afaik the patent was basically expiring in the next couple years anyway, even the small ancillary ones. They've been making and selling SawStop saws for the last 20 years and already made their bag. So, since SawStop has the experience designing and building the systems they want to wring out some good will and see which Big Saw manufacturer wants to pay them to get ahead of their competition.

https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...

Also, copyright terms are ridiculous. Historically patents and copyrights were both 14 years.

My first cynical reaction is to ask which politicians will benefit handsomely from stock trading with SawStop stock (assuming it's a publicly traded company) or through kickbacks of one kind or another.

I think SawStop table saws are terrific for woodworkers who work in their own shop. Less so for workers who have to bring their tools to the job site. Yes, I know that SawStop makes a portable table saw. When you're working at a job site, you have less control over the materials you're working with (as compared to the cabinet maker in his/her own shop). SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site. A common example mentioned is treated lumber, but I don't recall ever having cut treated lumber on a table saw. When I need to cut treated lumber it's with a hand held circular saw. I'm a part-time handyman (some evenings and weekends).

You can turn the tech off to make it work as a regular table saw, but it does require pre-existing knowledge about what may false-trip the saw. Having a job site saw fail on site without cartridges and blades in supply, or a newbie on the saw could be pretty bad.

Not overly prohibitive with training though, and is something that everyone will face if this becomes mandated.

Expect better than SawStop to appear when able, and this issue to go away.

Just putting out there: the popular idea that blades are always trash after an activation is not true.

That said, cheap big box store blades without carbide teeth will die a horrible death.

The missing teeth need to be replaced and the plate needs to be re-checked for runout, but most carbide-toothed blades are repairable.

Ruminating a bit:

Cheaper blades are replaced more often with use and can’t generally be sharpened; SawStop tech doesn’t change the lifetime of a blade unless an activation happens. So, if you’re already willing to run to the box store for another blade semi-regularly, whether one survives activation perhaps isn’t material?

On the other hand, somebody who doesn’t regularly use their saw is probably both more price conscious and less likely to need sharpening/replacement often. I assume they care most about whether an activation forces them to buy a new blade (and a $100 brake). I suspect those are the people who propagate “SawStop = trashed blade”. For them, it’s true.

However, the blade-preserving system puts the explosive between the table and the pivot that's already there for retracting the blade. The full explosion force is there to force the blade down and it ends up being faster than the SawStop. Which while cool the SawStop was already fast enough so it's all the same.

So I don't know, I guess to me I'm surprised that the solution we jumped to first was a brake when the action of moving it out of the way takes far far less energy. It's only the energy to move the weight of the blade and bar down at the requisite speed, instead of needing to absorb the full energy of the spinning blade.

Do you mean in a system with both moving it away and a break?

The only time my fingers hit the blade of a table saw they were moving with a fair amount of momentum and hit first low on the blade - dropping the blade at the speed of gravity wouldn't have been enough.

I haven't seen an explosive system like you mention - is that what Bosch had for a bit? - so I don't know just how fast that is, though dropping a spinning-towards-you blade also seems to have some other potential risks of grabbing shit with it, too. If it's fast enough I wouldn't be concerned as much, but at relatively slow speed it seems maybe nasty.

Also, you can get a push stick for pennies. There's never an actual reason you need to put your fingers anywhere close to a moving blade.

It is pretty uncommon and rather difficult to cause yourself a digit injury that cannot be recovered from with a kitchen knife. Bad technique is most likely to lop off the end of the fingertip which can fully regrow so long as the cut isn’t very deep.

Mandolines and meat slicers (guards are bypassed when cleaning which happens every 4hr, they also tend to be used by 16 year olds) are much much more dangerous but they tend to be dialed in quite shallowly which limits the damage.

Table saws are THE most dangerous thing for your fingers because of where people tend to put their hands when using the tool and how they can go right through your digits and how they’re dialled in to make thick cuts. The logic that well if we accept kitchen knives we shouldn’t have safety regulations on table saws doesn’t make sense because table saws are far more dangerous and unlike with kitchen knives it’s actually possible to enforce the default use of an effective safety mechanism which ensures a cut will usually be shallow enough to be recovered from. Of course some people will disable the brake excessively but the average person will likely keep it on most of the time.

You can argue we shouldn’t have this safety regulation because it will add costs to consumers, and point out that other safety approaches already exist, the safety paradox, but the comparison to kitchen knives doesn’t really make all that much sense. I’d argue adding saw brakes as a standard feature makes a ton of sense due to the high social cost of digit amputation and the inconvenient and frequently ignored use of other safety approaches.

But that's how it is: people do cut their fingers off on table saws. They all know what you said. And yet 30 K accidents per year in the US alone. It is a serious problem.

I never bought one because it's just too big of a risk.

It's no different to Apple insisting that only they should repair Apple products, and hobbyists should be trusted.

I think table saw brakes are awesome and absolutely have a benefit for things like high school shop classes, but a properly functioning blade guard also does the job most times.

"You can operate the saw in Bypass Mode which deactivates the safety system’s braking feature, allowing you to cut aluminum, very wet/green wood (see above) and other known conductive materials. If you are unsure whether the material you need to cut is conductive, you can make test cuts using Bypass Mode to determine if it will activate the safety system’s brake."

https://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/faqs/

The first thing people will do is turn on the bypass and never turn it off.

I'd have a hard time leaving it off if I had a gristly accident. That might just be me though.

I have a feeling that you have never used a sawstop. You can not "turn on the bypass and never turn it off." As soon as you hit the stop paddle the bypass mode is disabled. You must reenable the bypass mode every time you want to pull the paddle. If someone is dead set on getting stuff done the bypass procedure gets old quickly.

Have you ever used a sawstop? How did you turn on bypass mode forever?

If people are already bypassing the safety features then "add more safety features" is a dubious move. Gotta go fast, can't afford if the saw has a false positive, switch it all off. Changing behavior is likely going to be a lot harder.

Seems like you have to do it for every time you switch it on, but on the jobsite saw it's not a key, just an extra button, so we'll see if people get in the habit of just always turning it off in case they have wet wood or other material.

First digit amputation (100% recoverable) I caused myself happened after spending most of my life using a knife because I just got complacent and was cooking when I knew I was extremely fatigued. Wood is also a natural product where natural variance can cause a table saw to operate in unexpected ways that catch people off guard.

Easy.

A patent expires, but forcing competitors to adopt a technology you already incorporate raises everyone else's costs, so it's not always bad for business.

Heinz was the first company to make shelf stable ketchup without any of the chemical stabilizers that had been in use before, and then successfully lobbied against preservatives. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch...

I wish we had a way to enact this kind of legislation without massively distorting markets.

Pushing for regulations that only they have the scale to meet, as they are entering the vaping market.

For alot of things, that's fine, but I distinctly remember having to bring clothing over to a window because the bulbs I had would not render the color of it accurately enough to put an outfit together. That's partly the clothing manufacturer's fault for using cheap dyes that are prone to metameric failure, but still, annoying.

I'm still in the process of purging the early gen LED bulbs that I have with nicer, high CRI, High Ra, variants, and getting dimmable bulbs in the places where it matters, because around me, the incandescent rollout was more of a rugpull when LED's first came out, and I snagged a couple bulk cases of cheap LED bulbs to use that were... not great.

I do keep a few decorative 'eddison' bulbs, aka squirrel cage bulbs, for reading use, as they are very warm, like 2300k, and the light they produce is very comfortable to be in at night. They use a ton of power, but, because they're not running their filaments as hard as they could, they tend to last forever. I've had one go out in ~10 years because I had removed it for cleaning and dropped it while it was hot (and also because it was hot), the envelope survived but upon being turned back on it ran for about a second before failure.

All of that to say, yes, there were downsides, mostly short/mid term downsides, some that persist to this day if you're not clever or don't know what to care about.

Short summary: 25 years ago, if you had asked a researcher what is the most important antioxidant in the human body, they would have answered vitamin C or maybe vitamin E. 12 years ago, they probably would have answered glutathione. Nowadays many researchers think the most important antioxidant is melatonin in the mitochondria. melatonin cannot get into the mitochondria, but serotonin can, and the mitochondria contains enzymes to convert that serotonin to melatonin -- and certain frequencies of light in the red and the near infrared greatly increase the rate of mitochondrial melatonin production.

From the article:

> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

> No external funding sources were used in this review.

That's also strange. It's not a smoking gun, but everyone gets some funding fro somewhere.

This last winter I was asked whether I knew if Tractor Supply still carried 100W bulbs since the person used them to keep a pipe in a barn from freezing and the current one had burnt out. The closest thing I could think of (that was easy to find) was a 275W heat lamp, but that uses a lot more power.

    R = V^2 / P = (110V)^2 / 100W = ~120Ω

But since then we've found a better way using the old receptacles, which wasn't an option in the '00s. They don't really make those bespoke ones anymore. When my mom did a refresh to sell her house last year, she had to replace everything done in the '00s.

Then the government broke standard oil up, rather than revoke the patent or reform the system in away way, and prices got higher for consumers in the end.

This is often brought up as a success story. Patents never have worked as intended.

So are fruit leather "recipes": https://patents.google.com/patent/AU2021200204B2/en

I'd imagine they had something like that. Probably have to do something special to not burn the ketchup while you heat it.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7579036B2/en

Alternative milks were common in a time period before refrigeration and pasteurization. It just kept longer.

I guess the benefit to SawStop is that they sell a better product, but turns out most people won't pay 2-3x the price for the added benefit. If they can make everyone implement the same feature, then they still probably won't compete on price, but the price difference will go down, and perhaps people will pay a low to medium premium for a slightly better safety mechanism.

As far as regulatory capture goes, it doesn't sound particularly nefarious. I do believe that the folks at SawStop genuinely believe this is necessary regulation.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-23898/p-145

The higher end table saws is probably a different story, they are even smaller manufacturers, but a lot of that stuff is different anyway.

It's idiotic that health insurance companies don't pay for gym memberships and reduce your premiums if you deliver them screenshots of your workouts and pictures of making healthy food at home.

That's what a sane insurance company that wants to increase profit margins would do. Get out there in the field and reduce the number of times they need to pay.

Regardless, it would have made sense for them to agree to FRAND [1] licensing >5 years ago which might have accelerated standards adoption.

From https://toolguyd.com/sawstop-patent-promise/ :

> I am a patent agent and I just took a look at the patent office history of the 9,724,840 patent. It is very interesting because it spent a long time (about 8 years) being appealed in the court system before it was allowed. While patents are provided with a 20 year life from their initial filing date (Mar 13, 2002 for this patent) there are laws that extend the life of the patent to compensate the inventor for delays that took place during prosecution. The patent office initially stated that the patent was entitled to 305 days of Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) and that is what is printed on the face of the patent. But the law also allows for adjustment due to delays in the courts, which the patent office didn’t initially include. So SawStop petitioned to have the delays due to the court appeal added and their petition was granted indicating that it was proper to add those court delays to the PTA. So the PTA was extended to 4044 days, meaning that this patent doesn’t expire until 4/8/2033!

> The other interesting thing about this patent, is that its claims are very broad. Claim 1 basically covers ANY type of saw with a circular blade that stops within 10 ms of detecting contact with a human as long as the stop mechanism is “electronically triggerable.” It would be VERY difficult to work around this patent and meet the CPSC rules. So the fact that SawStop has promised to dedicate this to the public is at least somewhat meaningful.

> BUT, SawStop has many other patents that it has not dedicated to the public. I have not analyzed their overall portfolio, but is is very likely that the other patents create an environment that still makes it difficult to design a saw in compliance with CPSC rules. So it is entirely possible that the dedication of the one broad patent was done to provide PR cover while still not creating a competitive market.

0: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9724840B2/en

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...

Counterpoint: a lot of inventions seem obvious in retrospect, especially if you've used them routinely for most of your life. Doesn't mean they were obvious at the time.

All his words. He's trying to explain that sure, the patent is open, but companies are still going to have to work harder than Sawstop because they have many more patents they refuse to open that cover the best and most logical implementation of this idea.

You're asking for a "cynical" take, but it's not really cynical! The CEO is trying to tell everyone, openly, and they're not listening. They are NOT altruistic, otherwise they would have opened the entire suite of patents. They are openly saying this singular patent is open, because it doesn't matter and that they will doggedly defend their other patents. Now, every other manufacturer will now need to navigate a minefield of patent litigation, and follow the path of subpar implementations that Sawstop ruled out during their R&D.

I don't know why everyone is ignoring his testimony and thinking the company is giving anything up, it's wild!

How does that work though?

If the patent covers something that was already in the first version of the device, it should be either patented before 2004 and thus expired, or patented afterwards and thus invalid due to prior art, no?

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2104.html

> 35 U.S.C. 101 Inventions patentable.

> Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2103.html

> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention; (ii) the inventor(s) must be identified in an application filed on or after September 16, 2012 or must be the applicant in applications filed before September 16, 2012; (iii) the claimed invention must be eligible for patenting; and (iv) the claimed invention must be useful (have utility).

The prior art requirement isn't "there exists nothing like this before" but rather "this invention hasn't been listed before".

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2120.html

> A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.

Wow. So this is how "evergreening" works? You patent enough of it that nobody can replicate it, but not everything, then every couple of years you patent one more non-obvious detail even though it's already included in v1?

I always thought patenting has to happen before first public use. I wonder if that's different in Europe.

> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention;

You need to improve upon it and have a new claim.

If I was to patent A and make it, and then patent B which improves upon A at some point in the future, when A's patent expires someone else can make A and if they show that they're making A and not B, there's nothing I can do about it.

The issue is that often B is better than A (why make a 223,898 light bulb when you can make a 425,761 light bulb?) so while you could make A, its not commercially viable to do so.

The thing is that I've got a research line looking at making improvements on B and patenting C later which is a further improvement on B. The investment of time, knowledge, and resources to be able to do refinements of A to make B, C, and later D - that's where it's hard to get into it.

Someone else could improve on A to make B' and if it was different than how I did B, they could patent that. Though in the real world, this often involves in hiring away people who are familiar with A and investing a lot of time / money into making a B' that might get interpreted by the courts as too similar to B.

I tend to agree with Jim Hamilton, Stumpy Nubs on youtube, who was quoted in this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk

Bascially, mandating the more expensive blade brakes instead of standards around blade guards will eliminate cheap table saws from the market. And yes, this has happened before with radial arm saws - they are now basically non-existent in the US.

So it definitely benefits SawStop to give away this patent, as their saws will look a hell of a lot "cheaper" than competition.

That's of course great, if you're in the business of selling saws, not so great if you're in the business of buying saws.

Realistically, I don't like the tech or the methodology at all. Battle bots had saws that would drop into the floor without damage, and pop back up even, also without damage, and that was decades ago. That's the right model, not "fuck up the saw".

Might be wrong, but my own amateur reasoning has me believe that a table saw has far more kinetic energy than a battery powered battle bot, and that the SawStop must likely move the saw in microseconds, vs a battle bot which may comparatively have all the time in the world.

The question is, how fast does it need to be? Likely not that fast really, certainly not microseconds, and an actuator could easily yank the saw down without damaging it if it detected you were about to lose a finger.

There's also no reason you couldn't use the same actuator to do fancy things, like vary cut depth on the fly, or precisely set the cut depth in the first place. Can't do any of that with a soft aluminum pad that gets yeeted into the sawblade when it detects a problem.

Basically, SawStop exists to sell saws. Those saws happen to be safer, but that's a marketing point, it's not what ultimately makes them money. Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.

I don't know - the marketing material actually says 5 milliseconds. That's the crux of the problem and I don't believe you can actually move the saw fast enough to not cause serious damage to the human without damaging the saw. The problem, as I understand it, is stopping the saw. The saw actuator only makes sense if it moves fast enough and given the saw stop works on detection, I'm not convinced you have that much time.

I'm considering the physical reality here - if the saw must be yanked down quickly, how much force must be applied to the saw to move it, and then can that equal and opposite force be applied to stop it without damaging the saw?

>Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.

This is true of any safety device? The SawStop inventor created his company after trying to license it and eventually won in the marketplace after nearly 30 years. Surely his competitors would have released an actuator based solution if it is was possible rather than ceding marketshare of high end saws?

As far as I can tell, REAXX also damages the blade.

This is the most asinine argument I’ve heard yet, and I am not a fan of this regulation.

Blades are typically cheap and the ones that aren’t are often repairable after an activation. Also, Sawstop barely sells any blades - I don’t know a single woodworker or cabinet shop that runs their blades.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Carpentry/comments/11s6zlr/cutting_...

While we're still not talking microseconds, I think it highlights that moving the blade out of the way needs to happen very quickly in some cases to avoid serious injury.

"Protect your equipment AND your fingers."

With the government potentially mandating these types of devices, you could be makin' the big bucks!

These incentives are clear, where's the truth?

(This is only somewhat facetious. I'm skeptical of your claims, but not enough to discount them out-of-hand. The industry honestly does seem ripe for disruption.)

According to my calculations, on a 10in/ 30tpi blade you have a teeth passing every 8.3uS.

If the rate of advancement is much slower (like a normal pace of feeding the stock into the saw accident), you have several milliseconds before reaching a 1/16" depth of injury from first contact to last contact.

I know this because I've had to buy a table saw blade to replace a $10-12 one on my wife's table saw that someone threw on there because they were doing framing work.

> If you're ripping a wet piece of wood, no thumb risk at all

I'm no expert in this, but I'd say 'definitely way more than one'.

So, the risk is really quite high here.

So just divide the average net worth of a saw operator by the cost of a saw to get how many saws a finger is worth.

So talking about the average outcomes of a random homeless person doesn’t really apply here.

If I went bankrupt and lost everything I have a social safety net of family members who would put a roof over my head until I got on my feet again. Only people without that safety net end up on the streets. Or they have addictions that mean their family can’t take care of them anymore.

If we're concerned about job site injuries then let's address the real problem, which is that a lot of people using these things do so as fast as humanly possible with little regard for set up, site safety, or body positioning because the amount of money they will lose by doing that eats so much margin out of their piecework that it's not worth it. As usual we don't want to solve the hard problem of reducing throughput to improve safety, but we're perfectly happy to throw a part that is as expensive as the sawblade on the unit just to say we're doing something.

Solving that sounds a lot harder to me than legislating that saws have safety features.

I have seen an average of about one false firing a month--generally moisture but sometimes a jig gets close enough to cause something. I have seen 4 "genuine" firings of which 2 would have been an extremely serious injury. This is over about 8 years--call it 10 years.

So, 4 spaces * 10 years * 12 months * $100 replacement = $48,000 paid in false firings vs 4 life changing injuries over 10 years. That's a pretty good tradeoff.

Professional settings should be way better than a bunch of rank amateurs. Yeah, we all know they aren't because everybody is being shoved to finish as quickly as possible, but proper procedures would minimize the false firings.

Part of the problem with false firing is that SawStop are the only people collecting any data and that's a very small number of incidents relative to the total number of incidents from all table saws. SawStop wants the data bad enough that if you get a "real" firing, SawStop will send you a new brake back when you send them the old one just so they can look at the data.

Replacement cost is always brake and blade.

The blade is always dead. These things work by firing what looks to be an aluminum block directly into the blade.

Assuming of course, there is no possible way that you could otherwise reliably prevent those injuries that doesn't depend on a human's diligence. That is, of course, ridiculous, but, that's the nature of this regulation. You're also not accounting for the cost of the blade, which isn't salvageable after activation, and those can get spendy.

Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market, which will, of course, prevent anyone from innovating a no-damage alternative to SawStop, which is certainly possible.

Well, the saw manufacturers could have done that before this regulation. However, they didn't. Only once staring down imminent regulation have they been willing to concede anything.

Bosch even has a license to the SawStop technology and had their own saws with blade stops. They pulled them all from being sold.

Sorry, not sorry. The saw manufacturers have had 20+ years to fix their shit and haven't. Time to hit them with a big hammer.

> Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market

Realistically, SawStop is so damn small that they're going to disappear. They're likely to get bought by one of the big boys. Otherwise, the big boys are just going to completely mop the floor with them--there is absolutely zero chance that SawStop becomes a force in the market.

As to this proposed mandate... If it's mandating any safety device, and Bosch and others can freely compete without everyone paying SawStop, I'm all for it. But if it's mandating the SawStop design, or would require all competitors to pay SawStop, forget it.

Certainly reattaching fingers would be cheaper than $48k. That's a steal of a deal in the US.

In addition, last I checked, modern medicine cannot reattach nerves so you lose a great deal of functionality of your finger or hand even if you save it.

See: https://youtu.be/Xc-lIs8VNIc?t=1095

I hope I am simply missing the joke if someone would be so kind as to clue me in.

A sense of humor might cost in excess of a finger reattachment, though.

Sweat dripping on the work piece (especially NoVA in summer with AC on fritz) was responsible for a fair share of the cartridge firing without contacting flesh.

OTOH (literally?) keeping your fingers but having to buy a new saw seems pretty reasonable.

This is what I actually expect to happen to the table saw market - they all become expensive, and the sub-$1k market (which is huge) goes away. Yes, you can find an RAS but it's about 10x the price of what they used to be.

I found a RAS from Sears from 1995: $499, which is around $1000 with inflation. https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...

So I stand by my statement: they're effectively non-existent, demand is gone after the 2001 recall by Craftsman, and most of the major manufacturers have stopped producing them. I expect the same thing to happen to table saws.

It even says so right under where it says discontinued. Specs are exactly the same.

The biggest "excuse" I have seen from the saw manufacturers is that if they put this kind of blade stop on their system that they are now liable for injuries that occur in spite of the blade stop or because of a non-firing blade stop. And that is probably true!

Even if this specific regulation doesn't pass, it's time that the saw manufacturers have to eat the liability from injuries from using these saws to incentivize making them safer.

As for cost, the blade stops are extremely low volume right now, I can easily see the price coming down if the volume is a couple of orders of magnitude larger.

So, similar to ripping plywood on a table saw, then? What makes one worse than the other here?

>They also travel towards the operator in the event of a catch because of the direction of the blade and the floating arbor.

So, like a modern sliding miter saw, then? What makes one worse than the other?

And when that saw bites, and comes at you with enough force to be too much for you to react to. If parts of you are in the way, it'll rip right through them as it punches you in the jaw.

I'm all for safety and would love for there to be more options for this kind of tech from other saw makers, but I personally don't think regulation is necessarily the right way to do it. Just like there are legitimate cases for removing the blade guard, there are legitimate cases for running without this safety feature, especially one that would require several hundred dollars more investment even if the safety feature is disabled (On SawStop, you physically can't mount a dado stack unless you buy a special dado stack cartridge).

And if SawStop really wanted to improve safety for everyone... well I find it rather telling that they'll only open their patent if the regulation becomes law. Since they're effectively the only ones with the tech, with the regulation passed, buyers instantly have only one option for however long it takes for competitors to come to market with their own (which they'll be hesitant to do based only on a spoken promise by the patent holder). Instant pseudo-monopoly.

If the technology is allowed under free-use or a free limited license, that'll change things.

Right now, no one can put it on their saws without having to either risk the patent fight or pay whatever Sawstop wants, with the later probably being so high, there is a reason other brands don't have "Equipped with sawstop technology!" badged on them.

1. Many of SawStop’s patents either expired or about to expire.

2. Bosch already has a similar tech but was prohibited to sell their saws with it in the US. I think soon all the patents that were basis for this ruling going to expire.

3. SawStop already by acquired by TTS(same company that owns Festool). They may have plans to integrate it in their line up somehow and safety tech becomes less of a differentiator.

And my even more cynical take is that FTC only considered requiring safety tech after a nod from the industry leaders.

It appeared to work just as well but I believe it pulls the blade away instead of stopping it.

Sadly I currently can't find it.

Edit: I think it was this one https://www.felder-group.com/en-us/pcs