SawStop works by detecting electrical conductance, and there are many reports of it misfiring when attempting to cut wood that isn't fully dry (i.e., there is moisture inside the wood, increasing its electrical conductance).

I'm aware. I'm not buying that a new saw blade and a replaced brake is too much of a cost over the peace of mind that you're at a significantly reduced chance of losing a finger.

And they're pointing out it's not just those two replaceable components - it's the _entire saw_ that they're risking destroying off a false positive that some woodworkers will hit frequently.

That just means the tech is not ideal, not that I want table saws without it.

They are suggesting the blade retracted, broke the saw, in a situation in which there was no risk to the finger. Maybe there was a literally hotdog in the wood.

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

How many expensive false alarms are you willing to accept, per serious injury avoided?

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

And many people have experienced those ratios.

Many older woodworkers lost fingers often multiple fingers in multiple accidents.

So, the risk is really quite high here.

The guys I've seen lose fingers were all sleep-deprived and working flat out. The biggest risk to site safety is sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion.

Most people would rather go bankrupt than lose a finger. Fingers are kind of important. If I can choose to keep my house or my finger, I’m definitely choosing the finger.

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.

Really? I would definitely rather lose a finger than go homeless. Homeless people have far, far worse life outcomes than people with missing fingers.

A specific person isn’t the average homeless person who tend to be dealing with addiction, physical or mental illness, past incarceration, etc.

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

Exactly, homeless people living on the street should really be called familyless.

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.

StopSaw makes these. The saws, tables, and fasteners are beefy enough to survive.

It works on conduction and capacitance. It's not immune from false positives.

I do it so seldom and am so careful not to put my fingers within 3 inches of the blade that this is a non-issue for me. This is another one of those "let's put 6 extra buttons that all need to be pressed to start the saw!" kinda situations that doesn't do anything to improve safety because the stop is the first thing you disconnect if it throws a false positive.

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.

"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"

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

How often do you use a saw? At $3500 a saw I care. I saw a lot of wood and inadvertently hit at least one staple/nail/screw per year. Over the last 20 years of using my saw that would be tens of thousands of dollars if even a portion of them damaged the saw. It would essentially price me out of doing woodworking.

Frankly, the biggest problem is that this makes it impractical to test the brake. How do I know the brake even works, if testing it is not practical?