"rich" wrote in message
ups.com...
Hi, All,

I thought kickback was for thumb fingered geeks who didn't read the
manuals. I was wrong!!! Just got my first table saw last week, and
while putting some grooves in the ends of 1x2's, I dropped or bumped an
8 inch piece against the blade. Of course the blade guard was up!
LOUD THUNK! Oh, well... Finished the other pieces, and went looking
for the missing piece. Nowhere on the floor. Then I saw the piece
embeded in the plasterboard wall! Well embeded!

I'm a disciple of Kelly Mehler, author of _The Table Saw Book_ and a strong
proponent of table saw safety. He would not describe what you experienced
as kickback. In his words, kickback happens when a piece of wood gets bound
between the back of the blade and the fence, causing the wood at the back of
the blade to raise up, pivoting on the front corner, and getting tossed back
at something approximating a 45 deg angle to the left. In fact, I'm not
sure what word he would use to describe your experience. Something else
many people call kickback, when a cutoff piece between the blade and the
fence is pushed backward, he calls "ejection". I'd call what you had an
"accident" that thankfully had no negative consequences (unless walls can
feel pain). [Ed.- which for some reason reminds me of this Jack Handy
quote: "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them
down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."]

I had learned enough to use multiple push sticks, and stood well to
the left of the blade, so there was no injury, except to self esteem.

If you get a real kickback, you'll be standing directly in the path of the
projectile on the left side of the blade. In my opinion, the safest place
to stand while cutting is outside the room. The next safest place to stand
is to the right of the fence, which isn't always possible.

I am now a FIRM believer in the hazards of kickback. Even letting a
smaller piece of wood touch a moving blade will give you a scare, and a
vivid example of very rapid acceleration.

Hope this helps someone else avoid the experience.

As do I. It happened to me once, though the block wall was a bit more
resilient than your plasterboard. In my case, I was picking up pieces from
the outfeed table and dropped one. It bounced right on top of the blade.
It put some nice saw tooth marks in the back of a drawer front which I left
as a reminder.

todd