On Jun 4, 7:40 pm, "Howard Swope" wrote:
I am getting ready to make a table saw purchase. I have pretty much decided
on getting the SawStophttp://www.sawstop.com/. It looks like a high quality
saw and the safety features can't be beat. It is about double what I had
originally wanted to spend. My thought was that if it prevents one injury it
has easily paid for itself. An extra 2 grand seems like a lot of money until
you weight it against the loss of a finger(s), and then that 2 grand seems
like nothing.

Thoughts, comments, advice?

The cost/risk analysis is certainly weighed heavily in the favor of
prevention by the high cost of a single incident...

My thought is if I were buying for a commercial shop and certainly if
I either were going to have employee(s) or others besides myself using
it I'd consider it almost a given.

For home shop it gets more subjective -- usage typically is way down,
time pressure of production, etc., are generally far less, etc., so
risks _should_ be lower. OTOH, there's the possibility of less
experience/familiarity, may be more likely rather than less to make a
poor choice of operation or how to most safely perform a given
operation, so risk _might_ be as high or even higher...

All in all, if have the budget, from what I've seen of the saw at a
single show and from reviews, seems hard to say you could go wrong
with going that way. The only negative I've ever heard (other than
the diatribe kind of stuff) was one reviewer a couple of years ago
commented that his test machine turned off on its own a couple of
times while using it--not a hard-stop false firing, simply the on/off
switch dropped out. One would presume this was either an isolated
faulty switch or the problem has been resolved by SawStop by now--I've
certainly heard no more about it.

IMO, $0.02, ymmv, etc., etc., ...

- dpb

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