On Jan 22, 9:38 am, "Leon" wrote:
Correct, you did not say ignore the blade nor did I indicate that you said
that. I said that I always keep my eye [on] the blade when it is
spinning. If you are set up properly and taking prudent precautions you
should not have to worry about other areas of the saw.

I disagree. You can easily come off the fence at the back and not
realize it if you don't have a splitter, which isn't possible on every
cut. It may not necessarily cause an incident, but it's sure going
to ruin the stock. If the stock is thin it can bow significantly
before a splitter can do anything. With the proper precautions you
can hopefully prevent any incident from causing you harm, but you
don't necessarily prevent the incident from occurring in the first
place, and once things get out of whack anything can happen and you
don't have time to react to it. It's always better to prevent it from
ever starting to happen at all, and you do that by being aware of
everything that is going on and using all of your senses. You can
often see the problems starting to happen in time to correct it, if
you are paying attention. If you are only looking in one different
spot, then it's just going to happen in an instant and you may very
well both have no idea what actually caused it and assume it could not
have been prevented. I'm not saying every incident is preventable, we
all make mistakes and sometimes unforeseeable things go wrong. So I
am not saying prevention makes safety precautions unnecessary, just
that we don't want to fall back on the last line of defense if we
don't have to.

-Kevin