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Leon Leon is offline
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Default Is this a Safe Table Saw Operation?


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On Jan 22, 9:38 am, "Leon" wrote:



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.


Ok, I'd much much much rather ruin the stock then my hand. I'll keep my eye
on the blade.


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.


If you are watching the blade you can simply stop feeding and turn the saw
off, I did this routinely before adding a splitter.


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.


If you know what you are doing, you know what can cause a problem. Perhaps
you don't to this yet but reviewing what can happen and preparing can cut
down significantly on the unexpected. My number one priority it to keep
from getting cut again. Me keeping my eyes on the spinning blade has been
very successful for the last 20 years and not every cut has been text book
smooth. I have had several incidents for one reason or another, a majority
of the time the stock was the cause, and I so far I have been able to
controll the unwanted reaction.



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.



We agree.