Ian Dodd wrote:

I experienced my first real near miss yesterday. Definitely caused a
few more gray hairs in the beard (not that you could tell the
difference from before).

I was cutting a shoulder rabet in a 1/2" thick slice of some exotic
burl. The protruding shoulder would sit in a 1/4" groove that runs
around the inside perimeter of a mitered walnut box I'm making to
store my chisels. I was making the last of the four cuts with the
wood on edge in which the TS blade would be buried in the wood (the
next series of cuts would be with the wood flat and would complete the
rabet).

All of a sudden I heard a loud CLUNK! of the blade as it grabbed the
piece and it was launched out of my hands. It's always amazing to me
how the mind can work so fast in those situations that it seems like
everything else is slowing down. In that fraction of a second I
thought, "Damn, that's gonna ruin that beautiful piece and I'll be
done for the day!"


snip

Did you figure out what went wrong? Find the "missile"
and I'm betting it is cupped, twisted or bowed or all
three - and not by much - just enough to get it to
rock against the fence enough to move the back of the
cut into the upward rising teeth coming out of the
table at the back of the blade. The "clunk" could have
been a corner into the gullet between the teeth at
the initiation of the event

Did you have a splitter behind the blade? Even if
you did, sounds like you were doing a pretty
shallow cut so the splitter would be a ways away
from the back of the blade - that's assuming the
splitter raises and lowers with the blade. If it
doesn't then it'd have to be removed for the cut
you were making.

This is another example of why a riving knife
that wraps around almost all of the top rear
quarter of the blade and goes up and down with
the blade is so much better than a simple
splitter.

Oh, was the exotic wood zebra wood or snake
wood by any chance?

charlie b