"mac davis" wrote in message
...

I don't know if she's safe or not, but I'm a devout coward...
I use a slide jig that holds the work against the fence and makes it
really, really hard to get my fingers in the way

Just for the record - don't take my comments on this topic wrong mac... and
others. If that's what makes you comfortable, then fine. After all, for a
lot of us this is more of a sideline than a career, and it should be fun and
relaxing. (Maybe someday the relaxing part will really happen... at least
more often). The point being, do what makes you comfortable. My comments
are only directed at those which precede them, and which sought to find
fault where there was none. Those comments took on a nature of witch hunt
and ignored what the pictures themselves showed. Heck - just look at the
title of this thread.

Sometimes we who only do this stuff occasionally will adopt practices that
are beyond the required level, simply because we only do it occasionally,
and we either need or want an extra margin of safety or assurance. That's
fine. The problem comes in when we start to apply that universally and
become critical in our view of what others are doing, and that what they do
does not match up to what we do. We forget that we have adopted our
measures based more on what we feel comfortable with than what is really
necessary.

My little banner in this thread has not been one which flies in the face of
safety, but more so one which flies in the face of contrived safety. Some
topics like kickback have lost their meaning completely. My discussion with
Andy is a good example of that. We discussed the matter of the fellow
trimming a piece of wood on the table saw without a sled. The mantra of
"use a sled" has led to a point where the physics of the cut have been lost.
A perfectly safe cut is now deemed to be unsafe - because of a mantra.
There is a point where "better to be too safe" actually is not better. Once
we get to the point where we're looking for what we can see wrong all around
us, we've hit the point where our focus is on finding things, and not on
acceptable practices. That does not really benefit anyone.

--

-Mike-