Saw Stop table saw

Winegrower said:
A friend bought a Sawstop, it's comparable to the Powermatic PM2000. We were trying to add a dado blade, and learned the brake cartridge had to be changed when switching to the dado blade. The cartridge was somewhere around $100 as I recall, but I don't know for sure. Just beware of that, and if you use dado blades, better have a cartridge on hand in advance.

Another comment from another user of Sawstop was the brake fired once when he accidentally touched the blade with his extended tape measure.
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yep, he had the saw running, the only way to fire the brake. It's off when the saw is powered down as far as I know.
 
woodchucker said:
yep, he had the saw running, the only way to fire the brake. It's off when the saw is powered down as far as I know.
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Well, I guess he deserved that, for poking a tape measure into a running saw blade ......

It reminds me of something that happened on a carpentry job I worked at, many years ago -
There were three of us - I and another guy were up on scaffolding, running cedar lap siding on a large gable wall.
The third guy was on the ground, cutting with one of those Delta SawBucks.
We were nailing off, and calling down lengths and angles fast and furious - The cutter was getting a little frazzled, I guess, keeping up with us, and made an angled cut, right into the Stanley 30' tape, laying on the SawBuck table - The result was SPECTACULAR, to say the least ;~)
 
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Even if the saw is powered down, but still spinning the sensor is on. The blade must be stopped from what I know. The saw is monitoring the turns and only disables once the blade is stopped.
 
Aaron_W said:
That certainly makes me feel better about the short comings of my older $50 Craftsman. ;)
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well Aaron, hopefully you never need the features of the sawstop. I have been woodworking since I am a kid, now 65. I notice I am not as sharp as I used to be. I play volleyball with an unbelievable professional woodworker, and he cut his finger off a few years back. It happens. His lively hood was on hold for a while, while he recovered. The costs I am sure were way over what the sawstop and any cartridges cost. I am sure the surgery to cleanly cut back and close up were probably 5 times the cost of the saw.

The tablesaw is the number one reason that people lose digits.
 
woodchucker said:
well Aaron, hopefully you never need the features of the sawstop. I have been woodworking since I am a kid, now 65. I notice I am not as sharp as I used to be. I play volleyball with an unbelievable professional woodworker, and he cut his finger off a few years back. It happens. His lively hood was on hold for a while, while he recovered. The costs I am sure were way over what the sawstop and any cartridges cost. I am sure the surgery to cleanly cut back and close up were probably 5 times the cost of the saw.

The tablesaw is the number one reason that people lose digits.
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You are reading more into my comment than was intended. I'm not anti-saw stop but $6000 for the least used saw in my shop is not in the cards. I probably don't have $6000 in all of my woodworking tools.
I was introduced to the table saw in the 8th grade and still have 10 fingers 40 some years later so hopefully my luck holds out.
 
I've got a unisaurus (unisaw) in my shop and it'll eat wood, fingers, hot dogs.... total omnivore. I feed it a not-so-steady diet of wood only.

If I used my saw in a production setting or had employees running it routinely, a Saw Stop would be a no-brainer. It would need to be sufficiently rigid and adjustable, but the safety feature would take a much higher priority. As a hobbyist, I'm more concerned with kickback, and have added a riving knife to my unisaw.

Saw stop's overreaching marketing tactics are obnoxious, but would not stop me from buying one to suit a purpose. There's nothing personal to me about a business doing what a business does, aggressively seeking market share, leveraging their strength or uniqueness in the marketplace. Theirs just happens to be a safety feature, so their strategy felt like an attempt to regulate. They pushed it like they were saving lives, and in the process found out just how much people's fingers are worth to them. I guess we've all made that calculation.

They enjoy considerable tailwinds from the insurance industry. Overall their strategy seems to have worked, without any regulatory change.

Now that I have a Ryobi cordless track saw, I don't know how much I'll use a cabinet saw. Always wanted a festool for sheet goods, but was never worth the $. Have not used a track saw much so I don't actually know that it'll replace the unisaw. Depends on if I can setup cuts at waist level because my crunchy farmer bod cannot work on the ground.
 
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