My table-saw injury (and SawStop discussion)

so this is a video that I never wanted to make it's a video about how I hurt myself using my table-saw this is usually the part of the video where I try to say something funny to lead into the opening credits but I don't I don't have anything funny to say this this isn't funny [Applause] okay so today is Wednesday and I injured myself on Monday everything that you see here is exactly the way it was when I left for the emergency room and what I'm gonna do in this video is go through what happened what I did wrong what I plan to do differently in the future and most importantly I'm going to talk about my SawStop whether or not it worked and whether I think it made any difference in my injury okay here's the exact setup that I was using when I injured myself and I'm showing you this setup right here because I want to talk about what happened the scary part is I don't actually know what happened and that's the terrifying thing about table saws is there's so much faster than human reflexes by the time you know something is gone wrong you're already injured I know that I was ripping a long stock and I'm always very concerned with my right hand when I'm doing ripping and my injuries to my left thumb I was clearing away some boards to make a cut and then all of a sudden I had this incredible sensation of impact against my thumb like it had been hit with a hammer dead-on and I looked down in time to see the saw blade kind of bite into it and then it was over it was that quick here's the best theory that I have as to what was happening I was paying a lot of attention to what was going on with my right hand I was using a push stick a nice tall one that keeps me clear of the blade and I was sending the thin pieces through against the RIP fence but I had a piece of stock right here this is the piece and I needed to move it and bring it back to make another cut off of it I did that with my left hand I think that I wasn't paying close enough attention to what I was doing and as I reached forward to take this piece of wood I contacted the blade with this phone so this is the tough part because this is where I have to talk about how I was stupid and how my injury was completely preventable if you look at the stock that I was ripping you can tell that it's quite thin and you can also see that the offcut that I was dealing with was quite thin too my general rule is that I always want my hands to be at least six inches away from the blade and I was following that rule by using a push stick with my right hand but I wasn't even thinking about my left hand because it just hadn't occurred to me - so as I was working with this material my left hand was much much too close to the blade and that's how it got hit here's what should have happened and here's what I would have done differently ripping the stock with the push stick was fine this stick keeps me above the blade I've got a good grip on it and it's got a heel for gripping the bottom of the stock so this is no problem but then I was handling the offcuts barehanded and that's really stupid it's particularly stupid when you consider the fact that I have pushed six I have two of them I keep them hanging from the rafter right above my saw so they're easy to grab even in the middle of a cup the way I should have been working is like this with a push stick in one hand to handle the offcuts and my other pusher in my right hand to deal with the main part of the cutting this would have kept my hand far enough away from the blade that if I needed to know as a piece of board out of the way I would have been using the stick for it and not my hand and then I wouldn't have gotten cut now that we've talked about what happened and what I would have done differently I'd like to talk a little bit about what I'm gonna do going forward this is the exact setup that I was using when I hurt myself and if you're paying much attention you might notice one thing that really is a problem here no blade guard I just have the bare blade I am using the riving knife to help the kickback but the blade itself is totally exposed of course my saw did come with a blade guard and it's not very difficult to install so let's take a look now I'll give the people that saw stop all the credit in the world this is a pretty good design it's pretty good at staying out of your way and it does a decent job of keeping your hands away from the blade had I been using this guard I might have hit the guard before I grabbed the piece of wood and hurt myself now at the same time the blade was down quite low and this front part of the guard is still quite exposed so I can't say for sure this would have helped but I probably still should have been using it now there's a few reasons why I really have barely used this blade guard since I got the machine um one of them is that I worked in cabinet shops for a couple of years making furniture and other stuff and all the more experienced woodworkers I worked with just had a terrible attitude about blade guards they thought they were for amateurs I've actually never worked in a professional shop where the blade guard got used everybody uses a riving knife but nobody uses a guard like this and I think I let that attitude get into my head even though I really shouldn't have these are the sort of things you should think about on your own another problem with this blade guard is that even though it's a decent design and I like it these paddles over here do get very clogged with fine sawdust and this shroud over here it gets fairly clogged with dust too and it makes it pretty difficult to see exactly what you're doing sometimes now when you're making a rip cut obviously you kind of set it up then you put the guard down and you make your cuts but since I'm doing very precise cabinet work I really like to watch the blade go through the cut make sure it's tracking my line make sure that I'm getting exactly the cut that I think I am and you can learn a lot by watching the blade if your cut line is moving back and forth a little bit that usually means the piece of wood against the fence isn't as flat or straight as it could be and the wood is moving side to side that's gonna let you know that your piece isn't too Square and straight as you want it to be so being able to watch the blade while you're working is extremely handy blade guards do get the way of that a little bit now that being said do I plan on using this guard in the future yes yes absolutely do so how bad was the injury well it wasn't fun or anything but it could have been much much worse I had what they called an irregular laceration of the tip of my thumb which means I ran my thumb tip directly into the saw blade I got a jagged cut in the end of my thumb that's about one to two centimeters deep and the saw blade also penetrated my fingernail and took a pretty good chunk out of that I'm gonna show a couple pictures here so if you're squeamish you might want to look away for a second the end of my thumb does look like hamburger so here's a picture of the injury and with the stitches in afterwards so you can see not a good entry to have not fun or anything but also not life-altering the final question is did the saw stop actually do anything obviously I can't say definitively but my answer is I think it did I think it actually helped a lot and I think it's possible I could have lost the finger without it my finger only contacted the blade for a fraction of a second to get that injury that you just saw looking at it carefully I think only maybe two or three of the saw teeth actually touched my finger which isn't much when you think about how fast the saw blade is spinning if that's all the contact there was that's good right after I touched blade the mechanism fired immediately and the saw blade disappeared beneath the table and in this case that's really good because of the way table saws work because of the hook of the teeth and because they're turning down towards you they often pull you into the cut which is what makes them more dangerous than other saws even though I only had the tip of my finger engaged that saw could have pulled me in further and it's very difficult to say what would have happened to my thumb otherwise so I think the saw stop probably did save me from having a much much more severe injury like maybe even an amputation so given what's happened to me would I buy another saw stop again in the future yeah I definitely would even though they're expensive I think it's very very likely that the saw stop kept me from having a much much more severe injury and on top of that I love the saw I've used a huge number of saws power Maddux Delta's craftsman small tabletop saws all sorts of stuff and even though I don't have a top-of-the-line model this is the contractor saw which is the 110 volt sort of medium duty saw I'm still really happy with its performance it does pretty much everything I need to do and the accuracy and strength of the unit is excellent so if you are a small time professional like I am working in a home shop or if you're a serious hobbyist I think this saw is a good choice I did shell out the extra money for the cast iron wings which I would do again in the future and I have the mobile base on it the saw weighs a ton and I used the mobile base every single day it was a good investment just in case there's any question I'm not sponsored by SawStop I have no affiliation with them I've never met somebody from the company and I don't do sponsored content anyway so this is just my own personal opinion having had this off for seven years one thing I do intend to change in the future is I would love to add there overarm dust collection it's got a much better blade guard that fits down much more tightly over the blade the visibility seems to be better and even though I have dust collection hooked up to this I still get a ton of dust blown back at me from the blade itself so I think adding the over arm dust collection would make things safer and it would also make for a cleaner shop environment unfortunately those are actually quite expensive and so I don't think I'll be picking one of those again anytime soon either way this wasn't an easy video for me to make it's not easy to admit that you did something dumb it's not easy to talk about your mistakes and your failures and have to admit that pain and money and lost time are all your fault I haven't enjoyed this very much but I think table-saw safety is literally the most important thing we could talk about in the shop and maybe by talking about the things that I did wrong I can help other people do things right and avoid injury anyway hope this was helpful thanks for watching hey and real quick before I go I do have an affiliate link down in description to my model of the SawStop and the accessories that I currently use with it I'm not trying to turn a safety video into an opportunity for crass commercialism but the cartridges that the SawStop uses are one use only and they cost $100 apiece they also kill the saw blade when they stop it because the impact is so great and so I also ruined a Freud rip cut blade that's another hundred dollars and I have my copay from the emergency room which is another hundred dollars so this tiny little injury cost me 300 bucks which is what I would make on a small project and I'm gonna be out of work for a week so I have a pretty big cash flow deficit right now that I have to deal with if you're thinking about buying a saw stop please do click on that link before hand because if I could just get a little commission off something like that it would really offset the business losses that I've taken recently thanks a bunch for your patience have a great day

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 936,240

Rating: 4.7571402 out of 5

Keywords: table saw, saw, tablesaw, injury, saw blade, first aid, cut, laceration, shop safety, push stick

Id: 1wJQn_UGAKY

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2018