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Unread 08-09-2006, 09:50
KenWittlief KenWittlief is offline
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Re: Article on Skin sensing table saw

The article is interesting, and from an engineering perspective very disturbing.

If I understand it correctly, the inventor is a patent attorney with a long term hobby/interest in wood working. He decided to invent a way to stop powerfull table saws from cutting off fingers.

As an engineer, here is my problem. The inventor was not in the power tool industry. He uses power tools for his woodworking, but he is not a power tool designer.

He thought he had invented something that everyone would want, but was rejected by every company he approached.

So what did he do (here is the disturbing part): he managed to start a process to enact laws and regulations to force companys to use his invention (or something like it). This is just wrong! His 'engineering' attempt failed to get his design into production, so he turned to his lawyer friends to cram it down the industrys throat.

He has followed what engineers call the two step design cycle: Here is a problem and here is the solution. That is the human intuitive approach to solving problems, but engineers have learned over the last couple hundred years that this is not the way to do things.

If fingers getting cut off is the problem, then people who are involved in power tool design step back and study the whole problem, the whole system, the entire woodworking process, to see what leads a person to push their fingers into a saw blade.

Making a saw that will sense fingers may not be the best answer (the power tool companies seem to agree, or they would have jumped at the chance to buy his patent).

Quote:
The power tool industry, however, has a very different view of the subject. Representatives cite a plethora of technical problems with SawStop technology, including too many “false positives” or “nuisance trips,” cost of replacement cartridges after the brake fires, and difficulties cutting conductive materials, such as moist wood. Moreover, they say, Gass is asking for an 8 percent royalty on each saw sold, a figure they describe as ridiculous.
From my own experience with industrial accidents, many are caused by operators disabling the safe guards, over riding them, and then getting hurt. This system would be no different - if someone wants to bypass it, because it keeps stopping the saw for false positives, then it will be no different than other safety systems already in production.

Whats more, if people get the idea into their head that their saw will not cut them, they will get more careless, which will result in more injuries.

If someone takes a coat hanger and wires the guard on a saw blade up, its obvious to anyone that the guard is no longer over the blade. But if someone disables this stop-saw system, by cutting a wire or jumpering a sensor, another user walking up to the system will have no indication the system has been disabled.

the idea that engineers in the power tool industry care more about law suits than user safety is absurd, and down right insulting. If your invention is a good idea you dont need a plane full of lawyers to force people to implement.

Last edited by KenWittlief : 08-09-2006 at 09:59.
 


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