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I have to assume that Gass, having failed to get table saw manufacturers to get on board with using his product, would then produce a saw as high a quality as he could. And they are great saws. They do have some limitations, but he could re-engineer his product to use smaller blades, and he could create a second after-market division to work with companies who now might want to utilize the technology.

_________________
"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

Btw, this is another good example of the "law of unintended consequences". Had the government never gotten so involved in the issue of "public safety", the market would have spoken. Say there was no workman's comp (mandated by law). Then a business owner has to weigh the risks. Not pass them along. So, he/she might fear the consequences of table saw injuries. Then, along comes a device that might indeed minimize his risk. Would he buy it? More than likely, yes. Government always distorts the marketplace and you can't blame businesses for trying to stay profitable under this distortion. What makes no sense will inevitably become more insane over time as the Government adds more and more distortion.

Given the probable course things will take, business owners will most likely have to buy this technology. Hacks will come along that allow the saws to operate without the safety devices. People remove fences and guards already. In the Orsario case, that is exactly what happened. And the business owner should have been held responsible, but he was not. That leads me to believe that hacked sawstop technology will also not lead to business owners being held responsible in those cases as well. Just another layer of laws will be proposed and implemented that end up costing us more and more till there is no real incentive to be in any related business (regarding woodworking)

Mike

They ARE great saws Don, and not only because of their safety technology. And I want one and WILL get one. Even as I feel that Gass is a less than ingenuous person. But "I" want to be the one who decides that the technology is for me. I'm funny that way. I take my liberties seriously, and do not like the government intruding into my life like this.

Mike (who hopes someone does not come in here and slam me for commenting yet again on the sawstop legal issue)

Mike, you miss the point that the government HAS to get involved in public safety. Here is an example...

A theoretical crib is on the market and has been found to have sides which come down too easily causing strangulation and death of a number of infants. When CPSC investigates they may find that the problem was either:

1. poor instructions which led to the parents assembling the locking mechanism upside down so it instead of latching it is ready to fall
2. the instructions were clear and the parents neglected to read them
3. the design was flawed and no matter how it was assembled the chance of injury was unavoidable

Without regulation there would be no checks and balances as a manufacturer could pay off each lawsuit as part of "the cost of doing business" and continue to sell faulty, defective or dangerous products.

To compound the issue, a product may be manufactured by a single factory in China and then resold under a variety of tradenames or the product could be assembled in a single factory from parts sourced in several dozen factories but all of whom have different quality control processes in place. Because that product or name of brands can be sold at a number of retail businesses, there would be no way to tell which cloned product is the safe one and which is unsafe.

Multiply this by the 19000 different kinds of products that CPSC oversees and regulates with an organization of less than 1200 people and you can see how difficult it is to create a governance process to deal with all products fairly. The market can not police manufacturers but effective regulation and oversight can.

Take the example of seatbelts...they undoubtedly have same many thousands of lives but there is no requirement that a manufacturer instruct the public how to buckle up but local laws do enforce behavior.

In the case of tablesaws, the advocating of a relatively simple technology to dramatically reduce the potential loss of life and limb does not dictate which technology is used and because Sawstop was there first with a demonstrable product means that for their investment they will have first product market advantage but the ruling actually opens up a new market for equivalent technological approachs to solving the same problem which includes any company that chooses to create retrofit products to add safety measures to existing saws.

This is a net positive to woodworking, a market opportunity for machinery manufacturers and all it would take from a regulatory standpoint is to rule that products manufactured prior to the proof that the technology was viable enough to establish the need for regulation would be exempt from liability lawsuits. This would protect manufacturers since there is not tort reform legislation in place to limit exposure.

In the case of seatbelts I can own a car that was made before seatbelts were part of the original car and I can add retrofit seatbelts and avoid local traffic tickets for not wearing a seatbelt...that is a good thing and not punitive. There are no freedoms that are lost and if a woodworker is foolish enough to remove protections such as fences, riving knives and sawstop like technologies, they are free to do so as Darwins law still applies...

Shawn, although an important example, the defective crib case is not a related example. Most people buying cribs assume a level of safety by default. Most would not have assumed a crib was an inherently dangerous item. And babies must be protected since they are of course, defenseless. No cribs I've ever seen come out of the box covered in hazard stickers.

A table saw is by most sensible people assumed to be dangerous and does come covered in hazard stickers. Table saws, like parachutes, when used, are likely to lead to some kind of mishap (there is a probabilty of hazard, even when used properly).

Shawn, if I asked you to jump out of an airplane without a parachute, would you?

This is a clear and blatent case of crony capitalism. That's what bothers me. Yes, there is a role for government (a constitutional one at that) to protect us from bad guys. But in this case, one person stands to benefit quite nicely. And that sticks in a lot of craws. And if you think SawStop is going to provide this at $55 per contractor saw... well that is your right. I do not believe that. Next there will be laws passed to force Sawstop to do that. Then real protection will be diminished, and accidents will happen. It will spiral out of control. It is not a market solution. Real solutions come from market solutions, not the government. Market solutions are difficult to attain when the government has added many layers of distortion, since the market attempts to resolve the distortion, not the problem.

Mike

It seems to me as though the machine manufacturers had little choice in this from the beginning. If they had bought Gass' design, and started to build machines with this feature, they'd have been tacitly admitting that the existing machines were 'unsafe', and the first person who got injured on one of the older tools would have sued them to the max. Not only would they have faced a settlemant, they'd have had to retrofit all of the older saws at their own cost. They _could not afford_ to buy into this in the first place. From their standpoint, the only reasonable thing to do was to put it off for as long as possible, and they did a pretty good job of that; it took Gass a long time to get his saws on the market.

This is interesting: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000055630&year=2011



versus

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=F41330&year=2011


It looks like the Powertool Institute http://www.powertoolinstitute.com/pti_pages/who.asp is trying real hard to influence rules and legislation with money coming from the Manufacturers. It also appears to me that they are failing in their "Safety" mission with the large number of injuries associated with Tablesaws.

The point is that there is no one person that will profit from the proposed regulation as it does not require Sawstop technology but rather focuses on the flesh sensing. While Sawstop has the first to market advantage, there is already at least one alternative to Sawstop and as the market adjusts to the regulation new solutions will be created.

There is no regulation that has been passed yet. All that CPSC has done is filed an ANPR, an Advance Notice for Proposed Rulemaking. This is the way that Federal regulatory and oversight agencies solicite feedback from industry experts and only once after all of the evidence is collected, analyzed and vetted is the regulation codified. I can guarantee you that every woodworking machinery manufacturer, trade association and publication will be submitting evidence, opinions and alternative approaches, all of which will benefit the consumer and eventually the industry.

Whirlwind tool already has pending patents for a table saw flesh sensing safety stop that takes a very different approach that does not require a destructive insert to stop the blade. That means that as other companies create solutions for both new saws as well as existing machinery that the price point of the technology will drop and consumers and manufacturers will benefit from the increase in demand for the new safer saws.

There is no cronyism within CPSC but rather when they see that there is a viable solution that will protect consumers they gather evidence and make regulations that mandate what the application of those standards should be. This does not constrain design or limit competitive advantage but rather can galvanize an entire industry as well as all of the supply chain involved.

Filippo Morelli wrote:
"I don't agree, Al. Making a safer device (something thousands of manufacturers do every year with tens of thousands of products) does not place them open to a less than safe device lawsuit."

We had a conversation about this the other night in class. A couple of my students work for a gun maker, and if there's an inherently dangerous product, that's it. It seems there are ways for a manufacturer to protect themselves from this sort of suit, or, at least, to limit the number of possible cases. I'm no lawyer, and neither are my students, so I can't say how they do it, but it seems there are specific actions you have to take: one of them was talking about the paper work requirements.

A couple of examples from the aircraft industry:
Several years ago the head of the EAA (a 'homebuilders' group sort of like the GAL) wrote in their magazine about a conversation he'd had with an (obviously unamed) engine manufacturer. They had come up with a simple modification to the design of their engine that would make it much more reliable at high power. Since the greatest number of light plane fatalities occur from engine failures in take-offs, this would be a big safety improvement. Their legal department said they could not put it into production at that time because doing so would have opened them up to lawsuits: this was something that _could_ have been done in the '30s (if somebody had thought of it), and it could not be retrofitted to older engines. A few years later tort laws were changed to limit liability for this sort of improvement, at least for aircraft makers. It's interesting to think that, were the name of the manufacturer to come out, they might well be open to lawsuits by the owners of engines built between the time they thought up the improvement and the time they actually put it into production. After all, they knew how to make a safer engine, and didn't: what's their bottom line as against a life?

Piper corporation was almost driven into bankruptcy when a pilot was injured in an older airplane that did not have seat belts. The crash was in no way Piper's fault, and seat belts were not mandatory equipment at the time the aircraft was built, but the lawyers argued that, since they were known then, and mandatory now, Piper should have retrofitted the whole fleet. This obviously relates to seat belts in cars. I do seem to remember that, when they were first mandated, there was talk about needing to re-fit all older cars, and a lot of resistance from the owners of same. In the end, iirc, it was determined that, in many cases it would be extremely difficult to actually install belts on some older cars, and laws were changed to allow them to go without. I'll note that car makers would sell you seat belts fairly early on, but you had to specifically request them, and they were not advertised. They did not come into wide use until they were actually mandated by law.

One would think, of course, that there would be some sort of doctrine of 'reasonable care': that anybody stepping out in front of a cross-country bus, or ripping a board without using the fence, was not excersizing reasonable care, and deserved what they got. Naturally there would be a lot of wrangling about what was 'reasonable', but that's what lawyers get paid for. It's possible that there is such a doctrine, but it's just been settled at a level that assumes the average American has no more reason or instinct for self-preservation than a turnip, and therefore can't be expected to take any care at all.

I watched those videos over at Whirlwind tool. That's cool. Non-destructive, and it works. I just hope they get their patent. One has to think that Gass is looking into how he could stop this. Looks like that device drives a huge back emf signal to the motor(s!).

Mike

I think it's absurd and crazy that the guy won the law suit based on the fact that he was using the saw with no safety devices

But on the other hand, it looks like one day every new saw you buy will have some sort of flesh sensing instant detection and that is a good thing.

My 2 cents.

Next up: Construction worker will sue and win over damages incurred wile using a tablesaw under the influence of alcohol. Hey, it's possible. A recent article showed that a bunch of Ground Zero workers were daily heading out to taverns for lunch and purchasing several beers to wash it down. So next, tablesaws will require alcohol sensing equipment to turn them on.

There is no end to the possible lunacy.

Mike