October 20, 2006
Shunning the better mousetrap
In 1999, Stephen Gass, a patent lawyer and woodworking hobbyist, invented a device to make power saws safer. It was designed to prevent, or at least minimize, the gruesome injuries that result when someone's flesh hits the blade of a table saw spinning at 4,000 revolutions per minute. . .Full article here. The sawmakers are claiming that Gass is asking too much in the way of royalties, but their other complaints about his invention don't ring true -- in fact, they sound all too familiar, like the grumblings of those who insist on removing the simple mechanical safety guards from existing saws, or meatpacking plant operators who maintain that everything is already as safe as things can be made.Gass called his invention SawStop and was so convinced of its value that he quit his job at a law firm, raised capital, and with two partners, started his own company in Wilsonville, Oregon. He demonstrated the technology, which can stop a saw blade in 3/1000 of a second, to anyone who would watch.
Now, seven years later, Gass says he was unprepared for the buzz saw of opposition he ran into from companies such as Black & Decker Corp., Robert Bosch Tool Corp. and Ryobi Technologies Inc. ``Our thought was the manufacturers would license it,'' he said. ``We thought it was inevitable.''
Instead, not a single manufacturer has signed a contract with him. An Underwriters Laboratories Inc. subcommittee, with some of the saw manufacturers on the panel, voted in early 2003 not to approve his invention.
Posted by David on October 20, 2006 9:03 AM
I've been watching this saga on and off for years, being an amateur maker of vast quantities of sawdust, and there appear to be two sides to the story. Yes, it appears to work. It seems to be a Very Good Idea. But manufacturers on the whole felt they were running a horrible risk if they advertised their product as "cannot cut fingers off" and a finger was cut off because the guard failed. So they erred on the side of (their) caution.
On the other hand, there is a potent argument which goes along these lines: some power tools are insanely powerful, far more powerful than most people ever need. They cannot be made (in general) more safe without seriously compromising their function. So the world is better if the user is relentlessly trained to not just be careful, but to be paranoidly careful. I know that if I was running a woodworking factory, I would rather have workers that were paranoid about safety than workers that relied on the technology keeping them safe.
It's worth looking at the actual stats on the injury rates versus the number of tools that are out there in use. One of the highest causes of injury is actually angle grinders, because people persist on using them to cut metal. And when accidents occur with table saws, it's usually because the safety guards have been removed and someone passes their hand across the cutting space inadvertently (and the other big cause of injury is people getting smacked by the wood if it kicks back during the cut).
Posted by: Robert Hook on October 20, 2006 6:47 PM
Caution to the point of paranoia is good -- no disagreement there. And I would guess that the rate of injury in professional shops where the workers are well trained and rigorously supervised is low.
But there are other shops where stronger backup safety devices would be a very good idea, where experience and good judgement are too often in short supply -- school shops, in particular.
Posted by: David on October 21, 2006 10:17 AM
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