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Comment by quickben | Hacker News Reader

Safety tip. Especially if you are starting with routers or jigsaws, get decent goggles+ facemask since stuff are flying everywhere.

I'm surprised most of these sites don't mention this.

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Also, for table saws, there's SawStop. This is expensive, about $1500 for their table saws (made in USA), but protects you from lost fingers. Table saws cut off about 4,000 fingers a years in the US. SawStop has a system which detects a touch to the blade by anything conductive (such as a finger) and fires an explosive charge which jams a stop into the blade, stopping it in half a tooth of rotation. This costs you about $150. TechShop has these, and they get about two emergency stops a year.

The hot dog video may be the most convincing sales pitch in history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquL0GG9RGI

The finger video is even more convincing (skip to 3:40):

https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk

I have seen these, but the place that I know locally that has one, has never had the SawStop piece fire - however, it is very good to know that it is there, and the manager in charge of the wood shop feels very relieved about having it.

I'm 100% against these in a serious shop. The reason? Most of my tools are dangerous. Bandsaw? Yup. Lathe? You bet. Drill press without a guard on the belt? Yeah, lost some hair to that, built a guard.

You get the idea, tools need to be treated with respect.

I don't like the idea that one of them, that is dangerous, is now not dangerous. That tends to make me let my guard down and I don't want that to bleed over (pun intended, sorry :) to the other tools.

If I could make them all safe, that's a different story.

A friend has one - only time it fired was when he forgot to deactivate the safety mechanism and tried to run aluminum through the saw. Bam!

Not trying to piss on the technology though — great if it saves someones fingers. SawStop the company though is douche-ish (you can Google it to see how obnoxious they have been).

Bosch too now have a similar safety mechanism on some of their saws.

I have a Sawstop, it is a top notch saw, with excellent fit and finish; but it is made in Asia. It was designed by a company in Oregon.

Apparently wood dust—the invisible diesel-exhaust-like particulates, not the stuff you can see—is also a major health hazard, and will progressively destroy your lung capacity if you let it. A rubber mask with proper particulate filters is called for, as well as one or more forms of local or general extraction.

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