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Comment by humantiy | Hacker News Reader

I had this happen to me once with a bigger piece of wood I was cutting. He's right you have no time to react and the board is gone and flew 30 feet into the wall behind the saw. My hands were no where near as close to the blade as his were since it was a 12" wide board, but certainly freaked me out. He is lucky though that he didn't get cut.

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There was a guy last year trying to post a video like this and he used a high speed camera.

When he went to edit the footage, he discovered to his horror that when the board kicked, it nearly sucked his fingers into the blade. Missed by less than an inch. The final edit ended up being mostly a message of "learn from my mistakes". Basically I learned that there's never a good time to have a kickback, even if you're trying to make an educational video.

Are you sure that’s not this video. That happens here too.

Oh...

Yes this might be the one. Somehow on mobile I missed the big scare banner at the beginning.

This exact thing happened to me as well in High School "woodshop" class. The entire class and even the teacher called me "kickback" for rest of the year.

I don't think any of us realized at the time just how close I was to injury.

The blade of a standard 10" table saw rotates at very close to 100mph (150 fps). Of course, the teeth of the blade point such that they will maximally engage the wood if it gets loose. So anything of small-to-moderate size will accelerate to as much as 100mph. Using 150 fps, it will depart the 2-foot table of the saw in about 15 milliseconds, so (like the author of the video, and me, once) you will only understand what happened after it's over.

The usual reaction is to stare dumbly at your hands, and then stock up on push sticks, push pads, and work holding jigs ;-).

Yeah, it's crazy. I would never have imagined a table saw being able to throw large pieces of wood with such force. I had kickback on an 8-foot long 2x4. It wanted to throw that thing like it was a golf ball.

I probably avoided a broken rib thanks to having all the safety features of the saw on. Beam ended up jammed into the guard instead of jammed into my chest. So many people leave those things off because they're inconvenient. Glad I didn't.

I had a lighter board kickback on me while cutting a grove. It hit me in the side of my gut and then proceeded to fly back another 25 feet into the street in front of my house.

The kickback happened because the blade was so shallow. As I pushed the board into the blade, it rode up on top of the blade. The answer is more downward pressure, but I was using two push sticks to guide it through and didn't have the leverage to provide that pressure. Luckily, I was in a completely stable position and at no time were my hands anywhere near the blade, but it was still pretty scary.

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