2024-04-10: Try It On At Home

Back in 2009, a man named Steve Gass invented a system that sensed flesh and allowed the blade to stop and retract before it could cut into hands and fingers.

This wasn't some gimmick. It actually worked. 40,000 people in the US alone end up in the ER because of table saw injuries. When a human makes contact with a 2lb blade spinning at 5000rpm, the outcome is never a couple of stitches and a bandaid. This is when you go to hospital with your fingers in a zip bag and beg doctors to reattach them. Or when the blade goes between your fingers and bifurcates your hand in two. Nasty catastrophic injuries.

Gass' invention fixed this. The brake worked fast enough to prevent almost all these bad injuries. What could be a major catastrophe turns into a small scratch and a $150 brake and blade replacement.

And it was commercially viable too. The tech worked with any regular metal blade, and the brake mechanism could be made for under $100. The brake was just a consumable item that could be replaced quickly with no tools.

Initially Gass tried to license this technology to all the major saw manufacturers. But they all turned him down. The speculation is that manufacturers couldn't afford to put this on their low end saws because of the added cost of the brake and the need to make the saw sturdy enough to support the energy absorbed from the brake. Some low end saws retail for $150-$300, so even though the brake was cheap, it would have made that product segment unviable. And if manufacturers chose to put the brake only on their higher end models, they were afraid they'd open themselves up for lawsuits if they possessed the safety technology and intentionally omitted it on the cheaper models. So they didn't want anything to do with this.

Then Gass went to the government and lobbied for regulators to compel the use of this technology. But back then there was no appetite for that kind of intervention and Gass got a lot of bad PR for trying to impose this on the public.

So Gass decided to go with the free market approach, and started a company called SawStop which made table saws using this technology. And he proved that a lot of people were willing to pay an extra $200 to save their fingers. Who knew?

In time, the other manufactures lost almost all market share to SawStop for the medium to high end saws. Almost any new saw sold in the US over $800 was a SawStop.

And miraculously, the manufactures had a change of heart! Now they wanted this technology. So a few of them began developing their own versions. Almost none managed to bring anything to market, but at one point Bosch developed a similar technology called Reaxx and started selling these saws in the US. But SawStop sued them for infringing on their patent.

In the end, the court ruled that Bosch couldn't sell these saws in the US, and this ticked consumers off because they said this was further proof that SawStop was more interested in money than safety.

But shortly after SawStop won that lawsuit, they changed their mind. They gave Bosch a free license to use their technology. But Bosch still didn't bring back their Reaxx products. Some say that Bosch never managed to implement a reliable solution and they realized their solution would be compared to SawStop's and it would harm their brand if it didn't work as well.

Fast forward to today, 25 years after Gass invented this system. The political situation is very different, and now it's looking very likely that SawStop technology will be mandated for all new table saws sold in the US.

SawStop still have a patent for this technology until 2033, and if this regulation passes the other manufactures would theoretically have to pay license fees for every saw they sell in the US.

But in a shocking move, SawStop said that if the regulation passes, it will release the patent for free to the public. The US public safety commission, prepared for a fight, was baffled by this news. When the news sunk in, they concluded that at this point there are no more barriers for any other company to match SawStop safety.

This means that SawStop will give their rivals permission to use their technology. It doesn't mean that it will sell the parts to them, but they are not going to sue anyone who tries to make their own version. They are basically giving up their monopoly on this technology.

But the manufactures are still unanimously opposed to this regulation (except SawStop of course). They claim that this will put them out of business and that cheap affordable saws are going to be a thing of the past. The cheapest SawStop table saw costs $899, while most manufactures sell saws under $300. Since they're not selling any high end saws anymore (SawStop took all of their business), the low end is what's making them money at the moment, and now this regulation will force them out of the market completely.

If this regulation passes, we're likely not going to see saws on the market for under $700 anymore. And this will be a real obstacle for people looking to get started in woodworking, carpentry, and other construction trades that need to buy table saws. The regulation will also likely incentivize manufacturers to recall all the old saws, and that would make it hard for consumers to find cheap used saws without this safety feature. (This already happened with Craftsman's radial arm saws in the early 2000s.)

But what about the saved fingers? 400,000 catastrophic injuries and amputations over the next 10 years could be saved if this regulation passes. That seems substantial. This feels like progress. This is what an advanced society does. The end consumer will ultimately pay for it, but would you want the cabinet maker of your next kitchen remodel risk fingers and permanent catastrophic injury just to save a $100 part? Hell no!