Sorry. I'll come clean and admit that the way I put those statistics was deliberately meant to mislead - but then so, I feel, is SawStop's inference that the SawStop saw would prevent 60,000 table saw accidents a year. It won't, especially because SawStop won't stop kickbacks (for that you need a short rip fence as well as a riving knife, then you're 80% there). Sure, it's a good near miss and it has already got makers like Powermatic and Delta looking very carefully at their product lines (about 30 to 40 years too late, IMHO) so in the long term American buyers will benefit from saws with riving knives and possibly better guards - but they'll still have second rate rip fences, second rate stacked dado heads, unbraked motors and poor dust extraction. They have a long way to go yet. In the end Gass will possibly be bought off by the big boys - probably before he gets too big to do any real harm to them and at that point the SawStop will be quietly dropped. In the meantime the EC will have continued to develop it's safety concepts proactively with industry.
Scrit
Scrit