StopSaw that good?

May 11, 2006 5:45 AM

We had a table saw injury this week at the furniture factory where I work. Does anyone have experience with the SawStop? The web page is impressive. Interested in experiences good, bad, and indifferent.
posted by bobduckles to technology (4 comments total)

You saw this thread?
posted by planetkyoto at 6:10 AM on May 11, 2006

I've seen the videos, and they impress the hell out of me too. I believe the only downside to this technology is that you need to "reload" the braking cartridges after each emergency stop, kind of like an airbag.
posted by cosmicbandito at 6:24 AM on May 11, 2006

I have purchased three of them for my school district.

At one school, it is working perfectly. At another, there are two of them, and they keep having the brake mechanism engage for no apparent reason.

SawStop is being good about it, providing replacement parts at no charge, but there is a lot of down time involved. It is about 100 bucks to get it running again, if you buy your own brake cartridge and new blade (sometimes the blade is ruined, sometimes not).

So for us, the july is still out on whether this technology is viable or not. There is a large manufacturer in town that has one, and wants to get 7 or 8 more. Their only problem is when they cut some of the exotic laminates that they use.

But I had to investigate an amputation and had no fun doing so.

Email me if you want more info on my experience with this.
posted by Danf at 7:36 AM on May 11, 2006

There are a bunch of folks at rec.woodworking that use these, general impression is that they are good saws. A few folks there have it in for the company as they petitioned the gubmint to try and make the feature mandated on all new saws which didn't go over well with some folk.

Also in this months FineWoodworking there is a review of a bunch of cabinet saws and it did very well. It can have issues if the power line it's running on is noisy, I think filtering fixes that though.
posted by zeoslap at 11:21 AM on May 11, 2006