Sawstop Saves a Finger!

My New Table Saw

 In keeping with the theme of my last post, I thought it would be appropriate to unveil my new saw, purchased just at the end of 2012. It is a SawStop professional cabinet saw. This saw works beautifully and is very accurate, and it can handle large sheet goods and fine adjustments. I have been looking at purchasing a nice saw for a couple of years and my wife and friends convinced me to pay over twice the price of the saw I was looking at and buy a SawStop.

The key feature of the SawStop is that the saw can sense conductivity in a material and when it hits a material with a higher conductivity than wood, an aluminum brake launches into the blade causing it to instantly stop its rotation. In addition, the inertia of the spinning blade being stopped forces the blade down into the table. This all happens in a fraction of a second. This is especially helpful when your finger comes into contact with the blade. Rather than losing a finger, you walk away with a scratch! Here is a video from you tube demonstrating how the saw works (they use a Hot Dog instead of a finger in the video!:

Anyhow, thanks for all of your concern about my gouge accident! Here are a few photo of the sparkling new saw!

 The saw on the left is my old Craftsman saw ca. 1970. A real trooper, but hard to adjust and very small next to the new saw. I have finally retired it after 10 years of service!