Just for starters, his push blocks are the wrong tool for the job. The trust he’s placing in them, along with his stance and apparent direction of pressure is frightening.
It’s nice that he’s trying to warn us of something but I don’t think he actually understands the problem(s).
SawStop will do that (but as the linked guy says, not avoid kickback)
An oscillating multitool is also much better at cutting wood and other rigid materials than it is at cutting skin, which it will probably/mostly wiggle about because the underlying flesh is soft and flexible, instead of cutting straight through. You shouldn’t rely on that though. Nor would you want to use it to rip long pieces of timber.
Exactly. Someone seems to have overlooked the whole point of the video. Nobody would do that deliberately in real life, until it happens by accident - a moment’s distraction or some other conspiracy of circumstance and lack of attention. That’s the point.
It amazes me that we used table saws, more or less unsupervised (and certainly not using any safety precautions), in high school shop class, and nobody lost any fingers.
Silly. Those are for cutting chains.
Your best friend with a cheap table saw is a carpenters/framing square to ensure the blade and fence are parallel. The better saws mount the fence in a way to ensure that but you can make it work anyway. As noted in another comment, it’s hard to think of a shop tool that is more obviously dangerous.
I should mention that the factory guards were removed. Even a riving knife would help here.
There’s no riving knife installed on the saw. Riving knives (or at least a splitter with pawls) are standard on most all new table saws, and greatly reduce this sort of kickback. Also note that the idiot purposefully traps the wood between the fence and the blade to cause kickback.
@Stephen_Hess If you actually watch the video, you’d learn that he’s intentionally causing a kickback in order to demonstrate it 
Ha! I should probably do that.
I’ve been a fan of European-style sliding bed table saws. I can’t afford one but covet one for my dream shop:
Well, you get idiots like this guy who think they will work safer without safeguards.
Pretty much this. We used all kinds of tools and had mandatory wood, metal, and power mechanics classes. We used wood and metal lathes, band saws, table saws, table routers, planers, etc. The only one missing fingers was the power mech teacher (because you don’t know if the mower engine will explode until after you start it…and he maybe liked to drink). Keep in mind this is cycling through 300 some students in jr high (7th grade, so ~13/14 years old).
NONE of these tools we used had anything close to a saw stop, or a riving knife on them.
No injuries because we were taught to respect the hell out of the tools, and we had constant oversight. The brain is the most important safety feature of any tool.
I have 30 years of experience with woodshop equipment, and in that time, all of my injuries have come from chisels and drawknives. A well set up table saw is a great tool when used correctly.
ETA: the worst shop injury I ever saw came from an 18" jointer, not a table saw. I would much rather have part of my finger lopped off than part of my finger shaved off. Not that I’m volunteering for either, mind you.
For cutting 45s? Probably not, unless there’s a specialized jig, it would be very difficult to use a scroll saw or bandsaw for the corners. Blade wobble and imprecise angles of mitre saws (even the super fancy Dewalt I have) are murder. As an aside, here are some of the frames I’ve done: https://newyorkbakery.net/.
Laser cutters just aren’t practical for thick pieces of wood (think about how difficult it is to control what part of a piece of wood burns). There are water saws, however.
(Seriously, Google Android keyboard is &$#@ing garbage. God how I miss Swype.)
I liked his comment at about 3:37. It was about this time I realized it was time for new shorts. Hahaha!
No they don’t. It’s an expensive one-use upgrade you can add to a saw. I’m in the market for a nice new tablesaw, but I’m going to decline getting the Saw-Stop on it. I’ve been using tablesaws for 30 years, and I still have all my fingers.I’m pretty confident I can go another 30.
Well, no, not “most.” SawStop has the feature you’re talking about (in addition to being a really, really good saw), and Bosch had a similar system on one line (too similar, as it turns out, according to the patent suit), but the vast majority of new saws don’t have flesh detection hardware.
If you have a good bandsaw, you can do a good amount of the same kinds of cuts, provided you’re proficient with jigs and can set up an outfeed for a high work surface like that, but definitely not a scrollsaw. A lot of folks are using their sliding miter saws for some cuts they used to do with their table saw, but it’s pretty hard to beat a table saw for making precise & repeatable cuts once you have the blade & fence dialed in and have some basic jigs to go along with a sled.
You’re right, though, that table saws are pretty dangerous if used carelessly or improperly, but isn’t that true of a lot of very useful things?
