March 27, 2007
SawStop makes woodworking safer with finger-saving table saw
designed in SolidWorks and COSMOS
Oregon
company makes ‘smart’ saws that can tell the difference between wood and hands
CONCORD, Mass.,
March 26, 2007 — A small Oregon company is changing woodworking professionals’
jobs with a table saw designed in SolidWorks® software that only cuts wood –
not fingers. SawStop has invented a table saw that immediately
retracts the blade when it touches a finger, making woodworking safer and eliminating
painful and very costly medical procedures. 
Table saws are involved in more than
60,000 accidents every year – or one accident every nine minutes – according
to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Those accidents result in nearly
$2 billion of injury-related costs annually. Realizing the need for a safer
saw, lifelong woodworker Steve Gass applied his doctorate in physics to design
a saw that runs with a small electrical current on the blade. When the blade
touches a finger (or something else that conducts electrical current), the current
drops and engages a brake. As the blade’s teeth sink into the brake, the momentum
forces the blade to drop below the table. The entire process takes only three
milliseconds, which is a fraction of the time it takes to blink your eye.
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