Woodworking Network: SawStop, manufacturers of one of the wood industry’s most widely used safety technologies, announced that one of its key patents will, in the future, be made open to the public.
The action, announced on Feb. 28, was taken in response to a proposed rule by the Consumer Product Safety Commission that would require all table saws sold in the U.S. to have active injury mitigation (AIM) technology to make them significantly safer.
4 comments:
The technology that Sawstop has developed for its table saw products is certainly a great thing. It represents thoughtful engineering and provides a way to prevent life-changing injuries. That being said, I am skeptical of both how important Sawstop technology is and the motives of Sawstop. Having a quick-stop blade may be great for preventing cutting injuries, but it does not help with kickback, which is another major if not even more common source of injury from table saws. If a person knows that they have a sawstop table saw, they may be less careful when operating it, and be more susceptible to kickback. Power tools are dangerous and people need to have a healthy respect for them to be safe in a dangerous environment. I also find Sawstop’s previous action of heavily defending their Patent, while also fighting for regulation forcing shops to adopt their products is morally dubious at best. While they are getting lots of good press now, it seems like their overall goal is just to gain as much of a monopoly as possible without being susceptible to antitrust lawsuits.
As someone who grew up using “traditional” table saws without AIM technology, SawStop blew my mind when I first learned about the technology in middle school. I am glad that the US is starting to set systems in motion that will change how safety features are required on table saws. SawStop after defending its patients for so long and having a borderline monopoly on table saws with AIM technology opting to potentially make its patient open to the public is quite a shock for me. I feel like it would be so easy for SawStop to do nothing and let their monopoly in the AIM saw market continue; however, they are advocating for the public in opting to release this patient if this new table saw regulation is passed. The CEO of SawStop made a statement which stated that “we at SawStop are determined to seek a win-win balance between our mission and our business responsibilities”. With SawStops current actions they seem to be living up to this statement.
This reminds me of back when Toyota was inventing all sorts of safety features for their cars and they were making them freely available for other car manufacturers to use. They could have kept them in their cars and probably made a good chunk of money off of it but they chose not to which says a lot. This feels very similar to that, Though this is in response to a rule from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, it’s still really impactful. Sawstop’s technology is revolutionary in safety and there’s is no reason it shouldn’t be available, or beyond that even mandatory for every saw in the country. It’s never right to gatekeep safety, it’s always a good idea to just make everything safer when possible, and when it’s this easy to do. I also enjoyed reading up on how it works exactly because I’ve never looked into it before.
I think this would be major improvement to the table saw industry if, and when, this happens. However, it must be noted, that while SawStop may seem altruistic for their proposed release of the patent, they are only willing to do so after government intervention. I feel if they were really invested in consumer safety they wouldn't so stringently defend their patent as they did against Bosch. To be fair, I am being a bit speculative, however, to me it feels like they are only willing to do this due to regulation, as if they didn't the likelihood of other companies actually getting to the proposed standards would be minimal. I don't want to sound like such a downer though, as it would still be a major improvement in the overall safety of table saws sold in the US and that isn't something to brush of by saying they are only doing it cause they have to, it's important to realize that they are doing it.
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