… I spent the morning fitting the base joints and assembling my French oak workbench.
— Christopher Schwarz
Instead of Wrangling SawStop Comments…
Why I Bought a SawStop Table Saw
If I invented a pill that cured cancer, I can assure you that I wouldn’t try to force it down your throat via legislation, regulation or some other governmental mandate.
After my early career as a newspaperman writing about government, politics and the way those intersect the corporate world, I have a distaste for almost all mandates. You can argue with me if you like, but I have set my stakes in the ground and am watching the rain outside my tent.
So why the heck would someone like me buy a SawStop table saw? After all, the company has been working quite successfully to make its technology de rigueur on all table saws via legal and political channels. (And to be fair, many of the other machinery manufacturers have been working just as hard on the other side of the issue in the political and legislative world. There are no good guys or bad guys in this debate.)
SawStop’s methods and my methods are not the same. I have always been the kind of person who bristles when someone tries to force-feed me anything, even if it’s good for me.
So here is why I broke down and bought a SawStop cabinet saw last week: It is the safest table saw on the market.
After witnessing some close calls during the last decade (I’ve not had one myself, really), I keep thinking what my life would be like without a finger or two. I would type slower. I would have more difficulty handling my hand tools. It would feel different to put my hand behind my wife’s head and kiss her.
So $3,000 is an awfully small one-time price to pay for an incredible added layer of protection. I don’t care about the “cost to society” in my own case. I can afford to pay for my own amputation and rehabilitation. But then what? Do I want to live with an amputation I could have easily avoided?
No, I do not.
Don’t be misled, the SawStop technology isn’t perfect. It can go off when you have pockets of wet glue in a lamination. It might misfire if the cartridge is set too close to the blade for some strange reason. And when it goes off, you are out of the cost of a cartridge and perhaps a sawblade. But really, ask yourself this:
1. Is a finger worth $67 (the price of a misfired cartridge)?
2. Is a finger worth $3,000 (the price of a SawStop 3hp cabinet saw)?
3. Aren’t sawblades really disposable items when compared to fingers?
I answered those above questions by purchasing a SawStop. I paid full retail, plus tax and shipping. If you think that the SawStop company would ever cut me a deal (or that I would even ask for a discount), then you haven’t been reading my stuff long enough.
The new saw arrived Wednesday, and it is sitting next to my soon-to-be-obsolete Unisaw.
The Unisaw has served me unerringly for more than 12 years. I have never had a close call with it. I have kept the guard on it whenever I could. In fact, I have an aftermarket splitter installed on it now.
But that is not enough once you have crossed over. Once I realized how easy it would be for my left hand to slip forward on the cast-iron table of my Unisaw, I unplugged the machine and turned my back on it forever.
Should you?
I think that in 50 years or so, this discussion will be moot. All saws will have flesh-detecting technology. If you don’t think I’m right, dig deeply into the history of automobile safety technology and decide for yourself.
Until then, I’m going to keep my SawStop, keep my fingers and keep my head buried in the sand when it comes to the politics of table saws.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I have disabled the comments on this post. I have no desire to hear the same histrionics that pollute the message boards.
The Art of Asking Questions
Steve Ramsey of the “Woodworking for Mere Mortals” web site asked me to contribute an entry to his “inspiration project,” where woodworkers try to describe things that inspire.
I am no good at these things. When people ask me what inspires me, I stutter, spit and make no sense whatsoever.
Thanks to Jeff Burks and Peter Follansbee, I came up with a better answer to the question.
Jeff Burks pointed out the incredible “Art of Asking Questions” essays from the late 19th century. I have read them about 10 times now.
Peter Follansbee took me to the newly discovered joiner’s shop in Duxbury, Mass., which left me speechless, asking questions.
Together they are a document of what keeps me in the shop, in the library, at my keyboard.
Thanks to Steve Ramsey for asking me to participate.
— Christopher Schwarz
Left to my Own Devices
Nearly all of the workbenches I’ve built have been in other people’s shops – those that belonged to a school, a friend or an employer. So I’ve always worked with the tools they had. Or I worked under some artificial pretense – building a bench with only hand tools or a certain budget or a time limit.
In fact, I’ve never built an entire workbench in my own dang shop on my own terms.
That fact occurred to me as I was driving home some legs with a sledgehammer. Yes, a sledge. That’s what I prefer to use to drive workbench joints. But when outside of my shop I rarely have one (I usually leave it in my other sledgy pants), and so I make do with mallets, gravity or (no lie) cinder blocks.
What else is different in my shop? The through-mortises in the benchtop. I have cut these every way imaginable, from all-chisel, all-ibuprofen, all-the-time to a Mafell chainsaw mortiser.
In my shop, I take a three-stage approach that works well for me. I bore out most of the waste with an auger. Then I bust up the waste with an electric jigsaw. Using the jigsaw, I kerf all the walls down to my knife lines. The kerfs serve as a guide for my chisel. When the kerfs are chiseled away from the inside of the mortise, the wall is plumb or undercut. Period. End of story.
Today I cut all the mortises for my French oak workbench using this method. Within two hours I was driving the legs in with a sledge. The legs were going to go in on the first test-fit. No lie. Then I thought better of it. After all, getting the legs out of the mortises is much harder.
So I came upstairs and wrote this blog entry.
— Christopher Schwarz
2 Reviews of ‘By Hand & Eye’
Our latest book, “By Hand & Eye,” is sometimes difficult to describe. It’s not simple step-by-step guidance to designing better furniture. It is, for lack of a better metaphor, a can opener designed to pry open a part of your brain that has been dormant for too long.
Remember the first time you got a fantastic edge? The first time you planed a perfect surface? Cut a perfect dovetail? That’s the idea. It takes some work, but the results are important to your advancement as a woodworker.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Here are two new reviews of the book. (Reminder: We do not solicit reviews from anyone, friend or foe. These copies were fully paid for.)
The first review is from James Watriss, a professional woodworker and graduate of North Bennett Street. Here’s a taste:
“This is a book about learning to see, and about learning to think. And it’s written for people who want to learn to see, and to think for themselves. It’s not a spoon-feeding of theory and techniques, it’s a guide to finding thought-provoking projects that will lead you to an understanding that you won’t get by flipping through (and ignoring) the latest issue of any given woodworking rag. I’m in the second round of drawing the Doric column. And it’s already sent me back to my library at the shop to dig out The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director to look up the other columns.”
Read the full review here.
The second review is from the blog Baroque Pearls written by WN “Vels” Lucas. Lucas specializes in researching and building pre-17th century furniture.
“I’ve been noodling with whole-number proportioning for some time, and dividers and basic geometry have been part of my “toolbox” for quite a while. This book has excited several interesting projects to continue along that path – I can only imagine the impact it may have on those wholly uninitiated to the concepts… I imagine those things will be grand. If you think you might someday want to go to the next level with woodworking, or just enjoy geeking about design, this book is a must.”
The full review is here.
“By Hand & Eye” is available from our select retailers and directly through our store here.
— Christopher Schwarz
Two notes on other future editions of this book:
1. The digital version will be up for sale in our store this week. Because of the extreme graphic nature of the book (no, it’s not gory), the file will be a pdf instead of an ePub.
2. The leather edition should have been done by now. But it’s not. And it’s my fault. The bindery could not get the leather we wanted and called me while I was in Germany to ask me to look at some other swatches. I forgot to do that. I am fixing that problem today.