Court upholds tablesaw verdict

No offense mountainaxe, but this topic has been covered ad nauseam hear on LJ, and every time it gets rehashed nothing new is said. So to save time and space, here’s a summary list of the most common responses to this issue:

1. The guvment is out to get us.
2. Only stupid people injure themselves.
3. I’m smart and don’t need no guvment telling me what to du.
4. What’s next – regulation on picking our noses?
5. We’ll never be able to afford table saws again.
6. Our nation is becoming a communist dictatorship.
7. Power tool manufacturers should have been more proactive with safety technology but never are because lawsuits are far more cheaper from an industry-wide standpoint.
8. Safety matters.
9. Gass sucks
10. Obama sucks.

Yes it does appear totally stupid that Osorio won in the first case, and even more so that it was upheld on appeal.
BUT, I was not in the court room and we all know the media coverage of any event can and will be biased to present the opinion of the entity doing the reporting.

Agreed, there is no point discussing this here because it’s just more of the same old same old, but I have a few minutes to kill so I’ll bite.

The CPSC is moving to the stage where they supposedly take public comment on the matter and will eventually render their ruling based on who has the most kick back to offer, the industry lobbiest or the special interest groups. That just the way it happens.

Same thing happened back in the 70’s with rotary lawn mowers. They decided mowers had to have brakes to stop the spinning blade if the operator let go of the handle. Everyone said it was the end of the affordable lawnmower. Within about 3 years enough manufacturers figured out how to build the brakes into the design that the free market brought the price within reason.
And, people eventually figured out how to duct tape the damned control leaver down so the mowers were almost as useful as they used to be.

The present case is a little different due to the extensive patents held by Gass and the fact that his system is the only one that really works after you touch the blade. Any other method will not work as well and he has his method protected. The only competing device that I have heard of is Whirlwind. It stops the blade in about 1/8th of a second; that’s about 7 or 8 revolutions of the blade so it can’t wait till you contact the blade to activate; it activates when you touch the guard.

We can count on a ruling that will make saws more expensive, more difficult to work with, and not able to do some of the things they do now. . . . Until we figure out how to bypass the damn “safety” features.

You know, since the Saw Stop technology is so good, and would be in the public interest to have it on every saw made, why not just invoke Imminent Domain rules and force Gass to sell it to everyone for the $100 he said it would cost to add to any saw.

Oh yeah, Obama sucks. Now everthing has been covered I think.

Good points! Guess we’ll just have to wait to see if the circular saw market contracts and/or gets more pricey.

-- Jeff, "The things I make may be for others, but how I make them is for me."