I inherited a very grunty table saw from my father in law. The lights dim when its started, and it takes two men to move it.
It frankly terrifies me somewhat. I have always been very respectful of it, and had had no incidents in a couple of years of use.
However one day he watched me using it and said I needed to use a pusher stick to push the piece in, rather than the tips of my fingers as I was doing.
I switched to the pusher stick, and things felt...safer! I felt more casual I guess. And then, some months later, I contacted the blade with the pusher stick which disintegrated, with a piece flying past my face.
My learning was that sometimes having safety equipment can make one less careful, with a commensurate increase in the likelihood of an accident.
(A secondary learning was that table saws are just plain dangerous, and I wouldn't want a job that involved using one all day long - statistics would catch up with me one day).
Aside from using pusher sticks or blocks to keep your fingers away from the blade, the other critical element of table saw safety is understanding kickback. In the wrong circumstances, the saw blade can suddenly grip the workpiece and launch it back at you; the sudden change in force often causes the user to push their hand into the blade. Fortunately, kickback is a predictable and avoidable phenomenon if you understand the physics involved.
My grandpa owned a welding and machine shop back in the 70s / 80s. When it closed down (I assume this is where we got it from), we got an old cast iron table saw that was originally powered by one of those overhead shaft and belt systems, retrofitted to use an electric motor. Don't know that I ever used it myself. It had a ~1/2" deep channel for the push block to slide through though, which seems like it would maybe help to keep you from doing something stupid with it.
As a side note, wasn't Johnny Cash's brother killed in a saw mill accident? Seems like a saw mill is basically a very large table saw from what I've seen of them.
I was always real careful while cutting, then one day stuck my hand into the blade reaching over to clear out some scrap after a cut.
Luckily I was wearing super thick work gloves in the cold of winter, but it still wrenched my thumb so hard as it threw my hand back it was swollen and blue for weeks. (And ripper the glove all the way through).
Lesson learned: Be super careful whenever that blade is spinning, not just while making the actual cut.
Reminds me of the old Malcolm Gladwell piece about car safety, with the Consumers Union tester. Bigger vehicles are safer when they're hit (passive safety), but smaller cars are safer than you'd predict from their size alone because they're more able to avoid getting hit in the first place (active safety). They are more safe by making the driver feel less safe.
It frankly terrifies me somewhat. I have always been very respectful of it, and had had no incidents in a couple of years of use.
However one day he watched me using it and said I needed to use a pusher stick to push the piece in, rather than the tips of my fingers as I was doing.
I switched to the pusher stick, and things felt...safer! I felt more casual I guess. And then, some months later, I contacted the blade with the pusher stick which disintegrated, with a piece flying past my face.
My learning was that sometimes having safety equipment can make one less careful, with a commensurate increase in the likelihood of an accident.
(A secondary learning was that table saws are just plain dangerous, and I wouldn't want a job that involved using one all day long - statistics would catch up with me one day).