Shopsmith Forums

Ed in Tampa wrote:Sales are tough at Shopsmith as it is, can you imagine trying to sell the Shopsmith with out the table saw function? Or selling it without the tablesaw function and telling the customer they can buy the needed parts to accomplish tablesawing from another company.

Then if someone did get hurt couldn't they surely sue the second company because the first in effect admitted they couldn't produce a safe table saw. The second company then ignored that wisdom for the sole purpose of making money and provided the needed conversion parts.

Again if you don't think legislation of this type will effect the Shopsmith talk to European market. There table saws are almost extinct and I don't think SS even tries to sell there.

I think this could be a real problem to whole market and I think it would place Shopsmith in a very bad position if not fatal.

That is the big problem with any business. Any time you figure out the rules somebody changes them...
Sometimes you spend more time covering your butt than being productive.
Even today with my "hobby level" horse enterprise I keep insurance that I tell my clients that I don't have. I also keep a signed waiver in each clients file where they accept all liability for themselves, their family and any guest of theirs. BTW, an equine enterprise is the only one that I know of where that will stand up in court (in most states) depending on your states laws. Indiana has a non-responsibility regarding equine activities and it has so far been held up in court 100% afaik.

robinson46176 wrote:That is the big problem with any business. Any time you figure out the rules somebody changes them...
Sometimes you spend more time covering your butt than being productive.
Even today with my "hobby level" horse enterprise I keep insurance that I tell my clients that I don't have. I also keep a signed waiver in each clients file where they accept all liability for themselves, their family and any guest of theirs. BTW, an equine enterprise is the only one that I know of where that will stand up in court (in most states) depending on your states laws. Indiana has a non-responsibility regarding equine activities and it has so far been held up in court 100% afaik.

At the risk of derailing this thread (who me would I do a thing like that no never )
If what you said is true about the law in Indiana I think you may have placed yourself in the perfect position of find out in court by having insurance protecting you.

Before any lawyer takes a liability case they do what is called liability assessment (not totally the right term) where they can legally hire an risk assessment company to research your total worth. I'm told that banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions have to cooperate and give full disclosure. Once they find you have an insurance policy they now know the potential worth of their claim.
The idea is to find any deep pockets ( funds that can be claimed in a verdict) the fact you have insurance on this establishes your deep pocket and if, God forbid, someone did get hurt almost guarantees you that their lawyers will go after than potential. FWIIW

Ed in Tampa wrote:At the risk of derailing this thread (who me would I do a thing like that no never )
If what you said is true about the law in Indiana I think you may have placed yourself in the perfect position of find out in court by having insurance protecting you.

Before any lawyer takes a liability case they do what is called liability assessment (not totally the right term) where they can legally hire an risk assessment company to research your total worth. I'm told that banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions have to cooperate and give full disclosure. Once they find you have an insurance policy they now know the potential worth of their claim.
The idea is to find any deep pockets ( funds that can be claimed in a verdict) the fact you have insurance on this establishes your deep pocket and if, God forbid, someone did get hurt almost guarantees you that their lawyers will go after than potential. FWIIW

One more example why lawyers should be barred (pun intended) from creating laws. IMHO(not worth anything) the merits of a liability case have nothing to do with the deepness of anyone's pocket. Sadly we are quite distant from 'Utopia'.

We have an interesting situation here where I live in west central Florida, really neat things called sink holes. One day your house is there the next it is not, it is at the bottom of this huge hole that opened up. At first the insurance just covered it, but as claims started to increase they started adding an addendumm to cover sink holes. Now they have two kinds one is catastrophic where the house literally must be gone and the other covering even small cracks and such.
Interestingly the lawyers found out that it cost insurance companies more to fight claims than it did to pay. So the billboards went up. Have a cracked ceiling call a lawyer it may be a sink hole. The geographical survey alone costs 10 grand.
Many people were getting rich!

Guess what most insurance companies are fleeing Florida like there was no tomorrow and to get full sinkhole coverage (the one that covers cracks do to ground sinking) included in your home insurance now the cost is ranging somewhere between $1500-$3000 a year.

So in effect what made some people rich are now going to make some people poor. Think about the poor slob that can't afford full coverage and wakes up one day with his drive way and garage in the sink hole. But since his house is didn't fall in he has to foot the full bill.
Nice!!!!! Think of all concrete needed to stablize the sink hole, the ground to back fill and then repour the drive way and rebuild the garage. Nice!!! And everyday we pass by the billboards of the lawyers with smiling faces saying "make us rich, sue somebody"

Ed in Tampa wrote:We have an interesting situation here where I live in west central Florida, really neat things called sink holes. One day your house is there the next it is not, it is at the bottom of this huge hole that opened up. At first the insurance just covered it, but as claims started to increase they started adding an addendumm to cover sink holes. Now they have two kinds one is catastrophic where the house literally must be gone and the other covering even small cracks and such.
Interestingly the lawyers found out that it cost insurance companies more to fight claims than it did to pay. So the billboards went up. Have a cracked ceiling call a lawyer it may be a sink hole. The geographical survey alone costs 10 grand.
Many people were getting rich!

Guess what most insurance companies are fleeing Florida like there was no tomorrow and to get full sinkhole coverage (the one that covers cracks do to ground sinking) included in your home insurance now the cost is ranging somewhere between $1500-$3000 a year.

So in effect what made some people rich are now going to make some people poor. Think about the poor slob that can't afford full coverage and wakes up one day with his drive way and garage in the sink hole. But since his house is didn't fall in he has to foot the full bill.
Nice!!!!! Think of all concrete needed to stablize the sink hole, the ground to back fill and then repour the drive way and rebuild the garage. Nice!!! And everyday we pass by the billboards of the lawyers with smiling faces saying "make us rich, sue somebody"

Easy fix! Limit retainer/fees to less than 1% of 'settlement' and settlement to no more than 101% of actual 'repair' costs. Utopian thinking again! All you would be litigating would be responsibility issue(did you insure me for this or not?). No need to determine pocket depth, only sink hole depth!:D

Better not be working with your table saw when the garage goes into that sink hole(unless you have Saw Stop on it).

Someone earlier eluded to the gun analogy. I look at it the same way guns a very dangerous and so are table saws. But only when they are "misused". If you use the gun or table saw it was intended to be utilized and follow the proper safety precautions they are no more dangerous than a hula hoop. I don't have anyway near the experience most of you have but I did take shop class many moons ago that instilled very good positive shop safety to abide by. I remember the first few weeks of shop class were really boring and wishing we could just get to making sawdust but all of that class time spent discussing safety precautions I believe has allowed me to stay relatively safe while working with many a power tool over many years. The last power tool accident I had was last year. It was absolutely my fault and i deserved to get hurt doing what i was doing. I was using a high speed grinder with cutoff wheel after a full day of fishing. We got home and my buddie asked me if i could take the rusty nerf bar off of his truck as he is not very mechanically inclined. I said sure won't take a minute. I grabbed the grinder some goggles and leather gloves and kneeled under his drivers side door and started cutting. I got it 3/4 cut through and then had to change position under the truck. instead of turning off the grinder and laying down I just tried to readjust my position under the vehicle while the damn grinder was still spinning at 10K. Well I touched the concrete with the spinning cutoff wheel and it exploded. A piece of the broken cutoff wheel obviously spun back into my left ring finger and cut me down to the bone and i felt it seriously. Like getting hit with a hammer I don't even want to think about the damage had I not been wearing heavy leather work gloves. I wanted to punch myself out for my stupidity. I should have pulled truck closer to the garage and jacked it up on stands and properly prepared the task at hand but i was in a rush and i paid dearly for my lack of judgement.

The whole point is most if not all of these accidents are 100% preventable and I would bet 99.9% of the time the people injured are their own worst enemy and not following basic shop safety precautions. I have a really cheap Skil table saw that I hate but I would bet it would cut me just as good as a Unisaw or Powermatic and because it is a crappy saw (inaccurate poorly designed) I give it a lot of respect. It cuts fine but setup is just painful. I am going to get the saw function working on one of my Shopsmiths as they are far superior to the crappy Skil and i now have all the proper guards but I will still follow all the same rules and precautions that have kept me safe and still with all 10 digits intact.

The whole point is most if not all of these accidents are 100% preventable and I would bet 99.9% of the time the people injured are their own worst enemy and not following basic shop safety precautions.

True, but your finger is still sliced off. Given the choice, I'd rather keep the finger, even if I do something stupid.

I look at it the same way guns a very dangerous and so are table saws. But only when they are "misused". If you use the gun or table saw it was intended to be utilized and follow the proper safety precautions they are no more dangerous than a hula hoop.

Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. I own a number of guns, and they are all far more dangerous than a hula hoop.

foxtrapper wrote:True, but your finger is still sliced off. Given the choice, I'd rather keep the finger, even if I do something stupid. Wouldn't we all!? However not to the point(why should we be protecting idiots from themselves? - How they gonna learn to not be doing stupid things?) Too many fools wandering around now that think big brother is taking care of them! I do not wish injury to anyone, but, being foolhardy is not something I recommend either!



Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. I own a number of guns, and they are all far more dangerous than a hula hoop. Yeah! A hula Hoop is a tremendous stretch!!!

Just a matter of who/what is responsible! IMHO, always the 'user'.

Ed in Tampa wrote:At the risk of derailing this thread (who me would I do a thing like that no never )
If what you said is true about the law in Indiana I think you may have placed yourself in the perfect position of find out in court by having insurance protecting you.

Before any lawyer takes a liability case they do what is called liability assessment (not totally the right term) where they can legally hire an risk assessment company to research your total worth. I'm told that banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions have to cooperate and give full disclosure. Once they find you have an insurance policy they now know the potential worth of their claim.
The idea is to find any deep pockets ( funds that can be claimed in a verdict) the fact you have insurance on this establishes your deep pocket and if, God forbid, someone did get hurt almost guarantees you that their lawyers will go after than potential. FWIIW

There are two things here that you do not understand. One is the nature of Indiana's equine liability laws. I am considered an "equine professional" under Indiana law. If they come to my horse farm they are at that point participating in an "equine activity". It has been tested and is holding up very well.

The other is that I already have very deep pockets and have too much to lose to not carry a little more insurance to protect my pockets. It would be very foolish of me to not carry a little better than average insurance. I'm not some lemonade stand on a rented spot that can move to a new spot and start over for $50. I am sitting on an extremely high priced piece of real estate of 100 acres + smack up against the city limits of a bedroom community of Indianapolis. This community was set back some by the recession but nothing like much of the rest of the country. Yes development is down but still active. While real estate prices have risen .3% state wide over last year they just announced that in my county they have gone up 15%. Lower cost new housing construction is down the most largely since the second largest home builder in the state (C. P. Morgan) that was building most of those went belly up a couple of years ago. Still, much of the infrastructure is still there since they went in and put in the streets, sidewalks, sewers, underground power etc.
McMansions on some acreage are still being built at a reasonable pace.

This is early March. About the end of the month or into April as green-up advances on into May it will start. I will look up and see a car moving slowly down one of the 3 roads I have frontage on. They will move slowly along, stopping now and then. I can often see them pointing or waving a arm around in a sweeping motion. Sometimes they will get out of the car and stand looking out across the fields. Many times they will drive on over to the next road then turn around and come back past. Some will end up at the house and approach me about selling them a building lot. Others will go contact a real estate agent who will then contact me. I have no idea why they want to be so close to town... I don't If they would go another mile out the land cost would be less than half of what is this close to the city. Funny thing about these lot hunters, some of them have a hard time understanding "no". They are of the mind set that if I have land and they want to buy it, I should sell it to them or at least set a price. Just saying "no, I am not interested in selling anything" will not satisfy them. Some get pretty frustrated... I guess by that point they have already decided just where the house should be and which direction it will face and where the driveway will hit the road (and where the woodshop will sit ). I don't get contact from hundreds of these lookers but contact from 6 or 8 a year fairly serious ones is pretty common. I have no idea how many just look.
The sad part of it is that while my financial statement looks "really good" it accomplishes very little to put any money in my pocket and has a serious downside in added property taxes. We also face the risk of the city forcing us to go on to city water and sewage. That is happening a lot around here. Actually the city has no service I need or want. I have two very good working septic systems and 5 good wells. I have the same fire protection plus a really good nearby volunteer dept. The very good sheriffs dept operates in the same criminal center as the city police.

Now if someone were to want to force some money on me for the mini-farm in the next county I might have to talk with them.

.