Shopsmith Forums

Tomorrow morning, I’ll post a new video and this one disappear, thanks to the way the YouTube algorithm works. This topic is to important to let it fade away. If you use your Shopsmith, as a tablesaw, there are some critical safety lessons to be learned here. Scott

Too Important for a "Clickbaity" Title. Shopsmith Table Saw Safety
https://youtu.be/DBENMKA2y9g

Scott,

Excellent reminder and showing what can happen if we forget to do all the checks before turning on our Shopsmith. I once started making a cut without the Quill locked. Not something I will forget to do again.

"What Went Wrong?" He is an experienced SS user that failed to lock the table height immediately after adjusting it. When veteran woodworkers are injured (he wasn't, thankfully) complacency and/or distraction are frequently contributors. Could most of us create interesting video content while woodworking without being distracted by it? I could not. The video, work, or most likely both would suffer. Personally, I wasn't comfortable with the idea of a non-through cut on a glue-up with an octagon cross section. He was cutting a quarter out of it with cuts on two sides 90 degrees apart. So from my perspective the relatively unstable 3/4 octagon left rules out many of the safety devices, either they can't be used or should not be used. He started with a square cross section glue-up. So IIWM I'd use fence mounted Jessem Stock guides on the square glue up. The safe and effective alternatives to that are numerous, the key point is to do it while it is square. He redid the cut for his video using a push stick, and dinged the trailing edge. IMO, that's because the workpiece wasn't stable and the push stick did not and could not add control.

I thank Scott and also Dave at Sassafras Valley for putting this out there, and I'm thankful he wasn't injured. His close call is a wakeup call for the community. His videos, first one is an outtake on the incident. Second one is detail on the project (fluted columns):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOtRoLU319s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpa4_KHpo80

While I agree a riving knife should have been used, I'm skeptical of how much it would help. It would have slowed things down, possibly giving him enough time to notice the table moving and safely abort the operation. But had he not noticed, I believe it would have delayed the blade coming through the board until a much more dangerous time.

- David

Thanks for the synopsis, David. The observation of the use of a riving knife possibly being able to help is based on the thought that if the stock is partially though the cut, as this one was, the riving knife would act upon the surface of the kerf where the blade was making the correct depth of cut, and would be lifted slightly from the table, which at least in my experience would give me pause. If that happened and he would continue to soldier through the cut, then yes, that might delay the cut-through to a later portion of the stock. Either way, Dave admitted that his biggest mistakes were to miss the 5-point safety check and not using push blocks. Scott