I screwed up.
I’ve lived in the new house for over a year now … and the shop is still not set up. And that is killing me. I cannot find tools. Some are in storage. Some are … well, I can’t find them. And I have looked.
So Mrs M has, uh, encouraged me to get the shop built out with cabinetry, drawers, and tools in places I can find them.
Challenge accepted.
This brought me to building the cabinetry for the new miter saw … complete with melamine tops, trimmed in Hard Maple. The cabinets are done, with some of the hardware already installed … and it was time to cut the shelf for between the 2 cabinets that the saw will actually sit on.
This shelf will be cut to 28-1/2″x30″ … and I set up the SawStop to make the first cut.
I love my SawStop. It is the PCS model with a 3hp motor. Powerful. And, the SawStop is famously very safe, because it has flesh sensing technology that will nearly instantly stop the blade and lower it below the surface of the table before your fingers suffer unrecoverable harm due to a poor decision.
And then I made a mistake. I set the rip fence to 31″, turned the saw on and got ready to make the cut. But, ooops, that’s the wrong size. The work piece was smaller than that. So, I moved the work piece to the left of the blade to measure it.
And then the poor decision set in. I extended my tape measure with the saw still running and promptly touched the spinning blade with the metal tape measure.
WHAM. The blade slammed below the table before I realized what an idiot I was.
I was fine. Am fine.
The tape measure, miraculously, was fine. Is fine.
What happened? The SawStop system measures electrical conductivity of the spinning saw blade at all times. If the blade measures an increase in conductivity … as when your finger touches the blade, you get an activation. Hence, WHAM.
But in this case, the SawStop didn’t know that it was a metal tape measure that touched the side of the spinning blade, it only knew that the electrical conductivity increased. So it activated the safety system. This is a good thing.
The bad thing … was I just made a $350 mistake. You see, the WHAM was my very nice Forrest Manufacturing Woodworker II Duraline Hi-A/T 80 tooth veneer saw blade slamming into the soft metal of the SawStop brake at over 100mph. The blade is now embedded in the brake. This is a good thing. But it will cost $350 to replace these 2 parts that are now fused into 1 piece.
Nothing to be done. I’m an idiot. I was done for that day. Next day in the shop, I had to remove the brake/blade fusion from the saw. I unplugged the saw & got to work. This process takes patience, the instructions say, because the new fusion is mounted on 3x parallel rods (the threaded rod the saw blade is mounted on is one of these; the brake is mounted on two others.) So, patiently I got to work. It was not until I noticed I was bleeding that I realized the saw blade was still sharp on the top side that I was rubbing my forearm against. Ooopsie. Road rash alert.
But, I kept at it and eventually got the brake/blade fusion out of the saw. I replaced both with spares that I had on hand anticipating just such a day as this. Then I plugged the saw in and waited for the on-board computer to boot up … and the lights were flashing red & green. That’s when I call for help to SawStop customer service, which is widely known to be helpful and supportive.
So, I explained the situation … I had caused an accidental activation, and now I had lights going disco on the saw. The man on the phone thought about 0.1 seconds & said, “Oh. Push the paddle to the off position.”
Apparently, I was not the first stupid owner to have an activation, install a new brake & blade, plug in the saw … and never realize that the saw’s power paddle switch was still in the “on” position. I never turned the saw off when the brake activated … the saw had shut itself off by going WHAM.
But nowhere in the literature are you told to push the paddle into the off position. I did that. Disco lights gone. Saw now works. Problem solved.
Back to making sawdust. Finally.
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