re: Dangerous home shop tools

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The number one thing, though, is understanding kickback.

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Kickback is like a loaded gun, you never stand in the line of fire but plenty of people do. My cabinet saw is a SawStop and I have a Euro Slider so I don't have much concern about table saws though kickback is still a possibility on the SS. I also won't use a saw without all the safety bits in place and won't use one without a riving knife which prevents a large percentage of kickback events. I absolutely won't use one of the direct drive site saws since most of them are accidents waiting to happen. I would use either of the SawStop versions but I have never seen one in the wild.

The two things I respect most are my jointer and my shaper on the rare times I hand feed it, even power feeding my shaper seeing how much wood an 8"cutter that weighs over 20 pounds being spun at 3k rpm by an 11 HP motor can take off effortlessly in a single pass is scary as hell and shaper kickback makes table saw kickback seem down right puny.

IME most wood shop (which is what I am most familiar with) accidents are directly related to poor setup of either that machine or the process. Not wood but someone mentioned drills catching when they break through metal. While a drill or mill the the best answer clamping the workpiece to a sacrificial board held a lot, using a step drill in thinner metal, drilling the holes in two or more increments helps control the chip load as does light pressure and high revs at the end. But I imagine everyone of us has been on the wrong end of a dill bit taking too large a chip. I had a friend milling cabinet stiles and the mount for his powerfeeder shared off his shaper (there was a stress fracture in the cast iron) and it shot a fairly lightweight stile right through the wall on his steel shop. When he told me I thought he just meant it put a dent in it but it went through it though the hole was smaller than the board because it shattered.


All that said having been on woodworking forums for many years the one tool I have seen the most NSFW pictures from "on the way to the ER" posts is routers. Usually when the fess up it is too deep of a pass, tooling that is too big to freehand and if it is in a table improper clamping and improper use of featherboards.