The Ultimate Dogfooding Story

Lest you think he started with the finger - it was hot dogs first...

"Ultimately, it seemed like the most reliable technique would have to involve contact detection, Gass recalls. And because your body has an electrical capacitance, it offers the potential for that. I figured that if you put a voltage into the saw blade, your body could absorb some of that signal. Then the voltage in the saw blade would drop.

Within a week, Gass formulated most of the idea’s details in his mind. Thirty days later, he completed his first working prototype. Initially, he tested the prototype by touching the side of the saw blade with a finger. And while that proved the saw could stop in a fraction of a second, he still didn’t know if it was quick enough to prevent serious injury. Gass wondered how deep a 4,000-rpm saw blade would cut into human flesh during the microseconds that it took to stop the blade. To answer that, he needed to touch the blade teeth.

"I came up with the idea of using hot dogs, and it worked pretty well," Gass says. "It’s cheap, readily available, and you don’t get any protesters coming to your door."

From a Design News article - he was chosen as DN's Engineer of The Year 2007 (aside: DN is one of the best pure applied engineering publications that I actually read - apply for a subscription)

http://www.designnews.com/article/print/5897-Man_on_a_Missio...

It is a good story. I don't know if you can call the risk of a finger "ultimate," though; when Nikola Tesla bet his life on the skin effect of very high frequency alternating current as a PR counter Edison's animal electrocution demonstrations.

You can always nitpick, but compared to what 99.9% of engineers put at stake when selling a product, putting your finger in the blade is quite the vote of confidence.

This guy is my personal hero, but -- alas -- this is also a story about worse is better:

http://www.taunton.com/finehomebuilding/how-to/articles/saws...

"Having heard all of the various reasons put forth by the manufacturers for not doing anything, I firmly believe it simply comes down to money," says Gass. "They cannot figure out how to make more money by adding SawStop. They are not paying for the injuries that occur now, so why should they spend money to change their product to eliminate a cost they aren't bearing?"

So, although this guy has offered his safety technology to all tool manufacturers, SawStop is only available on SawStop-branded saws, which cost a bit more money, which causes people to bitch and moan, because who wants to spend money on a feature that merely prevents injuries?

The appropriate software-platform analogy is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)

I've heard of the Sawstop technology before and what I heard was very depressing if true.

Basically none of the table saw manufacturers want to deal with this guy because they are afraid or lawsuits.

The logic goes like this, right now everybody knows a table saw will maim you, there's no expectation that it won't.

But if they implement that technology, and it then fails, then there will be a BIG lawsuit.

Meanwhile everybody who uses a table saw and sees Sawstop, wants it.

But the guy is having a very difficult time setting a major manufacturing operation to ship Sawstop table saws himself.

Again, I don't know if this is true, but it's very sad if it is.

-- EDIT:

I missed this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453822