Can new technology save the digits of a woodworking klutz?

Here’s an attention-grabbing headline from The New York Times: “How Much Would You Pay to Make Sure You Never Sawed Off a Finger?”

At first I assumed this was a story about the latest GOP fundraising text. But no, it’s about new, safer table saws that can detect a human phalange and retract in a microsecond, saving you a trip to the emergency room and a serious setback to your harpsichord lessons.

“If you’re a woodworker willing to spend enough money,” writes the Times’ Ben Blatt, “you can buy a table saw that detects fingers and stops the blade like this:” A video shows a disembodied hand pushing a hot dog toward a spinning blade (the hot dog represents your finger, it says) which disappears into the table when the hot dog/finger gets within an eyelash of the blade.

OK Ben, but if you’re so sure-fired certain that this works, why not just use your own finger? Huh, big boy, let’s see some stones; don’t go hiding behind some innocent food-like product.

But manliness is not the point of the story. The point is that you can buy a finger-sensing saw and then make bluebird houses to your heart’s content without worrying about acquiring the nickname Stumpy.

The catch is that these miraculous saws cost several hundred dollars more than the traditional finger-chopping brand.

The story says that “only one company, SawStop, sells a consumer table saw that can stop and retract the blade in milliseconds once it detects the small electrical signal from a finger.” The immediate question here is, how come it works on a hot dog? Or do wieners have an electrical charge — something that wouldn’t 100% surprise me. Maybe if your cell phone is low on battery you can plug it into a Ballpark Frank.

Yet the Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering whether to require this safety technology on all table saws sold in the U.S. Problem is, SawStop holds the patents on the technology, meaning the government would effectively be creating a monopoly on table saws, which would allow SawStop to raise its prices even more.

That would be great news for SawStop, because as it stands, only 2% of the table-saw-buying public is choosing the finger-saving option. That klutz next door may slice off a couple of digits, but that will never happen to you. Still, the numbers are interesting:

“Among tools likely to be found in someone’s garage, table saws are the biggest driver of serious woodworking-related injuries,” the Times writes. “Each year they are responsible for about 30,000 injuries that require emergency department treatment — and nearly 4,300 amputations.”

I’m not a real woodworking guy, so I tend to use my garage for something totally crazy, like a place for the car.

The story includes a happy little chart entitled “Amputations from consumer products.” Among the interesting data points is that 90 amputations a year are caused by hammers. Given my aptitude with a hammer, this outcome has a dismal plausibility that I don’t want to think about.

I do hope all these amputations weigh heavily on the conscience of Norm from “This Old House,” with his arsenal of tenon-mortise-biscuit-routing-joiner saws. Because, sure, professional contractors lop off a finger every now and again just based on pure math and the frequency with which they use these tools.

But the real risk, in my view, comes from PBS and the Yankee Workshop crowd who instill false confidence in the inept. It’s easy for them to push a raw block of wood into a million-dollar machine and have it come out the other end as a house. But I don’t see a lot of difference between those mechanisms and the ones behind the glass in the supermarket meat department that they use to make hamburger, so leave me out of it.

You just got a text message from your boyfriend. What is he trying to tell you?

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Good news for woodworkers: A finger-saving table saw