FineWoodworking.com Safety Tips – Tablesaw Safety
The tablesaw is an essential piece of shop machinery, but it can also be dangerous. Learn how keep your fingers safe and avoid kickback with tips from Fine Woodworking magazine editor Asa Christiana. For more woodworking tips and techniques, visit FineWoodworking.com.
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“The piece moves away from the fence and gets on the back of the saw”…? That must be some weird kind of kickback I have never seen or heard about. To “move away from the fence” during a cutthe wood would somehow have to travel through the blade sideways.
In my experience kickback tends to happen in one of two situations:
1. When the wood _closes_ on the saw blade. The splitter’s job is simply to prevent the kerf from closing.
2. When the saw blade and fence are not perfectly aligned (or the wood flexes during the cut) and the piece is pushed _into_ the fence, causing it to compress and act like a spring. A splitter won’t help you here.
The presenter is correct. What happens is as the wood moves away from the fence at the back, it is being angled towards the back side of the spinning blade. Remember that blade is spinning at you so the teeth on the blade are rising up from the table at the back. Eventually the side of the wood catches on one of the spinning teeth at the back. This causes the whole board to be lifted up on the top of the spinning blade. At the top, the teeth that were once rising are now pulling the board right at you. Since the center of gravity is usually to the right of the blade, this catching, lifting, and pulling causes the board to continue to rotate in a counter clockwise motion, which in turn moves more wood over the top of the blade, ensuring that the piece goes flying.
and since the board is no longer blocked by the blade it is free to spin towards you.