woodbutcherbower said:
Mandatory chain-mail gloves or a suit of armour maybe?
I also know that you were kidding—making a joke. But it reminded me of an anecdote that my high school machine shop teacher told us about gloves.
He was in the Navy during WWII. He was assigned to the machine shop (he was land-based).
There was a guy in the shop that was enormously strong. He got into a bet where he bet he could stop the spinning of the drill press by grabbing onto the chuck.
He did not want to chew up his hands in the process, so he put on a pair of heavy duty leather work gloves.
He did not stop the chuck. In fact the leather enabled a too-strong a grip on the chuck and he broke both of his arms.
So just in case someone took your “advice”, not only was it unlikely to provide any protection, it was fairly likely to make the injury worse.
As an aside, I got my first table saw when I was 45; before that I had never used one. But I knew they were dangerous because someone from high school had an “accident” on one.
Vinny T. was a rough character. He carried a flask to school every day and was pretty well drunk by the time school let out.
He also gambled.
When I returned from college I ran into Vinny. He had two prosthetic arms with metal hooks. He lost both arms to the elbow.
I was more than mildly shocked by the prosthetics. He said he lost both arms on a table saw at the cabinet shop where he worked. I took that at face value at that time. But 25 years later, after using the table saw for a while, I questioned the concept of the “accident”.
In retrospect, I would bet that the loss of the arms was more likely the result of someone teaching Vinny a lesson about repaying his debts to his bookie.
I doubt that a SawStop would have helped Vinny.
