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meowfaceHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

He also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product: …

He also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product: https://www.machinepix.com/p/machinepix-weekly-30-dr-steve-g... >Gass: I was out in my shop one day, and I looked over at my table saw, and the idea kind of came to me. I wondered if one could stop the blade fast enough if you ran your hand into it to prevent serious injury. >I started puttering around on how to stop things quickly. The simplest would have been a solenoid, but that would have been too slow and weak. I had come from RC airplanes—so I used the nose landing gear torsion spring from an RC airplane for an early experiment, that spring provided the force and I held it back with a fuse wire, a maybe 10 thou diameter fuse wire. I set up some capacitors to discharge through the wire and melt it in a few milliseconds, and I was able to generate maybe 20 lbs of force against a blade. So this isn't one of those cases of a patent attorney taking over an existing invention/company. …

Original discussionThe U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws756 source comments · at import
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LU
lumaHN

And this right here is the key bit. SawStop was started by patent attorney Steve Gass. He has spent years claiming that other vendors won't talk to him while leaving out the actual terms of his licensing (which, by some rumors, was somwhere around "extortionate"). Bosch released a saw with similar tech in the US and then SawStop sued the product off of the market. Every step of the way Glass has not acted in good faith and instead acted like a patent attorney. We have little reason to believe that he has all of a sudden found goodwill toward man in his heart when there's a dollar somewhere he could instead put into his wallet.

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LU
lumaHN

Yes, he has a PhD in physics as well as being a practicing patent attorney, a skill he put to use over and over in the past 20 years. We don’t have to guess how this org will behave, we have plenty of history upon which to judge their sincerity. If they want to give the patents (note the plural there) for the benefit of mankind, they can do so. They are not doing so.

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resolutebatHN

Insightful quote: > The fundamental question came down to economics. Almost a societal economic structure question. The CPSC says table saws result in about $4B in damage annually. The market for table saws is about $200-400M. This is a product that does almost 10x in damage as the market size. There's a disconnect—these costs are borne by individuals, the medical system, workers comp—and not paid by the power tools company. Because of that, there’s not that much incentive to improve the safety of these tools. Societally if there was an opportunity to spend $5 to save $10, we’d want to do that. But in this chain there's a break in people that can make those changes and people that are affected, so it’s not done.

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NI
nitwit005HN

> So this isn't one of those cases of a patent attorney taking over an existing invention/company. That's also not what the person you're responding to was arguing.

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