My table saw bit me in the shop last Saturday and not the way you think

I was ripping a 6 foot piece of maple for a set of drawers and about halfway through the cut the wood kicked back and my thumb caught the blade guard, not the blade itself. I stood there in my garage in Tacoma for about 10 seconds just breathing, then checked my hand and saw it was just a nick, barely bleeding. What really got me was that I had taken the riving knife off two weeks earlier because it was getting in the way of a dado stack I ran once, and I never put it back on. I found the knife in a coffee can under my bench, buried in sawdust, and it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to remount it. So now I have a rule where if I take a safety part off, it goes back on before I leave the shop, no matter how tired I am. What do you all do to make sure you actually put the guards back?

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spencer_gonzalez121d ago

That line about finding the knife buried in sawdust under the bench hit home. I hang mine on a nail right by the switch now, so I literally cant turn the saw on without seeing it missing.

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