50 OregonStater.org PHOTOS BY SO-MIN KANG OUR COMMUNITY HOW NOT TO CUT OFF YOUR FINGER Alumnus Steve Gass’ quest to make table saws safer. BY > KATHERINE CUSUMANO, MFA ’24 For this experiment to work, I had to become one with the hot dog — to believe in the hot dog as an extension of my own finger, both of us mostly salt and water merging into one salty watery body. I stood before a spinning table saw, holding the frank fast to a piece of plywood. The teeth bit the wood, sharp disc churning closer and closer.Then,with a loud snap, the blade disappeared. The hot dog bore only the tiniest nick. Humans, like hot dogs, are good electrical conductors. Our electrical charge is why we can think thoughts, and why we risk electrocution if we are caught swimming during a thunderstorm. In 1999, Steve Gass, ’86, considering this fact, had an idea: What if a table saw blade could retract fast enough, upon contact with flesh, to avoid serious injury? He set up a rudimentary prototype consisting of a circuit that would respond to blips in its electrical current and stop the blade within a fraction of a second. He called it SawStop. Though I don’t consider myself squeamish, I am afraid of saws. And this fear, I have come to learn, is valid: In the U.S., table saw injuries cause more than 30,000 hospital visits each year, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). These fall into four gruesome categories: “lacerations” (cuts), “frac- tures” (broken bones), “amputations” (digits cut off entirely) and “avulsions” (in which a body part is torn off). Every day, more than 10 people lose fingers to their saws. Gass has a gnarly scar across the base of one thumb, the product of playing unsupervised in his dad’s workshop when he was 4 years old. “I am someone who by nature perhaps needs SawStop more than almost anybody else,” he said. We sat in a conference room at the company headquarters in Tualatin. “I get stuff done, but I am also, uh, subject to injuries doing it.” At first, Gass — a lifelong “tinkerer” then working as a patent attorney in Portland — approached the table-saw problem as an interesting physics equation. A first-generation college student, he decided to study physics at Oregon State after reading an entry on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in the Encyclopedia Britannica. (He went on to get a Ph.D. in physics and a law degree.) He wondered: How fast would you need to stop a saw to prevent injury, and where would the force of all that spinning fury go? In hindsight, good design work turned out to be the easy part. Even finding a willing human test subject — himself — proved easier than the monu-
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