BGodfrey

I think Saw Stop's mistake is in not starting with OSHA. They are in the business of industrial safety, not consumer safety. I bet the majority of those missing fingers are from professional hands, not amateur. Those guys are in a hurry and that's a recipe for accidents. All manner of guards and protective gear are required on the job site and this would just be another. Once manufacturers are geared up and competing, it will not add nearly as much cost to the machine as it currently does to the low volume product made by Saw Stop. I find it bizarre that people who complain about all the annoyances of safety gear and guards would complain about something that gives you so much safety without getting in the way at all. Look at a Saw Stop saw. You don't see the technology at all and you won't interact with it, either, unless it is to save your finger. What could be wrong with that? Somehow this has become one of those moronic Right -vs- Left contentions. I sure wish people would just stop and think about things before committing themselves to a political position on something that isn't political.

What is this infatuation with bigger, heavier, more powerful. What ever happened to the right tool for the job. My old DeWalt ROS was getting tired after who knows how many hundreds or thousands of hours of use, so I went to replace it. But DeWalt no longer makes it. They replaced it with a bigger, heavier, more powerful one. Pah! What a disaster that was. Now I can't sand any more boat hulls until my rotator cuff injury heals. Thanks, DeWalt.

So a new, even bigger, heavier, more powerful one from Bosch? Count me out. Doctor's orders.

You have to be thinking all the time. Once I was nailing two pieces of 1x cedar (1-1/2" total thickness) together with a brad nailer. I opened the side-loading nailer and it was empty. I dropped in some 1-1/4" nails held the two pieces together with my left hand and shot a nail. It left a divot like it always does, nail or no nail. And the pieces just fell apart again. So I opened the nailer and everything looked fine. I shot a test nail and it shot. So I lined up my two pieces again, held them tightly, carefully lined up the nail gun with the existing divot and shot another nail ... into my finger. What the heck?

It turns out that there had been one 5/8" brad left in the nailer from a previous task. It was too far into the mechanism for me to see and it was too light to shake out. When I shot the first time, it went 5/8" into the 3/4" piece - not far enough to come out the other side, much less tack the two pieces together. When I shot the second nail, it pushed the little one on through ahead of it. 1-1/4 plus 5/8 equals 1-7/8. The excess 3/8" went into my finger. Thankfully it wasn't more.

You can bet that I am more careful to check that my nail guns are really empty now and I don't put my finger directly beneath the nail even if I'm sure the nails aren't long enough to go through.

I'm with you, Ocotillo Mike. I like mine blended on a hot day...

I forgot to mention: with a proper reverse-raked blade the RAS will not pull itself towards you.

I find it interesting that you have never seen one of your authors using a radial arm saw, and yet you seem to value their opinions of it. The opinion of someone who rarely or never uses a tool are valueless, regardless of whether the tool is a radial arm saw, a table saw, a skill saw and shooter board (way under-rated) or a chainsaw.

What it mostly boils down to is style. It is apparently stylish to use a table saw and to brag about all the brands and features and stuff. That's fine for people who are trying to impress you with their tools, but is not useful for people who are trying to do work. You can do a lot of work on the RAS without a lot of talk.

Safety - the RAS is as safe or safer than a table saw. Why?
1. You are always wary of the blade. It is when you lose respect for your tool that accidents happen. RAS users do not lose that respect. I don't know many woodworkers, but I know three who have removed fingers with a table saw. All three said they had become jaded and just forgot about the blade.
2. Yes, the blade can grab and move toward you, but the travel is limited and remains in-line with the arm. Since you are always aware of where the blade is going, it won't hurt you (unless you suffer a heart attach from the surprise.) I have had a few bad grabs in the 31 years I have been using my saw and none resulted in anything worse than marred wood and the need to partially re-adjust the saw.
3. It won't grab the material and throw it at you. Or a family member, pet, through the wall, etc.
4. This is big: your control hand is grabbing a handle which is connected to the blade, so the blade cannot get it. Your guide hand is (or should be) pressed to the table and just barely holding the workpiece. Assuming it is not on the groove, your control hand cannot accidentally wander into the path of the blade as it can with a table saw. Think about it: on the table saw you are often pushing the wood or holding the side of the wood with your hand and your hand is moving. Just a bit of inattention and there go your fingers as the wander into the blade. Yes, you are supposed to use guides and push sticks, but I've seen videos on your own site where a craftsman is pushing the work into the blade with his hand and coming pretty close to it, too.

Footprint: yes, the saw has the footprint of a table saw, but not exactly the same workspace requirement. It sits against a side wall, not out in the middle. In small shops there is no middle for a table saw to sit in. The material only moves through the blade in one direction (ripping) and so the actual work area of a radial saw is long, but not wide. The table saw needs some real acreage to use unless you want to move the saw around all the time.

Versatility: the Radial Arm saw can not only rip, crosscut, miter, compound miter, etc., but it can be adapted to do many other jobs, too. I once paid a few dollars for a collet for the "auxilliary output shaft" (the other end of the motor) and a couple of heavy duty router bits (3/4" round-over and 3/4" beading groove) and made hundreds of feet of 2x beaded trim right there on the job using my "overhead router".

My RAS is now setup on a stand (HTI, I think, it's been 15 years since I bought it and I don't remember for sure.) It has infeed/outfeed rollers that fold down. This combination allows me to rip plywood out to almost 24" without an assistant. It makes it much easier to crosscut long material, too. Having used both, I would take this setup over a table saw any day for my uses. I've done everything with this from making quality cabinets for my wife's store to building construction to bird houses to cutting kindling (very quickly!) out of my scrap. I have not done the really super finicky small woodworking projects like jewelry boxes, but if I did, I would probably rather use a super high quality table saw for that.

This should have been first place. The jewelry box and tool box are nice, but this guitar stand required serious creativity as well as woodworking skills. Very well done.