Word: shops
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...moment of distraction, Carl Seymour, foreman at the Cabinet Door Shop in Hot Springs, Ark., nearly became a statistic. One morning in March, he was cutting a piece of wood paneling on a power saw when his thumb made contact with the blade. Seymour jerked his hand away, grabbed his thumb in pain and peeked to see how badly it was mangled. To his surprise, it was no worse than a bad paper cut. "I was so happy and excited, I started screaming and jumping up and down," Seymour recalls...
...wasn't just thumb luck. The Cabinet Door Shop is one of 1,800 companies that use a new kind of power saw, the SawStop, that is designed to stop as soon as the blade makes contact with flesh. Its inventor, Steve Gass, an amateur woodworker and patent attorney with a Ph.D. in physics, came up with the idea in 1999. Says Gass: "I was tinkering around in my shop and looked over at my saw and thought, I wonder, if you ran your hand under the blade, if you could stop it quick enough, then you wouldn...
...from every other major power-tool company. He was stunned. "Everybody in woodworking knows someone who's lost a finger or had an accident," says Gass. "I felt this technology should really be out there." He and two other lawyers from his firm launched SawStop in 2001, setting up shop in his barn and contracting with a manufacturer in Taiwan to build the devices. With about $5 million in sales, 16 employees and nearly 50 reports from customers of undetached digits, SawStop is thriving...
...meantime, SawStop, which is available only as a commercial saw, will offer a less expensive version for hobbyists later this year. That may push more small shops to conclude, as Carl Seymour's did, that a safer saw isn't just good for workers; it's good for business. Gerald Wheeler, owner of Cabinet Door Shop, says two earlier power-saw accidents cost him $100,000 and two good employees, who suffered amputations. Seymour says he fixed himself up with "half a roll of toilet paper and a Band-Aid," leaving work that day with all his fingers, plus...
...Sunday stroll from his home near the World Trade Center meant jostling among the tourists. Today, he says, he bumps into neighbors. "There are many more residents now and a sense of community," says Pryor, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. "We even have a new coffee shop...