A tiff with my table saw

By Bobby Neal Winters

I lost a chunk of my left thumb in a fight with my table saw.  I am not calling the cops because it was a fair fight.  

Lest any of you worry, I only lost a bit of the fat at the end of the thumb and a tiny moon shaped portion of the nail.  When I tell women about the injury they arrange their faces in a rictus of horror; when I tell men, they say, “Dude!”

When it happened, I turned off the table saw (that’ll show it who’s boss), took off my noise cancelling headphones, took off my dust mask, and then wrapped my thumb in a paper towel.

Then I drove myself to the ER at Mercy.

After having received their tender ministrations, I asked if they had anything that would make me feel less stupid, and the response seemed to indicate they would be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice if they had such a medication.

I have continued with my woodworking but having a sore thumb has slowed me down a bit.  

I’ve completed the lean-to on my potting shed.  I’ve purchased and assembled a new bandsaw. (It’s a Grizzly!) I’ve gotten some chunks of walnut and oak from a couple of different friends of mine and have proceeded with turning projects with them.

But I hadn’t turned on my table saw until just a couple of days ago.

Whenever you fall off a horse, you are supposed to get right back on again.  That is good advice.  I believe it.  Indeed, I was planning to do just that.

But it was almost as if an invisible barrier had erected itself around the table saw.  Any time that I moved toward it, I saw something else I needed to do.  Usually that something else had to do with cleaning up my shop and putting it into better order.  

I threw things away.

I built shelves and put tools on them.

I swept the floor.

I took one of my handy little brushes, swept off the table tops.

I swept the floor again.

My shop looked better than it had in months.

Finally, I got to a point where I needed to use my table saw.  Nothing else would do the job. 

And I used it.

Now, we are cool with each other.

This is important.

It was learning to use my father-in-law’s table saw that got me into woodworking, so it is the founding part of my experience.  But, additionally, table saws are the centerpiece of the modern woodworker’s shop.

You need them to rip (cut lengthwise) your wood; you need them as an aid to milling (squaring up) your wood; you need them to make repeated cross cuts.

Yes, you can do all of these things some other way.  Indeed, it can all be done much more safely with hand tools.

But here’s the kicker.

The folks who did all of their work with hand tools invented power tools.

While I do enjoy learning their techniques in order to preserve that tradition, using hand tools at every stage of the process adds a lot of time and effort.

That is fine.  

Some of the time.

But a lot of the time you just want to get the job done.

You want to take your construction lumber, slice off the round sides with your table saw; run it through your planer to smooth it up, and then proceed with your detailed hand tool work.

And if you want to get it all done within the disjointed fractions of time that modern life allows us, you will need to use power tools and, most especially, the table saw.

So me achieving a rapprochement with my table saw it critical.

But, while I always respected my table saw, I think I’d gotten a little too comfortable with it.

That has been corrected, and I now have a reminder on the tip of my thumb that will be around for a while.

But I still have the thumb.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.