My shop teacher seemed to think the band saw was more dangerous than the table saw. Was he wrong, or is it just that table saws are used so much more than band saws that they dominate the injuries?
Table saws are dramatically more dangerous than band saws. When a band saw blade makes contact with whatever it's cutting, the force is in a single direction. Down at the table which provides material support. Table saws use a rotating blade and often a fence system. Lots of things can go wrong there, but it typically involves binding between the fence and the blade which can lead to kickback which can send chunks of wood through a wall or potentially more dangerous is it can cause the wood to twist violently into the blade risking bringing your hand towards the blade.
Here's a saw stop in action, so it's not gory. But look at how FAST things go wrong here and how violent the interaction was.
I haven’t used a bandsaw a lot, but I have seen some photos of gnarly lost fingers.
I use a table saw quite a bit and think there are more ways things can go wrong, most of which stem from kickback which happens in a split second. The wood will either fly back and hit you, or your hand will be pulled into the blade and you will likely lose a finger.
Both machines can be safe with the proper precautions. That said, I still enjoy my SawStop as insurance for my fingers since I still write software for my day job.
> I use a table saw quite a bit and think there are more ways things can go wrong, most of which stem from kickback which happens in a split second. The wood will either fly back and hit you, or your hand will be pulled into the blade and you will likely lose a finger.
One of the more horrifying things I've witnessed second-hand with kickback was a lucky third scenario. It was high school woodshop and one morning the teacher pulls us all over to the miter saw bench and points at a huge chunk that's missing from it. The bench surface was two or three layers of MDF glued and screwed together. He explained that someone had been cutting something on the table saw 8 feet away from it, had a kickback, the kickback missed but the piece of wood shot into the miter bench and that was the result. Thinking about what that same piece of wood would have done if it had hit a human... yeesh, I definitely treated kickback with a lot more respect after that day.
They can both be dangerous but one difference is that the band saw _seems_ much less dangerous and people would take it less seriously. In a shop full of adolescent novices I could see this causing more injuries whereas the tablesaw is probably more closely supervised and people will respect it more.
I'd say overall a tablesaw is more dangerous compared to a band saw because it has the additional failure mode of kickback which happens occasionally even to very experienced operators.
I think that's probably it. The band-saw didn't really look different or more intimidating than the jigsaws we had previously been using. The table-saw looks like it wants to kill you.
Ever seen someone bind the material in the table saw where the material kicks back into the operator? Here's just the first example from a quick search:
Here's a saw stop in action, so it's not gory. But look at how FAST things go wrong here and how violent the interaction was.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/11s53ew/w...
Compare that to a band saw in use, and you can see fingers quite close to the to the cutting edge and still have good control over the work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlHe9gOphBw