[Elspode]

Long ago in my youth, I worked in a cabinet shop. We had the occasional injury from air powered staple/nail impalement, router bites on the fingers and table saw incidents, but mostly, it was a realistically safe environment, all things considered. Then OSHA came in.

This was in the mid 70's, before such governemental things got really loopy, but even then, they made us put guards on *everything*. The biggest joke of them all was the tablesaw guard, which essentially made the saw useless, and about ten times as dangerous, since the stock you were feeding through had to push the frigging guard out of the way before it could be cut, and then it had to pass by the mounting rail that the pivoting guard bracket was mounted on. That damned thing caused more bindups of the stock going through than I would have even thought possible...bindups invariably resulting in the stock either being propelled backward into the operator at admirable velocity, or getting sideways altogether and exploding (flakeboard sheets were especially good at this) in a shower of high speed fragments.

The only way to stay safe when working with big saws, table routers, etc is to see the enemy and compare its location with that of your hands. Bruce is 100% correct.