In a lawsuit in the United States (where else eh?) this week a man was awarded $1.5 million USD for an injury to his fingers that was caused by a table saw. The man injured his fingers while using a Ryobi table saw when he was installing oak hard wood flooring in 2006.

The thing is, there was nothing wrong with the table saw. The table saw didn’t fail to function as designed, or break, or have anything wrong with it. The Ryobi table saw met all current safety standards. The problem was that is was not equipped with a flesh detection technology to stop the blade!

Personally I reckon the guy must have been an idiot who should never have been operating a table saw in the first place. Also the people on the jury must have never used power tools before, or something, because I really can’t understand how this could possibly have happened!

If the lawsuit sets a precedent then we can expect to see all table saws in the future equipped with flesh detection technology. This will probably add at least $250 to the cost of a low end table saw, and more to the higher end more expensive table saws.

I think that the flesh detection table saw, currently made by SawStop, is a cool invention. It would especially be suitable for wood working shop classes in school (we had a shop teacher at my old school cut off his fingers, not a good example). I don’t think though that it should be required on all table saws.

The cost is extremely prohibitive for the table saw technology. The additional cost for the flesh detection technology will be about $250.00. Not only that, but if the technology is triggered you will need to replace the brake mechanism and the blade. Unfortunately the mechanism can be triggered by something as simple as moist wood, which would cost you about $150 depending on the blade.

You can read more about the lawsuit and the flesh detection technology over at Pro Tool Reviews. Here is a video of the technology in action:

This Sunday is Sustainable House Day here in Australia and over the Tasman in New Zealand.

Sustainable House Day is a day when all around the country people living in sustainable housing will open their doors for people to visit their homes.

There will be people available to answer questions about what they did to make their homes sustainable, and what you might be able to do to make your own house more sustainable.

There seems to be a real cross-section of homes and people participating in Sustainable House Day. Here in Townsville there are two homes that are participating:

• A retrofitted house built around 1970 that has has modifications done to make it a more sustainable home
• A purpose built house built in 2001

Each of these homes offer two very different avenues to pursue when making your house more sustainable.

Sustainable House Day focuses a lot of attention on solar issues. This includes the passive solar design of the house (shade, eves, insulation, etc.) as well as the active uses of solar, including solar hot water and solar electricity.

The event is put on by ANZSES, the Australia New Zealand Solar Energy Society, hence the focus on solar issues.

You can find out more about Sustainable House Day here, and you can see if there are any houses available for viewing in your area here.

When installing our new double kitchen sink we discovered that the countertop was synthetic stone. For some reason I had just assumed that it was a laminate countertop, but it turns out that I was wrong…

The synthetic stone bench top has very similar qualities to solid stone bench tops, but at a significantly lower price. The lower price is due to the fact that it doesn’t need to come from one large hunk of stone, but rather it is manufactured to suit the install requirements.

It is very hard wearing and easy to clean. Despite our best (accidental) efforts we have yet to chip or scratch it, although we have lost a few glasses and plates to the hardness of the synthetic stone.

If you want the look and feel of a granite or marble countertop, but want to save some money, then have a look at a synthetic stone option. It should still probably be professionally installed, but it will look great, and save you a bit of cash.

We installed a clothesline in our garage over the weekend so that we could wash clothes even on the rainy days. We don’t have a drier, so we need to dry our clothes on a clothesline, which doesn’t work so well on the backyard clothesline when it is raining.

I was able to reuse our old clothesline that had been mounted on the back of the house before we lifted our house. It had been sitting in the garden for almost two years now (I can’t believe it has really been that long…) so it needed a good clean, but it is still in good working order.

I had to purchase some 120mm x 50mm hardwood timber to mount the clothesline onto the rails used for the pickets down the side of our house. I mounted the hardwood to the rails then using 180mm x 12mm carriage bolts drilled right through. I need to actually reverse the bottom carriage bolt so that it sits more flush with the hardwood timber. Right now the end of the bolts hit the clothesline when it is collapsed, I just don’t have a big enough ratchet set to put the bolt on between the pickets.

I then screwed the clothesline to the hardwood using 65mm x 6.5mm hex screws. I originally drilled out the hardwood for the screws with a 6mm drill bit, but because it was hardwood I ended up breaking the screw when I tried to put it in. When I tried, in a different spot, with a 6.5mm pilot hole it worked much better.

One nice thing about the collapsible clothesline that we have is that the clothesline is in two different sections. This way if I am only doing a few clothes I can still park the car in the garage with the smaller section of the clothesline extended. It makes it quite convenient.

Technorati Tags: clothesline

This looked like a pretty good idea for hiding your smaller valuables that you keep in the house:

We don’t usually keep too many valuables in the house, but if we did this could be a great way of hiding them in an inconspicuous spot. I know that from friends being robbed hiding stuff in drawers, books, etc. doesn’t usually work, and I couldn’t really see a burglar pulling at your power points trying to find the hidden power point safe, so this could be a good hiding space.

If you are looking for a higher quality hidden socket wall safe you can pick up a Wall Safe – Wall Socket Safe – Hidden Wall Safe over at Amazon for only $7.48. It does the same thing as explained above, but it’s a bit easier and probably would probably stay in the wall a bit better. The product from Amazon is only good for North American people though, as it includes the North American electrical plug design.

Source: Life in Student Ministry – How to hide your big ring of youth group keys

Technorati Tags: wall safe, power point wall safe, hidden wall safe

In my last post I wrote about moving around our wireless access point and our cordless phone base station. The reason that I was moving stuff around was to organize our cable clutter.

As you can see in the photo on the left the cable clutter has gotten quite bad and some serious cable organization is needed.

One of the most interesting ways that I have seen suggested for organizing cable clutter is to actually use rain gutters to run the cables through. You attach the guttering to the back of the desk between the points that you need to run the cables and then the cables just sit in their.

A really cool feature of doing it like this is that if you have large enough guttering to use for to organize your cables you can even fit the power bricks and power strips into the guttering, assuming you have enough room between the desk and the wall to fit this sort of cable organization.

We don’t have enough room behind our desk for that sort of cable organizing, so instead I have some small cable clips taped under and behind the desk to organize the computer cables. I can run the cables through the clips, but I need to hide the power bricks between the desk legs and the wall. Two problems I have right now with this is that I have too many cables and the clips keep popping open, and the power brick for my wireless access point is too big to fit between the desk leg and the wall.

Tonight looks like it could be a bit of a frustrating one as I try to get these cables organized and hopefully out of sight.