Quote Originally Posted by Daturat100r View Post
This thing, before it spits its blades out will grab a huge bite and drag the wood at a speed close to or equal to knife tip speed.
The comparable one NortonDommi linked to runs at 540rpm. Assuming that the diameter of the rotor is 3 inches that puts the knife tip speed at 20 feet per second* or 13 miles per hour. A broomstick shoved through it and shot out at that speed It would certainly hurt, but it's not likely to fly very far.

* Double-check that math: 3 inch diameter squared is 9 times 3 (pi) = 27 inches per rotation * 540 rpm = 14580 inches per minute /60 = 243 inches per second /12 = 20.25 feet per second * (3600 seconds per hour/5280 feet per mile) = 13.8 miles per hour.

As it's feeding wood through the blade is being shoved back onto the bolts, so for knife ejection to happen it would have to snap all three of the retaining bolts. I don't know enough engineering to know if that's a likely failure scenario, but for scale the single shear strength of a grade 8 1/2" bolt through 1/2" material is a several tons. Your scenario of it grabbing the wood and pulling through seems more likely, but it would require all of the blades to be too loose to cut through the material at the bottom of the cutting cycle. This seems like it would get more likely over time as the middle of the blades started to wear.

Here's hoping they put an E-stop bar on the feed-in. An arm stuck in that would be horrific.