The blade that was new Wednesday was broken today (more precisely, kinked beyond any repair at one point). We don’t have any more replacements on hand; they had already been ordered, but they are from a slow source. In the meantime, I ordered another set (identical to what we’ve been using) from Amazon for delivery tomorrow morning.
While the user when this happened was doing a somewhat unusual cut, it was one he had done successfully before. I don’t think that was the issue. When I investigated, I found that the previous user, who had widened the blade opening to cut something large, hadn’t fully tightened the blade guards when he returned them to their default position. This allowed the blade to pop out of the guide, causing it bind in the piece, kinking it.
I find this very frustrating. We are a community with expected norms about what state machines should be left in. If you are careless about such things, you can cause damage to tools and to other people’s work; you could even cause a later user to be injured. I’ve seen too many instances of such things recently.