Phillips v. Kimwood Machine Company
Oregon Supreme Court
525 P.2d 1033 (1974)
Kimwood (defendant) sold a large sanding machine, built for use only with an automatic feeder, to Phillips's employer Pope and Talbot, who instead used a partly manual feeding setup; Kimwood's smaller, manually-fed models included metal teeth to prevent fiberboard from being kicked back out, but the larger machine sold to Pope and Talbot lacked that safeguard. When employee Phillips (plaintiff) manually fed a thin board mixed into a batch of thicker fiberboard, the sanding heads kicked it back into his abdomen; he sued Kimwood for defective design, and the trial court granted Kimwood a directed verdict.
Whether, in a products-liability suit, a manufacturer may be held liable for a defective design even if there was no defect in the product itself.