From our friends at MachineBuilding​.net.

It is now more than a year since the new Machinery Directive (2006/​42/​EC) came into force, but the sit­u­a­tion is still fairly fluid in some respects. The EC Machinery Working Group meets reg­u­larly to dis­cuss mat­ters relat­ing to the Directive and cor­re­spond­ing stan­dards; the last meet­ing took place on 21/​22 December. According to the Stakeholder Report pub­lished in the UK by BIS (the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills), a num­ber of issues were dis­cussed, which demon­strates that the Machinery Directive is not as ‘black and white’ as might be expected.

For exam­ple, EN 12635 (Industrial, com­mer­cial and garage doors and gates — Installation and use) is cur­rently har­monised to the Machinery Directive, but the UK has raised a for­mal objec­tion against this stan­dard, as it would appear that there is scope for improve­ment. Other top­ics under dis­cus­sion ranged from vari­able reach trucks, tail lifts and loader cranes, to stave split­ters, dynamome­ters and ‘grey’ imports of machinery.

If you would like more infor­ma­tion, copies of the cur­rent and pre­vi­ous Stakeholder Reports are avail­able in PDF for­mat from the UK Department of Business Information & Skills (BIS) web site.

Machinery Directive stake­holder report: February 2011 (PDF, 81 Kb)

Machinery Directive Working Group held on 1–2 June 2010, Brussels (PDF, 56 Kb)