The Industrial S-Word is a new podcast covering industrial equipment safety hosted by Matt Ernst. Matt has many years of experience in the industrial automation sector, from his early days in 2006 with WIKA Instruments Canada Ltd., to his current work with Schmersal Canada. Last week I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by…
Read MoreThe Westray Mine Disaster
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Westray Mine disaster in 1992. At 5:18 am on Saturday, May 9, 1992, a great, blue flame flashed out of the mine opening, a cloud of black smoke on its tail [1]. Twenty-six miners lost their lives when a methane and coal dust explosion destroyed the mine. Eleven…
Read MoreWhat happened to the series?
If you’ve been reading this blog for very long. you’ll know that I frequently write a series of posts on a topic, like this one on how to do an ISO 13849-1 analysis. A few months ago, the software I have been using for many years to organize those series posts stopped working properly and…
Read MoreInstructions for Use – the New ISO 20607
Instructions are one of the basic items that users expect to get when they purchase a product, and yet these important documents are often poorly written, badly translated, and incomplete. Key product features are badly described, and information on features, settings and hazards may be absent. All of this despite the fact that the minimum…
Read MoreProblems with our websites
Apologies Just a quick note to all our readers to explain the outages we’ve been having. First, I apologize for the downtime and sporadic outages you’ve probably experienced. We tried and failed to avoid those issues, but we think everything is sorted out now. Moving house is never easy We outgrew the capabilities of our…
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