Tag: guard

Canada

Presence Sensing Devices – Reaching over sensing fields

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This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Guards and Guard­ing

I recently heard about an applic­a­tion ques­tion related to a light cur­tain where a small gap exis­ted at the top of the sens­ing field, between the last beam in the field and the sur­round­ing struc­ture of the machine. There was some con­cern raised about the gap, and wheth­er or not addi­tion­al guard­ing might be needed to close the gap. […]

Canada

Interlocking Devices: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

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This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Guards and Guard­ing

Note: A short­er ver­sion of this art­icle was pub­lished in the May-2012 edi­tion of  Man­u­fac­tur­ing Auto­ma­tion Magazine. When design­ing safe­guard­ing sys­tems for machines, one of the basic build­ing blocks is the mov­able guard. Mov­able guards can be doors, pan­els, gates or oth­er phys­ic­al bar­ri­ers that can be opened without using tools. Every one of these guards […]

Canada

Hockey Teams and Risk Reduction or What Makes Roberto Luongo = PPE

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Canucks Hockey Flag
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Hier­archy of Con­trols

Spe­cial Co-Author, Tom Doyle Last week we saw the Boston Bru­ins earn the Stan­ley Cup. I was root­ing for the green, blue and white, and the ruin of my voice on Thursday was ample evid­ence that no amount of cheer­ing helped. While I was watch­ing the game with friends and col­leagues, I real­ized that Roberto Luongo and Tim […]

CE Mark

Retained fastenings for fixed guards

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If you are build­ing machinery that will be CE marked or is sub­ject to the EU Machinery Dir­ect­ive, you need to read this art­icle at MachineBuilding.net This art­icle reviews some of the retained fasten­ings that are avail­able for use on fixed machine guards, as required by the new Machinery Dir­ect­ive 2006/42/EC and the guard­ing stand­ard […]

Canada

Understanding the Hierarchy of Controls

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The Hierarchy of Controls illustrated as an inverted triangle with each level of the hierarchy written one above the other, starting with Inherently Sfe design, then Engineering Controls, then Information for Use, then Administrative Controls and finally descending to PPE at the bottom. An arrow with the text "Effectiveness" on it runs parallel to the triangle and points downward from Inherently safe design to PPE.
This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Hier­archy of Con­trols

(Eds. note: This art­icle was ori­gin­ally writ­ten in 2011 and was updated in Nov. 2018.) The “Hier­archy of Con­trols” is one approach to risk reduc­tion that has become entrenched in the Occu­pa­tion­al Health and Safety (OHS) sec­tor. There are oth­er approaches to risk reduc­tion which are equally effect­ive but are less rigidly struc­tured. If you […]

Asides

Interlocked gate testing

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Did you know that inter­locked gates require stop­ping per­form­ance test­ing?

Machinery needs to be able to stop in the time it takes a per­son to open the guard and reach the haz­ard. If the dis­tance from the guard open­ing to the haz­ard is short enough that a per­son can reach the danger point before the haz­ard can be con­trolled, the guard is use­less. The res­ult­ing situ­ation may be worse