The 3rd International Forum of Machinery Safety Standards and Work Safety of Equipment Manufacturing Industry took place in Tianjin, China, on 26 September 2009. At this important international machine safety conference, Jeremy Procter was invited by the organisers to present a paper entitled Machine Guards – The New Machinery Directive and Standards: A guide to compliance to an audience of 150 representatives of leading Chinese manufacturers, users and government bodies.
Jeremy Procter is a Member of BSI’s MCE/3 committee, former Convenor of the European Standards Committee responsible for Machine Guards (CEN TC114 WG11), and Managing Director of Procter Machine Guarding. His conference paper covered a wide range of subjects, but the main focus was on machine safety regulations, the requirements relating to CE marking, and EN 953:1997 +A1:2009 Safety of machinery. Guards. General requirements for the design and construction of fixed and movable guards.
Particular attention was paid to important changes in the new Directive and the latest version of EN 953, such as the requirement for fixings on fixed guards to be retained (see this article: How to specify fixings for machine guards) and the fact that machine guards must, under certain circumstances, be CE marked as safety components (see this article: CE marking machine guards – free White Paper).
In his closing remarks at the international machine safety conference, Jeremy Procter mentioned a number of free guidance documents and other utilities available from his company’s website. These include Guide to the New Machinery Directive, White Paper: Machinery Directive and Fixings for Fixed Guards, Guide to Machine Guarding Standards, Machine Risk Assessment Calculator, and Safety Distance Calculator. All of these and several others can be downloaded free of charge from the Free Machine Safety Guides section of the website.