In an industrial setting, there are quite a few different machines that can lead to dangerous workplace hazards. Injuries in this work environment can happen in a few different ways, including anything from improper usage of equipment to accidental environmental disruptions. Machine guards are one important tool you can use to reduce these hazards and prevent members of your team from coming to harm.
Machine guarding isn’t just a good idea for your workplace. It’s a legal requirement for compliance with OSHA regulations. But depending on the nature of the work you do, it may not be easy or cost-effective to find machine guards that fit the equipment you use on a regular basis. In this kind of situation, you may need custom machine guards that are made to fit the tools you use and effective when it comes to offering protection for your team.
In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at how custom machine guards can help keep your workers safe, including how machine guards generally help prevent injuries and how custom guarding can make your specialized equipment safer to use.
Preventing workplace injuries
Amputations, burns, blindness, and more are among the types of serious injuries an industrial employee may experience at work. The risk of these types of injuries is never zero, but machine guards play a major role in preventing them, regardless of the type of machinery an employee is using. That’s why they’re required by OSHA to be implemented as a safeguard against any element of a machine that may cause physical injury upon contact.
OSHA’s requirements outline how and why machine guards should be implemented in the workplace, and it’s worth keeping them in mind when considering what kind of guarding to implement for the equipment your workplace typically relies on. A machine guard should:
- Prevent physical contact with the hazardous part of the machine during operation
- Be secure enough in place that workers can’t tamper with, remove, or bypass them
- Protect the machine’s user without creating new hazards
- Refrain from interfering with the machine’s operation
- Allow for the machine to be lubricated/oiled while the safeguard is in place
Protecting against injuries from specialized equipment
The benefits of machine guards in general may be clear, but it isn’t always necessarily as simple as getting the right guards for every hazardous element of the equipment at your work site.
Depending on the nature of what your business does, your work may include certain specialized pieces of equipment that are more difficult to obtain safeguards for. This not only makes compliance with OSHA regulations more difficult, but also makes your workplace more dangerous for your team.
Under these circumstances, the most beneficial course of action may be to obtain custom machine guards for your equipment. This may be easier when ordering these guards from a company capable of taking accurate measurements of the spaces where guards are needed through methods like 3D scanning.
Reducing hazardous machine malfunctions
The right guarding for your machines can do more than just prevent your workers from injuring themselves while using them. They may also prove helpful when it comes to mitigating environmental hazards in your workplace caused by other machines or elements present in proximity of one another.
Depending on what your work site looks like, environmental hazards could include anything from accidental spillage from a load hauled by an overhead crane above your machine to debris from other nearby operations accidentally coming into contact with the hazardous parts of a machine.
When you have the right guarding for your equipment, you can keep operating efficiently while preventing injuries to the workers that keep your business running. If you’d like to know more about the custom machine guards offered by Spartan Scanning Solutions, contact us now.
