Elf n Safety police

Readers all.

I may have mentioned before I am a union H&S rep not in the engineering trades but I subscribe to the HSE website, WHY I hear you cry but I like to keep up to speed and if you like make sure my colleagues and employer does also.

In this weeks digest from the great thinking ones I offer this pertinent to our hobby and lets be honest most of us me included live by the tenet do as I say and don't look at what I am doing.. In fact go put the kettle on.

I am sure the screams will rise and blood presures pressures with the mention of ELF and safety, but fellow model engineers and swarf makers like myself consider this. Most of the time we are lone working, and at best there maybe someone close by that should an accident happen will be able to help but a lot of the time we are down the workshop alone. so may I ask you all take as long to think about WHAT IF as you do about the job in hand.

Many thanks for reading my cod's wallop happy machining.

Martin

http://www.hse.gov.uk/engineering/lathes.htm?ebul=hsegen&cr=1/12-oct-15

I'm sure many h&s dudes have good intentions but over-interpretation of the rules by councils is doing more to de-skill this society than the luddites ever achieved

I only know 3 garages for instance and not one is training any new apprentices because of the council clergy and their biblical interpretations of the rules

Society always swings in cycles and eventually there will be a dissolution of the monastries job on our councils so that the little guy, and ordinary society, can get ahead again

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: The more things change, the more they stay the same

The problem isn't religion, or politics, it's genetics... it's darwinism, they can't help themselves

They have to run things, even if they're idiots with no grasp on reality, and the richer your society becomes, the more overpaid fools your society can afford, they flock to the free money and the fabulous early retirement pensions

Two world wars created a couple of serious speedbumps in this process but currently we're back to the same-old same-old.

Some amazing parallels with 1930s Britain are currently emerging, foodbanks, homelessness, crummy job prospects, everybody renting from private landlords etc etc and the BBC telling us all how fabulous everything is lol

Poor training is a major issue nowadays.

In the old days you had to work your way up from the bottom, the ground up, you earned your advancement

Nowadays you stumble out of university with a degree in politics clutched in one hand and get offered a job doing something you've had nothing to do with

Edited By Ady1 on 25/10/2015 14:00:16

That link is a fantastic example of not understanding the process of using emery cloth on a lathe.

A little trick that can be tried to see why. A very high class finish is required with say the same accuracy as boring. Fix some emery cloth to a boring bar so it's firmly in contact and well aligned with the bore and use it just as you would a boring bar but with extremely light cuts. 2 things become apparent. The cloth wears out very rapidly due to more or less point contact along a line and it will also clog up. The same thing can be done to external diameters.

Curiously extremely coarse emery cloth tends to be more effective as it forms a multi point cutting tool in the same fashion as a grinding wheel does. One supplier of the stuff looked into producing a sort of cassette so that "new cutting points" could be obtained at the press of a button.

John

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Edited By John W1 on 25/10/2015 16:19:14

Edited By John W1 on 25/10/2015 16:19:40

For some reason many people seem to think that the old way of doing things which involved hundreds of people being killed or maimed at work every year was a golden age. I don't. Unless doing work paid for by a council, they have no authority to impose Health and Safety procedures on private industry, although they do seem to employ some jobswoths who think they do. All that is required under HSE legislation is that you consider what might go wrong, how likely is it, how badly would you get hurt, and then take action to reduce unacceptable risks. It's not rocket science, and having done that you can tell any interfering busybody to take a running jump. Even the much promoted PAT testing is not a legal requirement, all that is required is that you have procedures in place to ensure the safety of portable electrical equipment. If you have another way and someone competent to do it get on with it.

If you think Health and Safety is expensive, try having an accident. and someone getting hurt. There is an unfortunate tendency to use H&S as an excuse for inaction.

Edited By duncan webster on 25/10/2015 16:44:56

The biggest hazard they would find in my workshop is the door step. Stepping over it would exponentially increase their chances (risk) of a confrontation!

Mark

Edited By Mark C on 25/10/2015 16:54:18

I agree with Ady on this issue of health and safety.I was a small builder and was happy to train apprentices.I always insisted that they followed my advice and used common sense as I was trained to do 54 years ago.They have all survived without an incident.I was working in a kitchen with an apprentice when the college supervisor arrived to assess him on the job.I was told that he must wear a hard hat and a viz jacket in the kitchen and that I must display a notice on the kitchen door stating that this was a building site.Lunacy.To pass his modules I was to take photographs of him wheeling a barrow ,posing on various tasks to meet the targets set.Lunacy.No wonder the trades are diluted as they are .There is no longer a decent appreniceship in any industry to be had .Why does one need an apprenticeship to be a shop assistant,nonesense.Like the interpretation of health and safety.Common sense is needed.

Frank

Interested in Duncan's comments above. Coincidently I had reason yesterday to look up the single person lift limit because some 25 years ago it was drummed into us where I worked that one of our products was just under and the other just over the limit, but I can't remember what that figure was. Much surprised to find there is no limit in the regulations - so it must have been the company interpretation. Still not sure, but think it was set at 20kg which is about what a 1ATR box of electronics comes to.

Frank,

I have an apprentice at the moment and on Thursday last week he asked me to take a picture of him cutting a hole in a piece of Perspex, later on he looked at the picture and said I cant put that into my work book.

He was not wearing, goggles, gloves, glasses and hi Vis, he was being supervised by me and I had carried out a mental risk assessment so could see no problem.

Martin P

I and my fellow service engineers have to do manual handling courses regularly, we approach the box, kick it to determine the weight, step up to the box with feet slightly apart, bend the knees and go down to pick up the box, the problem I have is that as a man who is in his sixties getting back up is bad enough but with a box of paper is becoming almost impossible

Martin P

We didn't seem to have all these problems until ambulance chasing became big business in the UK.

Is it my imagination or does daytime TV appear awash with compensation adverts?

Gordon.

I'm of the opinion that companies like mine are covering their posteriors by putting us on courses, which we have to sign to say we attended, so that should one of us have an accident they can say we were trained. Five months ago I returned to work after eight months on the sick with a condition called charcot foot, before I was allowed back to work my consultant had to fill in a ten page questionnaire asking what I could or could not do not to make my working day easier but to make sure they were covered in the event of me having re occurring problems, which I must add is likely.

Martin P

Matin B - thanks for that link. I hope we all know the hazards of using emery cloth on the lathe (not to mention what the dust does for the bed!). I've forwarded this link to the guys at work for there use as a reminder. You right elf & safety does get a bad press but there are more people going home from work without injury these days.

John

Martin,

It's always useful to raise awareness of these matters ... Thanks.

I would, however, just mention that the 'emery' problem has been discussed at some length on this recent thread.

Please note that I intend no criticism !! ... I am simply wondering if we should have some better way of flagging H&S matters on the forum.

MichaelG.

[wearing suitable PPE, in anticipation of 'flak' from the "forum ain't broke" brigade]

No matter how much training, legislation and safety measures are introduced there's always one clever numpty who will beat the system. There will always be the correct and the four and a half pint way of doing things (and always has been), sadly, common sense has given way to the "multiple choice" answer. Started going wrong when practical lessons at school gave way to theoretical subjects.

Regards Ian.

Sadly, Common Sense is no longer that common, anymore.

Ticking boxes, is the easy way out, since that is so much less effort than thinking about what is being , or going to be done.

Thank God that , as long as we remain careful, as non commercial operators, we are exempt from the whims of the untrained or unthinking "experts".

The danger to our hobby are those who do not think, are careless, and involve themselves in needless serious accidents. being realistic, we all, from time to time, take risks ( of which we are aware) and suffer minor injuries.

Minor, because, in the general scheme of things, we are pretty careful. Lets keep it that way!

Howard

As we are on about Health and Safety again, I will repeat a tale told to me by a friend who used to be a fireman.

One day the new health and safety officer visited the station where my friend was working. He had with him some "warning wet floor" signs which were to be used when the garage floor had been mopped. A few days later the station had a "shout" and during the rush to man the fire appliance, one of the crew tripped over one of these signs and broke his wrist.

A lot of the problems nowadays are policy-propaganda issues as they try to manage society in the same way that the USSR used to do with its own captive audiences (populations)

Us old dudes tend to spot the anomalies because we've been around for so long

A favourite of mine is the arctic being ice-free by 2013

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

This was trumpeted out in 2007 on the front page by the BBC because it fitted the current government propaganda policy, the guy who wrote the paper probably put it together as a worst case scenario if a whole bunch of highly unlikely events occurred.

I can't find it now but a while later the same BBC science web homepage reported that Russia was undertaking a huge expansion of its arctic icebreaker fleet... (maybe the Russians don't read BBC websites)

The bottom line is that there is a huge gulf between official policy and the reality on the ground and as long as government officials(or quasi-government officials) get paid good money to peddle fluff and nonsense instead of basic common sense we will always be blighted by this phenomenon

The biggest problem is that once a government guy has sorted something... then he's out of a job

Unless he makes it incredibly complicated and breaks it so it needs fixed again then he's on a sticky wicket as far as his long term job prospects are concerned

Any government guy who actually fixes something properly commits job-suicide

Edited By Ady1 on 26/10/2015 11:46:56

Like Martin, I have some experience of H&S (as in sixteen years serving on a health and safety committee and our work included agricultural and forestry operations (that kill far more people than engineering each year).

One aspect of this is you hear a lot of horror stories. I can also say that actually putting good H&S practice in place never caused us any problems, and we had work going on from chainsaws and earthmoving equipment to kids using fire and knives. In sixteen years two notable accidents - one broken ankle caused by a poorly proportioned step and one claim for a bad back caused by falling into a skip. In the latter case a claim was thrown out because our 'needless' H&S paperwork showed that an RA had been carried out and safety talk given that specifically warned against doing what the claimant had done.

Most of the complaints about H&S come from people who have been subjected to the attentions of nitpickers who over-interpret the 'rules' or invent new 'rules' to suit themselves. The classic one is issuing everyone with hi-vis jackets rather than keeping people out of high-risk areas.

Neil