Safety Guard Fabrication and Installation
Movable parts of machines can easily cause injuries in the workplace, for instance, amputations, crushed hands or fingers, blindness or even burns. This is where safe guards for machines come in to protect your employees from these likely injuries that can easily be prevented.
OSHA machine guarding safety requires that every function, component or process of machineries should be protected to prevent injuries. Control or elimination of hazards must occur whenever accidental contacts with machines or their operation brings about injury of nearby workers.
Machinery Parts for Safeguarding
Safeguarding is done on three major components of machines to prevent possible injuries as follows:
Moving Parts – all movable components of machines require safeguarding. These parts rotate, reciprocate or even transverse during machine operations hence can cut, pump, shear or bend any nearby objects or those that accidentally get into contact with movable parts.
Apparatus for Transmitting Power – machine components responsible for power transmission to energize working parts should also be safeguarded. They include pulleys, spindles, gears, belts, flywheels, couplings, chains, connecting rods, cams and cranks.
Operation Points of Machines – the actual machines operating points responsible for shaping, stock forming, cutting or boring should also be safeguarded to prevent injuries.
Types of Machine Safe Guards
There are four major types of machine safe guards worth knowing as follows:
Fixed Safe Guards – the effectiveness and simplicity of fixed guards explain why they’re the most popular. It takes considerable effort to remove installed fixed guards because they’re usually permanently attached to machinery or equipment. Fixed guards are normally used in covering band saws and power transmission components.
Adjustable Safe Guards – these are used to enable machines to cater to various sizes of materials while offering protection to operation points and blade portions not in use. Adjustable manually, these guards are typical use on band saw operation points.
Interlocked Safe Guards – these guards can either be removed or opened to provide access to the hazardous zones. For instance, when there’s need to access operation points to remove material, these guards are used. Machines automatically shut down whenever these kinds of guards are opened, effectively making the zone hazard-free.
Self-Adjusting Safe Guards – these guards work by moving away from operation points whenever machines receive new material, especially saws. The opening of these guards is just enough to enable the material being fed to get into the machine’s cutting zone. Therefore, all the blades remain covered, leading to reduced hazards.
Machines safety programs mainly comprise of safe guard installations. When coupled with machine safety knowledge and experience, your employees can enjoy working in safe environments free from injuries such as possible amputations.
Safe Guard Requirements
The best safe guards must meet the following minimum requirements to protect your workers from possible injuries:
- Safe guards must prevent movable parts of machines from getting into contact with or near body parts of your employees.
- Safe guards should prevent objects from falling into working machines’ movable parts as they can easily be thrown back at nearby workers, hence causing injuries.
- Safe guards should be secured or installed firmly onto their attaching surfaces or machines to prevent them from coming off. They should be durable to withstand the pressure of daily use by being made using high quality materials.
- Safe guards should ensure that employees are able to work comfortably and quickly without interference. This improves work efficiency because employees are confident of their working environment and safety measures in place to protect them from injury.
- Safe guards should not impair machine lubrication even after installation. Without accessing the hazardous area, employees need to find oil reservoirs fast to safely lubricate the points that need service.
- Safe guards should come in bolted or rolled designs without sharp, jagged, unfinished or shear edges to prevent the possibility of creating new hazards.
Machine guard fencing is applied in various industries, ranging from the construction, general and long-shoring industries to the agricultural and marine terminals industries based on particular industry standards.
Our Safe Guard Fabrication and Installation Services
We don’t work on any specific brands because our Safe guard solutions are built in-house to meet the varying needs of our customers. IMS, through safety guard steel fabricating, builds these protectors based on customer orders. Apart from running machinery in different industries, we understand that each of our customers have unique needs for safeguarding solutions. This is the reason we partner with our clients to provide them with safe guard fabrication and installation solutions that work for their unique businesses and needs for protecting the movable parts of machines.
Our Customers
We serve any manufacturing facility that has motors, pulleys, chains and sprockets, among other machines with movable parts. OSHA requires that manufacturing facilities place safety guards around motors, pulleys, chains, sprockets, etc. This is intended to protect workers who can easily lose their limbs, fingers, body parts, and in worst case scenarios, even life.
What Makes Our Safe Guard Fabrication and Installation Services Unique
Our safeguarding solutions are unique from the competition because we offer full service, including fabrication, installation, modification and repair of safe guards. We also sell sage guard parts in-house, so we’re truly a one-stop-shop for all your industrial machine safety needs. Moreover, we’ve got extensive experience in fabricating and installing safe guard.
We custom-design machine guards OSHA to satisfy our customers’ requirements for machine protection, leading to reduced cases of injuries. We can keep guards small in size and easy to remove for maintenance and repair purposes. We also strive to keep our guards visually appealing.
Why the Need for Our Safeguarding Solutions
Facilities often need guards after OSHA has visited their premises. They might face fines if they don’t get guards installed. Obviously, facilities also install safety guards to protect their people. This is where IMS comes in to ensure that we don’t just fabricate custom safety guards for your specific needs and area of application, but install them to protect your employees from preventable injuries.
Since our safeguarding solutions meet OSHA regulations, your guards get to be OSHA-compliant.
Why Our Safeguarding Solutions are Trusted
We know the OSHA rules and regulations, ensuring that our services don’t just meet, but surpass them for the best outcomes. What’s more, we’ve installed a lot of safe guards in different industries where our customers run large to small machines with movable parts. We care about the aesthetics of our safety guards and also pay attention to ease of removal and re-installation. We build our safety guards with a high degree of craftsmanship.
All our industrial safe guard fabrications, installations, repairs, modifications or replacement services are tested to ensure they meet factory specifications and industry standards before we leave a job. We have more than 60 years of combined experience working on production line machinery and hydraulic systems. This has earned us a good reputation as a trustworthy company.
Moreover, many of our customers have been working with us since IMS was originally started in 1994. We believe this is a testament to the quality and dependability of the service that we provide. This has seen our customers return for the same services, giving us repeat business.
Why Choose Us
This service is unique from the competition because we offer unmatched timely machine guard fencing fabrication, installations, repairs, modifications and replacement services accompanied with exceptional customer service and after-services. It’s our quality services, industry experience worth decades, an experienced team of machine safeguarding experts and a pool of state-of-the-art modern equipment, machinery and parts that set us apart from our competition.
We can partner and work together long-term to ensure that your safe guards work effectively and in case of damages, get the wrecked components replaced as soon as possible, or get your new plant’s entire machine safety guards installed and working. We assure you of quality services to meet your needs and great outcomes to keep you happy. After all, your happiness is our happiness and so is your success.
As such, your needs and happiness comes first. Therefore, we do what’s within our powers to provide safeguarding solutions tailored to meet your unique needs. We are here for you.
We offer full service, including fabrication, repair, installation, replacement and modification of your safe guards. We do industrial safe guard installations in-house, so we we’re truly a one-stop-shop for all your safeguarding needs.
We are your local machine guard and cover company.
Call IMS today to discuss your industrial needs for machine safe guards.
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