Hello, Me and my colleagues are trying to "convince" a machinery supplier that in order to achieve "not easy to defeat" fixed guards or interlocks, the tool required to fix/remove the guards must be "special", not an ordinary spanner, etc. The problem is that in every piece of legislation that I have read like PUWER, Machinery Directive 2006, ISO 14120, ISO 14119, etc. it is mentioned just tool or tools, but not special. If anyone has more information or advise, please share with me. Thank you in advance.

Thank you, but I can not find BS PD5304. Can you be more specific. Thank you.

No I think he does mean PD5304 availible from BSI. It changed from a BS to PD.

Correct the BS book on machinery safety is now PD5304 Just Google, it comes up easy enough. It was a British Standard but got down graded a few years ago.

Just include the requirement into the specification/contract for the supply of the machine.

walker, couldn't agree more. If I ware to secure guards to every drill/grinder/etc. with "special" tools, most of my work would boil down to looking for suppliers of special screws and dedicated screwdrivers ;)

I have managed to defeat every safety interlock & device that I have ever needed to. I doubt very much that a safety interlock exists commercially that I can't defeat. The "tool" thing is a bit, of a red herring. A coin is not a tool. A Torx key, is a tool A tamper proof Torx key is a more secure tool. Now if you are in an office environment where you have a machine used by users who are not "engineeringly" skilled, then simple hex head screws, slotted, pozi & philips would defeat their attempts to remove them at a basic level. If you are in engineering, say an automotive manufacturing plant, they will have almost all kinds of driver bit on site, they will probably use a lot of them on their production lines. So, how far do you go, you can get bespoke fasteners made which have unique heads, and, you can patent the tool to remove them. Great, now the interlock is securely fixed. I bet I can still remove it & defeat it. Your next issue, is as safetydude1 has said, you have to provide any special tools with the machine. So if you affix the interlocks with patented fasteners, you have to provide the tool to remove the fasteners with the machine, & make if commercially available. Unless you can PROVE that it is not safe for ANYONE to remove the fastener, good luck with that. You just need to apply common sense, and good sound engineering practice, then ensure that you have good procedures in place to reinforce this. If anyone wants to take me up on the defeating interlocks challenge, then I’ll do it for free if I can’t, if I can, then you have to pay up in full. (As per all the best adverts, terms & conditions apply!) ;)

Locked doors only keep out the honest man. Even patented specialist interlock key systems can be over ridden is someone has acquired duplicates - been there to see it and by good grace no fatality or injury resulting from such poor/illegal practice.

Roundtuit Not necessarily illegal, it depends on why the interlocks are being defeated. I wrote another missive in response to Ian's post, but once again this site ate it and threw an error, and I couldn't be bothered to re-do it because IOSH can't sort their software out. So it's gone into the ether never to be recovered. It's about time this site was sorted properly.