A safe and healthy workplace is a productive one that is good for workers and employers. It’s the one way to protect your greatest resource - your people. By simply choosing machine tool peripherals designed with worker health and safety in mind, you can show your commitment towards your employees’ wellbeing and ensure the best workplace for them.
Here are four examples:
- Improve air quality: CNC machines emit coolant mist and smoke into your factory’s atmosphere, which means your machine operators inhale large amounts of these vapors every shift. This can lead to respiratory problems that require medical attention. The solution is to install mist collectors capable of filtering out oil/coolant mist, smoke and other fine aerosols and particulates. The best of these exceed OSHA and NIOSH requirements and, with a final stage HEPA filter, remove 99.97% of contaminants.
- Eliminate waste oil: Contaminated cutting fluids potentially breed harmful bacteria that can cause respiratory problems and skin irritation. A waste oil removal system removes waste oil droplets as small as 20 microns from machine coolant, returning fluid that is 99% free of contaminated oil to the machine sump. As a result, workers are healthier and their performance improved, and the filtered tramp oil can be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner.
- Take a load off: Lifting and manually loading 2 or 4 meters bar stock is not only fatiguing, it’s time-consuming and exposes workers to potential physical injury. An automatic bar feeder is far easier on the machine operator’s body and reduces labor costs while improving throughput and part quality. In the same way a vacuum unloader eliminates the need for an operator to manually remove finished parts.
- Keep out of harm’s way: Sticking your hand into a pile of metal chips and razor-sharp bird’s nests to clear out a blockage is a good way to earn a trip to the emergency. An efficient chip conveyor should keep these bottlenecks from happening and have your machine-tool operate at peak efficiency.