Risk Management

As anyone who has worked for a company or organisation of any size in the modern era will know, Health & Safety looms large and holds sway. This is no bad thing in and of itself - working practices in foundries were pretty much a guarantee of personal injury well into the twentieth century: some of the stories the old man told me were exceedingly hairy to say the least, often the youngest members of the workforce being employed to perform some of the most hazardous tasks on the grounds of speed and agility.

One tale of Dad's springs to mind: the unfortunate school-leaver (between twelve and fourteen years of age) working in a strip-rolling mill whose job it was to catch the end of the strip of hot steel as it emerged from the last of the rollers and engage it with a revolving capstan to coil the thing up. Bear in mind that by the time the initially slowly progressing billet emerged from the final reduction rollers, it would have been moving at thirty miles per hour and more than cherry-red-hot: one slip and the consequences would be too horrific to contemplate. Fourteen-year-old armed only with iron tongs and no PPE versus high-speed hot metal.

Which brings me to a point of sorts. Although working practices such as these should never, ever see the light of day again; we do seem in the last couple of decades to have crossed a risk management rubicon of some sorts. When my son was in secondary school (high school to you modern types), the only engineering/crafting taught was the laughingly named Craft, Design & Technology; CDT for short. This consisted in keeping our children as far away from sharp, moving or hot things as possible and hence teaching them bugger-all about the use of tools: a woeful state of affairs that, knowing myself well, I've referred to before, I'm sure.

I've had conversation via email recently with my old school friend Phil Edwards about metalwork teaching in our school back in the 1960's. We both attended what was intended and designed to be a Technical School - a school to produce engineers - and we both have fond memories of our metalwork classes in particular. In these classes we learned the full gamut of engineering practice, using everything from basic hand tools to forging, brazing, soldering, lathe & milling work and so on: all involving hot sharp things or rapidly moving and potentially dangerous machinery.

Our first lessons were essentially basic safety and setting out, hand-filing and tinplate work, gradually progressing to more sophisticated processes in a natural progression, as in an apprenticeship. I was reminded today of one process that we were taught and carried out in one of the two very well equipped engineering shops at school. I've been sorting through - as I think I've mentioned - Dad's collection of Model Engineer magazines, culling useful articles from their annals. This afternoon, I came across an article - aimed at schools - on case-hardening.

This process adds extra carbon to the surface of machined steel to add wear resistance, and consists in it's simplest form of coating the surface to be hardened with a paste flux, then ground Potassium Ferrocyanide, heating the piece to cherry-red and then quenching in cold water. I remember the afternoon we were taught this in Mr. George's workshop. The principal safety instruction was 'Make sure you don't breathe in the fumes, lads - not good for you...' I somehow think that might not pass muster these days. 

But the point is, none of us died or were seriously injured - even minor injuries were very rare, such was the quality of the teaching, and most of us have had the benefit of a lifetime of being unafraid of using machine tools and indeed enjoying the [now] luxury of knowing how to learn to use new and unfamiliar tools and techniques because of the basic training that we got in school. I just hope that we can at least get back some perspective on the risk management side of things needed to effect this much-needed style of education. Without basic engineering skills and knowledge, the world as we know it would grind to a resounding halt with no-one left to repair/remake/remodel the machines we now rely on, should they all cease to function.