EUMABOIS has always considered safety of the utmost importance: so, while promoting the woodworking machines manufactured in Europe also as those able to assure the highest level of safety and protection to the operators, we help our manufacturers in reaching this goal.

For this reason, we actively support the standardization works on woodworking machines safety, by funding the secretaries of the relevant Technical Committee (“TC”) and Subcommittee (“SC”):
CEN TC142 at European level,
ISO TC39 SC4 at global level (parent TC39 on machine-tools).

In more than 20 years CEN TC142 developed and edited 31 European standards (“EN”) for woodworking machines and tools and kept them updated.
EN standards are recognized in the European Union plus Norway, Switzerland and Turkey, and give presumption of conformity to the Machinery Directive 2006/42/CE, the European law on safety of machinery. This led to an increased safety level of the machines and to uniform the European market.

Nevertheless, out of EU, local norms may require different solutions, which implies modifications to the machines, or local inspectors at installation may require so, which is even worse, since variable by case and not knowable in advance. Then, unifying all world safety standards, in order to uniform the global market, would be of great benefit to all machine manufacturers.
For this reason, SC4 was reactivated with focus on safety in 2012 and, since then, EN standards are being transferred to ISO, with the additional contribution of all other local standards on the matter, so that they can be acknowledged worldwide, and machines can be exported more easily.

Hence, most of standardization work is now going on at ISO level, under SC4. However, the products are published by both CEN and ISO as “EN-ISO” standards, thanks to an agreement with this purpose between the two bodies, which we wanted to apply to the works in our sector too. As a consequence, only one global version exists for all documents with no regional difference in EU, in line with our goal of unification.

The Working Groups still active in CEN TC142 only are those on tools and on “CADES” (Chips And Dust Extraction Systems).

From 2012 to 2021, SC4 developed and published as many as 21 standards (3 of which at 2nd edition). This is a very good result considering that the process takes about 3 years for each draft, and also in comparison with other sectors.