Industrial Safety, Maintenance and Workshop Practice
Industrial Safety, Maintenance and Workshop Practice
The exam tests hazard recognition, correct fire-fighting choice, maintenance types and safe bench-work calculations.
Safety essentials
- PPE: goggles for grinding and chipping, face shield, safety shoes, helmet, ear protection; gloves must never be worn near a rotating chuck or drill spindle.
- Machine guarding: no loose clothing or jewellery, never measure a job while it rotates, clear swarf with a brush and never with the hand.
- Fire triangle: fuel, oxygen, heat. Class A (wood, paper) - water or foam; Class B (oil, petrol) - foam, CO₂ or dry powder, never water; Class C (gas) - dry powder; electrical fires - CO₂ or dry powder only; Class D (metals) - special dry powder.
- Hot work permit, welding screens against arc flash, fume extraction, earthing, and no oil or grease near oxygen cylinders.
Maintenance
Breakdown (after failure), preventive (scheduled), predictive (condition monitoring by vibration or oil analysis) and corrective maintenance. Correct lubrication reduces friction and wear, but the wrong grade or over-greasing causes failures too.
Worked example
You must tap an M10 × 1.5 thread. Tap drill size = major diameter − pitch = 10 − 1.5 = 8.5 mm. This leaves roughly 75 % thread engagement; drilling 9.5 mm would leave too little metal and the thread would strip under load.
Traps
- Using water on an electrical or oil fire.
- Wearing gloves or loose sleeves at a rotating spindle.
- Assuming CO₂ suits every fire class.
- Reusing a coarse-thread tap drill size for a fine-pitch thread without recalculating.
- Treating lubrication as a substitute for scheduled inspection.