The Risk Assessment Is the Buyer's Document

The assessment of how a machine may safely be used at a particular site belongs to the organisation that puts it to work. That is the employer, not the builder, and it has to be that way: the same welder is a different risk in a cell with a light curtain than it is beside an open gangway where a forklift passes twice a minute.

What the builder holds, however, is almost every input the assessment needs. When those inputs never arrive, the assessment gets written from a brochure, and the gaps are filled with assumptions that nobody checks until an inspector or an accident arrives.

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An enclosed automatic station on a customer line. By the time a machine looks like this, most of the decisions that protect the operator have already been made, and the buyer inherits them whether or not they are written down.

Who Owns Which Part

The division is simple in principle and blurred in practice. We design out what can be designed out, guard what cannot, and then tell the customer what remains: the residual risks, the limits of the machine, and the tasks that still require a person to reach into it. The customer takes that information, adds their own floor, their own people, their own shifts and their own maintenance habits, and produces the assessment.

The blurring happens because a machine that is perfectly acceptable in one plant is not acceptable in another, and both buyers hold the same manual. The manual cannot tell them which one they are.

What Only the Builder Knows

Some of the inputs exist nowhere except in our drawings. Where the stored energy is: the pneumatic cylinders under pressure with the air still connected, the capacitors in an inverter cabinet that hold a charge after the isolator is off, the springs in a fixture. Which direction the spatter leaves the weld, and how far. Which surfaces reach a temperature that will burn through a glove. What the machine does when the supply fails mid-cycle, and whether the head stays down or opens.

Then the numbers that no photograph can carry: the force at the electrode, the sound pressure at the operator position, the weight and the lifting points, the coolant and the greases in use. None of these are trade secrets and all of them are frequently missing from the documents that travel with a machine.

What a Buyer Should Refuse to Accept

A manual that describes the machine and says nothing about its limits is not a manual for this purpose. The things worth refusing delivery over are specific, and they are all things a builder either has or does not have.

A list of residual risks, written in sentences, not reflected in a single line about "following the instructions".
The safety functions and what each one stops, because an interlock whose behaviour is unknown cannot be assessed.
The maintenance tasks that require the guard to be open, and how the machine is to be isolated for each of them.
Measured values, not typical ones: force, sound pressure at the operator position, surface temperatures.
What the machine does on power loss, on air loss, and on an emergency stop during a cycle.

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A compact unit before delivery: emergency stop on the panel, warning label on the door, key switch below it. These are residual risks made visible, and they belong in the information the customer receives.

A Gap We Found in Our Own Paperwork

A customer's safety officer once asked us, in writing, how far spatter could travel from an open-jaw weld on 2 mm galvanised at the settings we had quoted. We had no number. We had a manual with a warning triangle and a sentence, and we spent a week getting the answer from tests that should have been run before the machine was designed.

The fix was not heroic. Every model now leaves with a one-page limits sheet: the residual risks, the measured figures, the stored-energy list, the isolation points, and a statement of what the machine is not intended for. It took a month to write the first one and it has been amended perhaps a dozen times since, which is roughly the rate at which we learn something we should have known.

The Three Ways It Usually Goes Wrong

The first is copying. A new machine arrives, an existing assessment is edited to say the new model number, and the differences that matter — a heavier head, a different guard, a faster cycle — are never revisited. The second is layout drift: the assessment is written for the position the machine was planned in, and by the second year a pallet stack has appeared beside it and the walkway has moved. The third is product change: the same machine starts running a heavier part or a coated one, the forces and the fumes change, and the document does not.

None of those are failures of the builder, and all three are easier to avoid when the information we supply is specific enough to be edited correctly. A manual that says "guard the working area" cannot be updated when the area changes. A limits sheet that says the ejection distance is 1.8 m at these settings can be.

Why This Matters Commercially

Buyers tend to treat this as paperwork that stands between them and a working line. In practice it is the part of the purchase that decides whether the machine can be installed at all: a plant that cannot complete the assessment cannot put the machine into service, and the delay is measured in weeks, not days.

What the assessment needs	Who holds it	If it is missing
Residual risks and their limits	Builder	Assessment written on assumptions
Stored energy and isolation points	Builder	Maintenance done unsafely, or not at all
Sound pressure at the operator	Builder, measured	Hearing protection by guesswork
Layout, traffic and task design	Buyer	Machine safe alone, unsafe in place
Training and supervision	Buyer	Guards defeated within a month

The document is the buyer's. The facts behind it are ours, and a supplier who cannot produce them is asking the customer to certify something they cannot see.

PDKJ continues to provide customized laser welding and resistance welding solutions based on different materials, workpiece structures, welding requirements, and production applications.

The Risk Assessment Is The Buyer's Document