Do ANSI B11 Standards Apply to Woodworking Equipment?

ANSI Standard B11 was created to apply to machine tools, not woodworking machinery. But an argument could be made for a broader application of the rules. October 26, 2011

Question
I received a note the other day from Weinig about the new ANSI B11 standards relating to tooling, set up, etc. Does anyone know of a good site to view a list of these standards relating to the moulding/woodworking industry? A quick web search show most sites trying to sell books on the subject, 95% of which probably have no relevance to us.

Forum Responses
(Solid Wood Machining Forum)
From contributor E:
Doesn't seem like any really new changes via OSHA's websites. Perhaps the machine vendor was reminding you of newer machine guarding upgrades available to retrofit your particular machine(s).

---

From contributor R:
The latest B11 standard was first called B11 GSR, where GSR means "General Safety Requirements". This standard has been revised and re-titled as B11.0, since all the other B11 standards are B11.1, .2, .

The B 11 Standards were under AMT (Association for Manufacturing Technologies) which limited their subject coverage to Machine Tools since this was the purpose / coverage of AMT. In January 2010, AMT announced that they were getting our of the standards development business and they spun off the B11 standards to a new company. The new company is B11 Standards, Inc and it is run by Dave Felinski who was AMT's Standards Director. Now, under B 11 Standards Inc, the push is to have B11 standards apply to ALL machines, as this is the scope of B11 (from ANSI).

So it could be argued that many B11 standards apply to woodworking equipment. It is just as likely to be argued the other way since so far all B11 standards have been developed while under AMT's umbrella and AMT specifically limited scope to machine tools. More importantly, one could argue that the standards were developed with limited, if any, input from the woodworking industry. However the counter to this is that the standards were developed in an open manner and "woe to those who made the decision not to participate". Arguments are never pleasant.

But, if there is a SDO (Standards Development Organization) that has the scope (from ANSI) of standards for wood-working machinery and they have developed safety standards that would (no pun) negate the use of B11 standards, then these standards would apply and B11 standards would not apply. The arguments could still happen if there are B11 standards for which there is no equivalent coverage from the woodworking SDO. But again, when it comes to arguments, there is no clear and succinct answer.