May 2026 Volume 8

SAFETY

AUTOMATION IS REWRITING THE SAFETY PLAYBOOK IN FORGING By Katrina Geenevasen

T he worker wasn’t doing anything unusual. He was clearing scrap steel from a hot trim press chute at a press shop in Tennessee when he accidentally stepped on a foot pedal. The press completed a full revolution, and four fingers were amputated. 1 It is the kind of accident that safety leaders know too well. Not bizarre. Not cinematic. Not the result of some unbelievable chain of events. Just a worker, a routine task, a hazardous zone, and a machine that still allowed human exposure where no human exposure should have been required. And it is not an outlier. It is a reflection of how forging processes still operate, where critical steps routinely place people in close proximity to heat, force and moving equipment. In forging, many of the highest-severity risks still cluster around predictable moments: loading, clearing, trimming, die changes, and material transfer. The lesson is uncomfortable but increasingly hard to ignore. In a modern forging plant, safety cannot depend only on rules, awareness and perfect behavior. It has to be designed into the process. And more and more, that means automation. Forging Has Always Been a High-Risk Environment Forging is, by design, a high-exposure process. It concentrates heat, force and motion in ways few other manufacturing operations do, and the injury data reflects it. The pattern is difficult to ignore. In the U.S., the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024 data showed forging and stamping had a total recordable injury and illness rate of 4.6 cases per 100 full‑time workers, versus 3.2 for fabricated metal products overall. 2 That gap is not new. Early forging environments relied heavily on manual billet handling, mechanical hammers and direct operator interaction with tooling. Even as presses became more advanced and controls more precise, many of the fundamental process steps, such as loading, positioning, trimming and transferring, continued to depend on human proximity to the operation. Today’s facilities are much more sophisticated, but the core conditions remain far too familiar in many of today’s manufacturing facilities. High temperatures, heavy loads and rapid mechanical motion still occur within close proximity of operators. Even in well-run facilities, forging work often involves repetitive handling of hot material, manual positioning of parts, and interaction with powerful equipment. Over time, the same categories of injury have appeared consistently in incident data: • crush injuries from press or die interaction • burns from hot billets or forged parts

• struck-by incidents from material movement • hand injuries during loading or part repositioning • musculoskeletal injuries from repetitive handling

While overall manufacturing safety has clearly improved since the late twentieth century, forging operations still present inherent hazards simply because of the physical nature of the work. What has changed in recent years is not the presence of risk, but how manufacturers are beginning to approach it.

Exclusively engineered for safety, this fully autonomous press designed and built by Macrodyne Technologies can forge up to 180 different products, handling a wide range of billet shapes and sizes automatically. Advanced robotics manage heating, quick‑change tooling and part handling with no operator required. It’s the ultimate example of smart automation. When Safety Depends on Perfect Human Behavior Traditional forging safety strategies have relied heavily on procedures. Operators are trained to follow specific sequences. Guards and interlocks are installed around press areas. Lockout and tagout procedures protect workers during maintenance and die changes. Personal protective equipment helps mitigate exposure to heat and debris. These measures are essential and have undoubtedly prevented many accidents. But they share a common limitation: they rely on human behavior remaining perfect in environments where production pressure, fatigue and routine familiarity are constant factors. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health backs this up. It notes that severe injuries and fatalities still occur when lockout/tagout steps are skipped or not followed fully, underscoring the dependence of these measures on consistent human behavior. 3 Safety‑culture research highlights production pressure as a major threat. 4 When schedules, throughput, or budget targets are

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