Show your true colours

What is your favourite colour? Perhaps baby blue, lemon or jungle green?

Or maybe light purple? Light purple is really not my favourite colour – yet, I have a mesh panel in my office in that colour as decoration on my wall. I once asked production for “a panel in any cool colour” and was promised to get one next time we changed the colour in our paint line. And a light purple machine guarding mesh panel was what I got. We did this special colour paint for a customer request and I sometimes wonder what their factory looks like…..

At Troax, we have quite recently had the inauguration of our new paint line, increasing our focus on both standard and custom colours. The past years we have seen an increase in sales of our products painted in various colours and this is mainly for the machine guarding solutions. I haven’t done any in-depth research on the topic, but I believe the reason for this is that more design engineers and marketing personnel are getting involved when new production lines are being planned within factories. Many companies today have their own corporate colour scheme, and incorporating this into the machine guarding can make their premises “breathe” the company branding. Along with increased investments in automated production lines that anyone would like to show off, we get to sell more and more machine guarding in “cool” colours.

The power of colours

But “favourite” or “cool” colours – would you like to see them in your working environment every day? How does colour affect you? Do they affect how you feel? Can colours be used to increase worker productivity? In researching this topic I’ve found some interesting articles on the web, but how colours affect us does not seem to be scientifically proven. An interesting study could be to find out if colour can be used to increase workplace safety? Take, for example, the colour red - used universally for emergency stop buttons, placed on a yellow background - is well known and described in the text of the ISO standard 14119. It was stated in one of the articles by Verywell that "More recently, researchers discovered that the colour red causes people to react with greater speed and force, something that might prove useful during athletic activities." … and maybe also for emergency situations? Like if all the doors in a machine guarding cell were coloured red, you could easily locate them;

...it could mean a person would react with greater speed, and subsequently getting out quicker in an emergency situation.

Wouldn’t that be great?!

But still, this is just an assumption and not scientifically proven.

What's the purpose of the colour?

As product manager for Troax’s machine guarding segment, my job is to make sure that we offer the variety of products necessary to fulfil our customers’ requirements for safeguarding machinery and automated processes. You can choose our mesh-, pc-, or steel sheet panels along with the posts and then decide to get them in any colour you prefer. 

At Troax, our preferred colours are in grey scale - it might sound boring, but there is a reason behind it. Looking at the recommendations in the ISO Standard 14120, in paragraph 5.22 it’s stated that “guards shouldn’t be painted in bright colours that might interfere with the viewing of the process”. A grey machine guard is easy to see through and will allow for safe viewing, and therefore we promote grey as the “best practice” colour to choose for your machine guarding applications.

All Troax machine guarding panels and posts are kept in stock in grey (RAL7037) and black (RAL9005) for fast delivery, and we also offer the combination with yellow posts in (RAL 1018). With the new paint line, we are able to reduce the lead time for other colours as well, but orders for special colours are always painted upon customer requests so delivery lead time will be slightly longer than for standard colours.

Standard, corporate colour scheme, or favourite colour - it’s up to you to decide. With our new coating plant, we are well equipped to paint your order in any RAL colour you request. And, if you are in the neighbourhood, give me a call and I’d be happy to show it off for you. We are very proud of our new paint plant!

The next blog post will be just before Christmas, December 22!

Most welcome to join our blog!