By Michael Springer

Last December, I met with some influential tool manufacturers in Germany and Liechtenstein, manufacturers whose tools we often cover in this magazine, to see new tools that were headed to the U.S. and to look at ones that will remain absent from our market for a long time to come, perhaps forever. I also wanted to find out about the more-stringent European Union (EU) worker safety and environmental protection laws currently in place. My theory is that such regulations will find their way to the U.S. workplace, and with many of the tools we use currently being designed and even made in the EU, I was getting a glimpse into our own tools’ future. ANSI did pass a new voluntary vibration standard here last year but it does not carry the weight of law–yet. At the Builders’ Show in February, I saw manufacturers attributing new design elements to this growing influence.

The different standards to which EU tools are designed are based on directives that limit workers’ exposure to vibration, noise, and dust. Employers are responsible for limiting exposure on the job and they buy tools with this in mind. Manufacturers themselves are not required to design tools to a certain standard typically but if their concrete breaker delivers excessive user vibration, an employee may be legally limited to using that tool less than an hour a day. Such a tool is not a good proposition for the employer and probably will not sell well in that market.

Environmental laws that require manufacturers to be responsible for the eventual disposal and recycling of all parts of the tool dictate much of its internal component design and add about a dollar per pound for every tool sold. A restriction that is outlawing the use of cadmium in EU products is an instrumental factor in the push for lithium-ion battery development worldwide. Nicad batteries will soon be a thing of the past over there–imagine the change if that happens here.

Highlights of my trip included running Hilti’s largest new hammers and recip saws at its new headquarters in the beautiful Alps, meeting with influential designers and a national safety regulatory committee chairman at A&M (AEG and Milwaukee), being the first journalist to see and spend time inside the state-of-the-art mechanized tool-testing labs at Metabo, making chips fly with the latest high-tech gas chainsaws at Stihl, and touring the facilities and meeting with the designers and officers of the of the high-end Festool woodworking tools division. While there, I was introduced to and trained on their revolutionary new wood-joining tool called the Domino, which is coming to the U.S. this spring. Watch for a review soon in our FirstTest section.