It happens at every plant shutdown. Someone up top leaves a wrench on the platform deck, nudges it with a boot without noticing, and the wrench rolls to the edge. Below, another worker is bent over a pump. What separates that moment from an accident is a six-inch strip of flat bar: the toe board.
At Indumor we fabricate toe boards in flat bar or formed plate for new guardrails and to bring existing ones up to standard: straight, rolled for tanks and silos, and with corners and post crossings properly worked out.
Quote toe boardsMany guardrails are built halfway: top rail and midrail, and the deck edge left open. They protect the body of the person up top, but not whatever rolls across the deck, or a foot that slips under the midrail. How many platforms in your plant have a top rail and a midrail, but the edge of the deck in plain sight?
A bolt or a wrench dropped from several meters reaches the ground with more than enough energy to hurt someone, and during a shutdown there is always someone below. On grating decks, a slipping foot can also go over the edge. The toe board does not protect the person up top. It protects the person below.
A continuous toe board along every open edge, with the height and clearance the standards require: under OSHA 1910.29, at least 3.5 in high, with no more than 1/4 in of clearance above the deck, no openings over 1 in, and able to take 50 lb; under ISO 14122-3, 100 mm; under Argentina's Decree 911/96, against the deck and 15 cm at floor openings. We make it from flat bar or from plate formed into an L, which is stiffer, 4 to 6 in high and 3 to 4.75 mm thick; welded or bolted inside the posts, continuous at corners and rolled on curves. On grating platforms it is fixed to the edge structure, not to the grating. And where materials are stacked higher than the toe board, a mesh or plate panel goes up to the midrail.
More on the subject in safety guardrails: standards and dimensions and in what to demand from a platform. Toe boards are part of our industrial guardrails and platform guardrails.
If you can see the plant below between the deck and the midrail, the toe board is missing. Send us the linear feet and we will quote it. Or email tecnica@indumor.com.
© Indumor 2010–2026 — Industrial steel fabrication, Córdoba, Argentina
