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>The idea of legislating for scuba cylinder >valves with external (exposed) threads is >a piece of fuckwittery. Who at CEN pushes >this shit. And can we push back? > >Do you have an email address for CEN? > >rgrds billyW I think it is time to explain how the European standards are put together. The idea of European norms (EN) is to have a common standard in the EU and EES, to allow for free trade between the countries. The laws in the member states are to follow the directives taken by the comission. These are in many cases very general and need futher work to be used as guidelines for design of a product. This is where the EN's are useful. EN's are published by CEN. CEN is an organisation controlled by its members, the national standardisation organisations such as SIS in Sweden, BSI in the UK and DIN in Germany. The national standardisation organisations are controlled by its members through committees. For each field of standardisation a committee is formed by interested parties, such as governement agiencies, manufacturers and usergroups. The committee members pay a fee to sustain the secritariat and the CEN. Committees are formed in countries with interest in the field, and they send representatives to the relevant CEN committee. The work on an EN starts with a proposal from a member country and then interested countries join. The work then continues on the national level an each country expresses an opinion about the proposal. The secritariat then rewrites the proposal and a new round is started. The secritariat is usually run by the national standardisation organisation that initiated the work. After several rounds the standard is voted and ratified as a EN. Sometimes a preliminary norm prEN is issued when the work is timeconsuming, and the memberstates needs a guideline. Most products sold on the European market needs to be "CE"-marked. This is the manufacturers way of indicating that the product is made in accordance with the relevant EU directives. The normal way to do this is to use EN's. For diving equipment the EN250 is the norm for SCUBA sets. There are norms for BCD's and snorkels in the pipeline. Some of these norms, such as EN250, demands testing by a third partie, where as others are guidelines. How do we get our opinions heard? The only way to do this is to get the diving organisations as members in the relevant national standardisation commities. In Sweden both the National diving federation, and the commercial dive educators are reprecented in the commities. When the standardisation moves on to technical diving the technical comunity must get its own representatives in the system. Otherwise the manufacturers can set the standars and whats good for them is not always good for us. To answer the question, find your national standardisation organisation and ask them of the names on the committee dealing with standards regarding divning equipment. This system is not foolproof. The committee set up to find a common European 230V plug failed, so we will have to continue with different systems. I hope this gives you some idea of how EN's are written. Regards /Sten PS: I have heard that DEMA (the US mfg's assosiation) has applied for an observer seat in the CEN committee on diving equipment. /Sten Meyer * Mogatan 1 * 426 76 V FROELUNDA * SWEDEN * m87stme@mt*.ch*.se* *
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