More common than you would think, especially with older machinery in smaller engineering firms
or at least it was, not done any engineering in about 15 years now, but I've used massive decoilers, swage presses and punches that had safety stuff removed because it simply wouldn't work with it on. In fact I used to crawl inbetween the leaves of a 50ton swager which were propped up by blocks of wood to maintain it or get stuck bits of metal out.
Of course there was always big panic when H&S were due.
( Nuisance Value, Wed 13 Jul 2011, 23:45, Reply)