Patent Application
20050263470
This invention relates to storage bay safety covers. More particularly, it refers to a safety cover mounted on a side frame of a storage bay for vertical movement.
Many warehouse sales are now available for retail customers in larger facilities such as provided by COSCO, SAMS, HOME DEPOT and LOWES. These facilities typically have multi-level storage shelves on vertical support frames. The shelves are stacked with goods at all levels. Many accidents have been caused by the movement of goods on these shelves, particularly the higher shelves since the support frames usually separate customer aisles. When goods are removed from a high shelf from one aisle, items can fall from the other end of the shelf to the adjacent aisle. Safety covers to protect customers in adjacent aisles from falling objects from the high shelves have been employed. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,981,225; 5,170,829; 5,573,125; 6,619,490 and 6,698,604 show attempts to provide safety nets for warehouse shelves to protect against falling objects. Although the systems described in these patents assist in providing safety to customers, many of these systems are expansive, hard to mount to a storage bay and are difficult to operate. A need exists for a storage bay safety cover that is easy to mount to a storage bay, provides protection against shifting articles on the storage bay shelves and is easy to operate.
This invention solves this problem by providing an easily mountable and operable safety cover apparatus that prevents shifting of articles in a storage bay from falling off its shelves and injuring customers or employees. The safety cover apparatus of this invention has a right and left hollow column attached to a corresponding right and left vertical support frame on a standard storage bay having multiple storage platforms. A biased cable moves over a pulley within the right and left hollow columns. An electric motor turns a shaft attached to the pulleys to retract the cables. Multiple slide blocks move vertically in a vertical slot on the inside wall surface of the right and left columns and are attached to the cables. Clips along a right and left edge of a heavy duty curtain attach to the slide blocks. A rod is positioned at a bottom edge of the curtain and has ends attached to slide blocks. As the slide blocks move upwardly upon retraction of the cable the curtain is likewise retracted and is lowered as the slide blocks move downwardly to cover one or more openings in the storage bay.
The invention can be best understood by those having ordinary skill in the art of safety covers for storage bays by reference to the following detailed description when considered in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:
Throughout the following detailed description, the same reference numerals refer to the same elements in all figures.
Referring to
Referring to
Lower pulley 78 is bolted to a lower inner wall 80 of column 12 with a flange bearing 82 interposed between a side of the pulley 78 and the inner wall 80.
Referring to
The motor 94 is electrically operated by a switch 102 which is bolted to a vertical frame member 30. Wire 104 connects to motor 94. Alternatively, as seen in
The housing 16 and vertical hollow tubular columns 12 and 14 are made of aluminum or steel. The curtain 18 is a synthetic nylon, or polyester fabric, or natural fabric cloth or other high strength material on which indicia can be printed for advertising purposes.
Equivalent components can be substituted for the components described above to obtain substantially the same results in substantially the same way and achieve substantially the same function.
