Patent Application
20090217591
This invention relates generally to the field of safety gates commonly mounted on catwalks, walkways, and the like, and more particularly to a toe board attachment for improving the safety of a gate that is used to close an opening in a guard rail of a walkway for ladders and stairs leading to and from the walkway.
In a typical industrial plant, there are walkways and catwalks from which a worker could fall to a lower level. For safety's sake, these walkways are usually provided with guard rails to help prevent a worker from accidentally stepping off the side of the walkway and falling. Guard rails also often include a toe board to prevent tools and other items from falling off the walkway. For various reasons, however, it is necessary to provide openings in the guard rails. For example, one or more ladders or stairs may lead from the walkway to another level. Openings are provided in the guard rails so that one can move from the ladders or stairs onto the walkway and vice versa. Such openings in the guard rails are a danger to personnel using the walkway.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,866,356 described a safety gate specifically designed to keep personnel from inadvertently falling from the walkway into the openings for the stairs or ladders, hereinafter “stairwells”. The safety gate of the '356 patent has enjoyed tremendous commercial success and can be found throughout the industrial world protecting workers from inadvertently falling through the stairwells in catwalks.
The gate of the '356 patent is positioned approximately waist high to an average size worker standing on the catwalk. As a result, there exists an opening between the gate and the catwalk through which it is possible for a worker to slide under the gate into the stairwell. No such accident has been reported to date although these gates have been in use throughout the world for many years.
Nevertheless, an attachment for these gates extending the gate downwardly to a position closer to the catwalks reduces the chances of a worker slipping under the gate into a stairwell. This improvement was shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,094,863. However, the attachment of the '863 patent left a gap between the bottom of the attachment and the upper surface of the walkway. That gap has sometimes provided an egress for tools and other objects, which can then fall down the stairwell and perhaps strike a worker below the gate. Thus, there remains a need for a toe board which extends the bottom of the gate to a position close to the top surface of the walkway. The toe board attachment described herein fulfills this and other needs in the art.
The safety gate and its attachment described herein provides a toe board which may be attached during manufacture of the gate, or it may be attached as a retrofit to a gate that is already installed. The attachment comprises a pair of spaced-apart mounting adapters, preferably in the form of loops of a flat plate workpiece, to which vertical supports are secured. A butt plate is mounted to the vertical supports, and the butt plate preferably includes two or more joining holes so that the attachment may be secured to one of several widths of safety gate. The safety gate also includes an adjustable plate so that the safety gate may be mounted in line with a hand rail or perpendicular to the hand rail.
These and other objects, advantages, and features of this invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art from a consideration of this specification, including the attached drawings and appended claims.
The horizontal member 14b extends to define a horizontal extension 18b and the horizontal member 14c extends to define a horizontal extension 18c. An axle 20 spans the space between the extensions 18b and 18c and the axle 20 is rotatably held by upper and lower hollow tubular spacers 22a and 22b. The tubular spacers 22a and 22b are secured to a handrail 24, such as by welding, bolting, or other secure means. In this way, the safety gate 10 is operably mounted to the handrail 24. A coil spring 26 is positioned on the axle 20 between the two tubular spacers. The spring urges the gate to the closed position. In most respects, the safety gate 10 is similar to that shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,094,863; assigned to the same assignee as the present improvement.
The toe board attachment of this invention is indicated in
Once the loops 32a and 32b are placed on the horizontal members 14c and 14d, a vertical support 34a is mounted to the loop 32a, preferably with a bolt 36a and nuts 38a and 38a′ and a vertical support 34b is mounted to the loop 32b, preferably with a bolt 36b and nuts 38b and 38b′, shown in greater detail in
Finally,
From the foregoing it will be seen that this invention is one well adapted to attain all of the ends and objects hereinabove set forth, together with other advantages which are obvious and which are inherent to the apparatus and structure. It will be understood that certain features and subcombinations are of utility and may be employed without reference to other features and subcombinations. This is contemplated by and is within the scope of the claims. Because many possible embodiments may be made of the invention without departing from the scope thereof, it is to be understood that all matter herein set forth or shown in the accompanying drawings is to be interpreted as illustrative and not in a limiting sense.
