Covid Lockdowns Led to Innovation and Improved Anti-Crush Safety
As the UK went into full Covid lockdown, finding an alternative moulding company turned out not to be an option. As staff were furloughed and companies shut their doors to visitors, Managing Director, Stephen Weston, decided to redesign ACKBelt® Anti Crush system, from materials and tooling he could buy on the internet and through mail order. The result, after 18 months of constantly changing designs and prototypes, is a radically improved and more versatile Anti-Crush Safety product with Patent Pending.
Every year there are reports of operators being crushed when the truck’s ‘Anti-Crush Button’ (ACB), isn’t activated. The ACKBelt® is a safety device designed to overcome the limitations of the small ACB, by increasing the area of protection, at the point most impacts occur, typically by 800% – 2000%!
The ACKBelt® can either connect directly into a truck’s Anti-Crush button’s circuit, to activate it if struck, or, it can be supplied complete with a stand-alone portable control box, containing a battery, Warning Beacon and Klaxon.
Weston commented, “We called the new ACKBelt®, “ACKBelt®-2021™”, not because we were being lazy, but because we wanted to reflect that it was a development forced by the pandemic and carried out through the pandemic and that even though it was a time of immense difficulty, good work can still be done, and good results can still be achieved.
Within 6 weeks of the Patent being filed, the company already have sales to customers in the USA, Poland and the UK and new markets for the ACKBelt®-2021 have emerged.
But the pandemic caused even more surprises! Whilst demonstrating the new ACKBelt®-2021 to a major car manufacturer at their Liverpool factory, Weston noted that flexible Safety Barriers segregating factory traffic from pedestrians, often had scuff and impact marks on them and could also be used to alert to crashes.
As a result, another version to suit the profiles of factory Safety Barriers was developed, called the ACKBelt®-2021 ‘Crash-Alert’ system, which can fit onto Safety Barriers anywhere in a factory and alert staff & management when a barrier is hit.
