bigclive

Door safety interlock from a goods hoist

Added 2025-09-01 20:31:33 +0000 UTC

This was one of the door interlocks from our Bocker goods lift we used at The Edinburgh Tattoo arena.

We retired that hoist due to reliability issues and replaced it with a Geda site hoist notable for being able to accommodate a height of 200m and potentially so many floors that it actually has a keypad to select the required floor.

The old Bocker lift had a very annoying fault on part of its network where it would show a "heartbeat" error at a certain position in the shaft while moving, and after a number of errors it would lock out and need reset. That hints at a travelling cable issue or a vibration induced module/contact issue in the area where the error occurred, but despite many very expensive visits from the engineers who flew across from Germany each time, they never managed to find the fault with their own product.

The final straw was when strong winds blew the traveller cable into protruding metalwork while it was in use and tore the whole cable out. If installed properly there should have been no protruding metalwork in the area of the cable.

All issues that could have been fixed by employing a local lift engineering company to service and maintain it. But there were "politics" involved.

On a plus note, the very nice new Geda hoist is being maintained by a local company (Scot Hoist) by a guy with a great beard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi-QMIW6Qg0