I havent' tested but am wondering how the free wheeling action might be affected if something gets wrapped around it and then something heavy, similar to a human body, falls against the side of it. Any takers?
Despite that how would one know the cover can still free wheel and not jammed or stuck due to debris if it's considered "normal" to see it spinning. Holding the cover in position with a chain is the only on-going way to know the cover is functioning as it was designed. The purpose of the relatively thin chain is to establish a level of safety, if the forces are strong enough to break the chain that is a marker that either an acute occurrence has rendered the cover unsafe or that the slow degradation or debris buildup of the unit has now reached a level of concern which needs to be addressed while at the same time potentially still maintaining a level of safety. Unchecked, both may lead to a level of binding which and cause serious injury. If the chain is breaking or the ear is ripping off that might be red flag that the cover might require repair or cleaning and might not be as effective in preventing injury. In an industrial setting that piece of equipment would be taken out of service immediately until repaired.
Allowing the cover to spin with the shaft is a highly unsafe practice and I highly encourage those reading this thread not the follow that advise. From a safety standpoint, removing the chain that came with the cover is not much different than removing your homes electrical panel fuses and hard-wiring everything.
I apologize if the editing during you typing your post caused confusion. Regarding what implements I have I think that's irrelevant to the points being discussed though I do own and use a BXM32
chipper/shredder. I've worked in industrial settings in management roles and one of the primary focuses/responsibilities is always to ensure employees make it home at the end of the day alive with most of the body parts they arrived with. Identifying and reducing hazards wasn't some sort of hobby but a continual process requiring formal training which if performed in an irresponsible manner could not only have dire legal consequences for myself but untold hardship for those directly effected.
This may seem a little overboard for a discussion about using the guard chain, but the ultimate benefit of that one item seems fairly obvious. Yes there's many procedures which seems silly or useless and yes the entire safety approach is very costly in $$ (one reason why we can't compete with China, they don't give a crap) but to take on the position, which you seem to have, that's it's all bureaucracy BS is not accurate. Your profile indicates you're a mechanical engineer, what part of my first post do you take issue with?
I answered the 1st point of your first post on the basis of 50 years experience around pto implements. I have never seen a pto cover fail to be easily stoppable from pto speed. Even the steel ones dont pack enuf inertia to do harm. On 12 different pto implements ranging up to 50yrs old only one has had the cover removed - something Dad did because it was beyond his ability to fix damage to it I guess. All the others have their covers and altho most have some physical damage
all of them have been maintenance free and still work by stopping with very low resistance -- and they all spin with the shaft so you have no excuse to forget something is going on that you should be attentive to.
I take issue with exaggerating danger by imagining the worst remote possibility and then fixing it with something that has its own set of remote dangerous possibilities. No one can prove that the remotest thing wont happen so it must be protected against. Never mind that the solution is more failure prone and requires hundreds of times the maintenance and camouflages a dangerous area. The assumption that everybody knows nothing about the state of function of their pto cover results in a knee jerk yielding 99and44/100ths% penalty to prevent a bunch of people from being startled occasionaly. These startled people blame the spinning cover. - Cant you just hold it still? - Sure, but this application will suffer a net loss from that. There are costs; catalyzing complacency, reduced reliability, added maintenance and repair, risk of other ways to be startled, possible harm by chain whipping, higher and recurring monetary cost, higher energy use.
Letting an extremely reliable low inertia floating cover spin is nothing like hardwiring your fuses. It is like a ground wire ... doing nothing until needed.
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I perceive from your last post that you speak from an industrial safety perspective. Mixing that broad category with a specific small scale cover application is going to introduce different decision points.
* A cover with hi inertia cannot be allowed to spin.
* A machine may be operated by various people and must not present any surprises.
* Sometimes in the industrial setting situations will be better controlled making it possible for small gains addressing extremely unlikely possibilities to be instituted with the sole cost being monetary - liability makes these worth it.
* There may be people around that shouldnt be there and havent a clue. Removing all danger is necessary so that the tourists can leave intact.
But as you said, education has to be a big part for the workers. Anytime there are a lot of people the chances and consequences for error multiply. Unfortunately tho, when exaggeration comes into the response in lieu of sober balance it causes extreme reactions with poor benefit ratio. A continuing cycle of this is not viable.
larry
