In our factory we have two profile burning machines used for flame cutting carbon steel by oxy propane cutting. After the profile shapes have been cut from the mother plate, there is left on the bed of the burner the remains of the said plate. The procedure that is currently employed by the company is that the operator climbs onto the bed, approx 1 metre high, to cut up and remove the remains. The nature of the bed of the machine is a series of vertical support plates approx 100 mm apart. I have two concerns, one with working at height and one with the potential for ankle injuries. Have any members come up with a safe system of work for this operation?

I used to work for a company that had a couple of these and they were very big, so you could not reach in from the edge and even if you could you still had to gather up the off cuts. The bed (vertical plates / slats also get cut and you end up with jagged edges on the bed itself ( had to replace every now and then). Our bed was sunk into the floor (and removable to clean out the dross every 6 months), which brought the height down (perhaps you could have a raised walkway around it). We used ply boards to go on top of the steel slats, but as you can imagine there was still an issue on the board edges (no way out of this) or if there was a sufficient amount of original plate remaining they would stand on that. The boards were of a size to allow use, but be wary of manual handling issues. There were also some larger gaps as walkways between the slats (so many jagged edges though). We were looking at the idea of a light weight moving bridge, that would run on the same tracks as the cutting heads. This would run just above the plate being cut and would have prevented actually standing on the slats at all. Chris