Vestas engineer's contact-prevention tool made available to all

Kristian Holmelund Jakobsen
Press Officer at Vestas
Published on 8th April 2020

Vestas engineer Jeremy Haight has designed the ‘Door Claw’, a simple tool that allows you to open doors and touch screens without making contact. The 3D printed tool is now being used in Vestas facilities worldwide and provided to hospitals and other front-line organizations for use by their staff to limit the spread of COVID-19. The design files are now available for anyone to download and use.

At Vestas, the safety and well-being of employees all over the world is the highest priority. To limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus, Vestas has enforced a number of new health measures, including required cyclical cleaning on common-use surfaces at Vestas facilities. And now, with a little bit of proactive ingenuity from the shop floor, our health and safety measures continue to improve.

In early February, Specialist Engineer, Jeremy Haight came up with a great solution to help solve the problem of touching high-contact areas such as machinery, screens, and door handles. Working from his desk at Vestas’ factory in Brighton Colorado in the USA, Jeremy heard a door handle rattle as the cleaning crew was wiping it down. He opened his computer’s design program and in 20 minutes he had designed what would turn out to be the Door Claw, a simple tool for opening doors without touching the handles.

“The factory management took a very proactive decision at an early stage to start cleaning surfaces every hour. A great effort, but a lot of people interact with machines and door handles, so I developed this simple, personal device to hopefully help keep people a little safer in these challenging times”, said Jeremy Haight.

His initial design was successful, and he printed the first prototype right away. Production was quickly ramped up and together with a local supplier, Vestas in Colorado has now 3D printed 1,100 copies to be used by the factory employees.

Jeremy’s colleagues on the Isle of Wight facility in the UK, also started producing the Door Claw together with local suppliers. They donated a sample of Door Claws to the nurses at the local hospital and they soon came back asking for more for their colleagues. The word quickly spread and now front-line staff all over the UK are using the Door Claw.

Vestas’ engineers have made the design files available for other companies to use, and now in the name of sharing, Vestas has made the 3D printing files available for everybody to use.

Vestas engineer Jeremy Haight is pleased to see his idea come into use all over the world. But he is not resting on his laurels, as he and his colleagues have already started working on a new project to help more people in the community. They have recently started using Vestas’ 3D printers to produce a specially designed surgical mask to offer local hospitals in need of personal protection equipment.

“I feel incredibly happy that it’s helping people stay safe and to flatten the curve. Even if it prevents just one person from getting COVID-19 and taking it home to their family, it will make a great difference”, says Jeremy Haight.                       

To get your own Door Claw, you can download the file for 3D print here or contact pahar@vestas.com.