Also online at: www.dijonline.co.uk 66 THE door industry journal spring 2025 50 Years of the Safedrive®: A Timeline of Innovation GfA, the industrial door drive specialist, is celebrating 50 years of the Safedrive®, a product which established GfA as a global industry leader. GfA CEO Stephan Kleine reflects on his grandfather’s legacy, engineer Hans Meyer, who invented the Safedrive® which was showcased at the R+T exhibition in 1974. We look back on the journey of the Safedrive® and how it was instrumental in Shaping the Future of Industrial Door Automation. 1972: A Safety Revolution Begins Prior to the Safedrive®, industrial doors were often operated by chain or gear-driven systems, which still have their use today. In Europe, these door designs used a separate anti-fallback device (safety brake) to prevent the door from closing uncontrollably in the event of chain or drive failure. Meyer designed an antifallback device with a patented damping device to activate on door acceleration, such as following a chain break or detachment. With Meyer’s design, the energy was absorbed by the damping device and the door would come to a controlled, safe stop. Industry Breakthrough While chain-driven systems are still used today, they come with their complications and limitations; speed, barrel construction and door set-up. The obvious evolution to alleviate the issues associated with chain-driven systems and alike was to combine the anti-fallback device into the drive to create one compact solution which fitted directly onto the barrel shaft of the door. Meyer successfully solved this problem with the design of the first Safedrive®, which not only incorporated a twin worm configuration antifallback device within the drive unit’s gearbox (allowing for a far simpler door construction resulting in easier and quicker installations), but it was also not activated by speed, which opened up numerous new applications to the door industry. 1974: Introducing the Safedrive® to the Market The Safedrive® (or ‘der Sichere’ as it is called in Europe, which translates as ‘the Safe One’) was previewed at R+T 1974 at Messe Stuttgart. Later that year Meyer’s patent was granted and the Safedrive® was officially launched to the door Industrial Doors & Shutters
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