To place and tie reinforcement steel (rebar) is a manual handling exercise designed to stress and destroy the human skeleton by means of its awkward and repetitive motions. The steel fixer spends the day rotating wrists, swivelling hips and it is all done while the steel fixer works in a "touch your toes" position, in the warmer climates add the sun beating down on his back, and you have a recipe for a serious work place injury and illness that can be easily avoided.

The CLincHA is a system that prevents all the above: utilizing a patented machine and process. The CLincHA weighs approximately 6 kg. The steel fixer remains in a standing position at all times, simply picking the CLincHA up placing it on the intersection, pressing the button, picking it up placing it on the next intersection pressing the button, ad infinitum.

The CLincHA fires a prefabricated pressed metal "V" shaped staple (the CLinCH) straddling the top bar, then curling the legs around the lower bar, thus securing the reinforcing steel intersection. The actual tying time is approximately half a second. Running on compressed air the CLincHA does not depend upon batteries nor have any down time due to battery change over and re-charge time and can operate all day.

The CLincHA system is the only system that does not use wire, thus there is no requirement to "blow down the deck" (to remove the off cut pieces of wire from the area to be concreted), these wire tailings rust and stain in the area that becomes the ceiling of the floor below, left untreated the rusting may lead to other more serious structural problems. The remedial work required to repair this eyesore is both expensive and intrusive, but also unnecessary if using the CLincHA.

The only requirement to use the CLincHA is the ability to stand.

The first rule of Work Place Health and Safety prevention is to "Engineer Out the Problem" it is simply "best practice" to use the CLincHA system.

The Victorian (Australia) Occupational Health and Safety Commission in a document headed "Research Investigation into Manual Handling Steel fixing Injuries" 1987-1989 concluded with this statement: "It must no longer be Considered acceptable to deal with health and safety of steel fixers by selection criteria which state that steel fixers must be strong and be able to work bent over for long periods of time." One overseas study quoted in the same document stated that in a study of the above only 54% of the sample group had a normal muscular capacity of the back and abdominal muscles.

The CLincHA will improve this statistic, as the steel fixer remains vertical when tying the reinforcement. Manufacturers and distributors are required to exploit this innovative process.