Commercial Scaffolding – HMB Endeavour Replica

This month Stronghold Hire was asked to help with the restoration of the famous ship that Captain James Cook landed in Australia on – the HMB Endeavour! Ok, maybe not quite the actual ship, but the replica that is stored at the Australian Maritime Museum. The vessel was built in 1988 and has circumnavigated around Australia THREE times and sailed to many overseas ports including Europe and America. More information can be found out on this wonderful vessel here.

HMB Endeavour Maintenance

The vessel undergoes regular minor and major maintenance to keep it functioning safely and looking in pristine condition. This scheduled service included the paint restoration of the middle and upper part of the hull.

Safe Access Scaffolding

We were asked to provide suitable, safe access to carry out these works. The scaffold could obviously not be anchored to the ship and needed to be erected in four days to keep within their schedule.

Steel Kwik Stage Scaffold

We decided to use our steel kwik stage scaffold for this and were able to deliver the material the day before the works started to ‘hit the road running’. The vessel weighs over 500 ton and rested on heavy duty support beams. We used these beams to run diagonal internal ties, limiting the space taken up around the vessel to allow the maintenance facility to function normally.

Uniform Scaffolding

With these types of projects, we try to keep the scaffold as uniform as possible, limiting the number of broken bays, maintaining a neat, uniform shape around the outside of the structure. We do this by reducing the bay length sizes on the curved parts of the hull (always the front and usually the rear). We can then step the bays in to follow the shape, using timber planks that are fastened to the steel boards.

Droning On!

The scaffold was erected on time, even with inclement weather doing its best to interrupt us. On the final day of erection, we hired our drone photography specialist Michael from HLH Marketing to drone the project. He did an incredible job at showcasing the full size scale of works, and we definitely recommend him to any construction companies looking to add some unique angles to their project portfolio.

A Special Scaffolding Project

This project was quite a special scaffolding project for everyone involved at Stronghold Hire. It’s not every day that one of these unique projects is available to provide scaffold for. The pictures and video speak for themselves as to how spectacular this project was. One thing that put it into perspective for us was that this replica model is actually larger in size than the actual model that discovered Australia.