Commercial Scaffolding – New Canterbury Road, Dulwich Hill

Recently Stronghold Hire were engaged to provide scaffolding hire for remedial works to an apartment block at Dulwich Hill.

Full Perimeter Scaffold – With Challenges

The client required a full perimeter scaffold to be able to complete these works. This scaffolding project was not straight forward and presented several challenges. Some of the smaller challenges was the fact that the scaffold would need to go through the awning and onto council land on two of the elevations. This was easily achieved by working with the client to remove the relevant sections of the awning that would foul our scaffold legs. On the street elevation we had a few obstacles to overcome such as keeping doorways to shops, emergency exits and electrical maintenance boxes clear. On the other elevation we had a bus stop and public toilet block that we also had to take into consideration as our scaffold would run directly through them.

Planned Bay Sizes, Ladder Beams and Formply

We overcame these obstacles with the use of planned bay sizes to fall in the right spots and where this wasn’t possible, we suspended areas using ladder beams. 17mm structural Formply was then secured to base of the scaffold as per council requirements.

Scaffolding With Limited Space

The biggest challenge of all was the limited space to deliver material and how we would be able to move the materials to each elevation. We proposed that we would use the rear lane to deliver all material so that there would be a very limited requirement for work zones, traffic control, pedestrian control, permits etc. We would basically be keeping everything contained within the boundaries of the building.

Stress Free Scaffolding on Suspended Slab

The problem was that the rear lane only led to a very small garden at the rear of the unit block with the street level around 6m below this. The garden was only 2m wide by 9m long which would not really provide much space to land our material using our 10m truck crane (we normally carry around 12 packs of material per truck, the job required 9 trucks of material in total).

What we decided to do was to build scaffold up from the garden and expand it out to create a 4m wide loading bay for materials delivery. With the help of an engineer we followed a design that would not put any stress on the suspended slab below.

“Creeping” Scaffolding

From this loading bay we “crept” around the building erecting and moving materials consistently as we went along. Due to the nature of the job and limited delivery and materials movement this project took longer than that of similar sized ones we have completed in the past, however, the scaffold was still handed over in a timely fashion so as not to disrupt the clients program.

Galvanized Cuplock and Encapsulation

We used galvanized Cuplok scaffolding material for this one and encapsulated all elevations using fire retardant mesh.