Killarney Heights Glass Atrium Scaffold

This month Stronghold was approached by one of our insurance builders to provide access over a large glass atrium. The atrium measured 16m long and 3.5m wide. The area of works required was directly above this on the back wall. Being a fragile glass structure, it was obvious that the scaffold needed to be suspended with no weight bearing down.

15m Glass Atrium Scaffolding

Usually, these types of glass atriums on residential homes are small, at around 5m to 6m in length. Scaffolds to span these are generally very straight forward and easy to erect. It’s a case of just erecting a scaffold tower on either side, linking them with aluminium ladder beams and then suspending the scaffold from the beams.

Achieving a 15m span is a lot more complex. You cannot just join two 8m beams to each other and then link two towers as explained above. The span is way too large and would cause the beams to flex, bend and possibly fracture.

Heavy Duty Steel Scaffolding To The Rescue

What worked in our favour on the design of this scaffold was that there was plenty of room to the side of the atrium, parallel to the building on the 15m length. We would look to use this area to reduce the span and thus reduce the loads on the beams. You can almost think of it as a railway bridge with a pier on each end and one in the middle.

The idea would be to set up heavy-duty steel, 2.4m wide scaffold, offset to the longer side of the atrium, dead centre. We would then set up an aluminium tower scaffold at each end of the atrium. From the centre scaffold, two cantilevered ladder beams would be attached to the wall using anchors. It is these two beams that would act as that ‘middle pier’ of the bridge.

Counterweighted Centre Scaffold

The centre scaffold was also counterweighted so that our scaffolders were able to get to the anchor point safely without the scaffold tipping over. Once the anchors were in the counterweights become less active as the majority of the weight goes through the wall anchors.

Scaffold for Light Minor Works

The scaffold was for very light minor works so would be erected using our lightweight aluminium modular system. This not only makes it much easier for our scaffolders to erect the scaffold but helps with materials handling to the rear of the property, which had limited access.

4 Day Turnaround Time

The design was submitted and approved. The time from the initial quote request to design approval, erection and certification of the scaffold was all done within four working days. The client was very happy with the scaffold and the project was yet another success.

Doing The Scaffolding Impossible

If you are told that it can’t be done, please get in touch as we will see if we can find a solution, we usually do!