The engineering has to come first
For a tall scaffold, nothing gets built until the design is signed off. That’s the opposite of a typical domestic scaffold where the design is essentially standard and mobilisation can happen as soon as the quote is accepted. On tall commercial work, our design team will visit the site, measure up, review the building’s façade condition for tie locations, check the wind exposure, and produce a design package that goes through internal review before it goes to site.
We’ll issue the design drawings and calculations to the client’s structural engineer for sign-off before we mobilise. That’s not a formality — on tall scaffolds we actively want a second set of eyes on the design, because a missed tie or an underestimated wind load is a failure mode we need to eliminate before we stand a single standard.
Programme matters
Tall scaffolds are slow to put up and slow to take down compared to low-level work. A ten-storey perimeter scaffold might take three to four weeks to erect at a normal resourcing level, and a week to two weeks to strip. We’ll programme the erection to match the cladding or refurbishment contractor’s mobilisation date, and we’ll build from the bottom up in sequence so the lower levels are handed over as the higher levels are still being built — that’s the fastest route to getting trades working on the scaffold.
Get in touch at design stage
If you’ve got an upcoming tall building refurbishment or new build project, get in touch at design stage rather than at tender stage. We can produce indicative scaffold drawings that feed into your programme and preliminaries costing, and we can flag any façade features that’ll drive scaffold cost up if they’re not accounted for.
