Mission impossible

At tradeshows and events, installation has got to be fast and smooth. Large-format pictures, ceiling-suspended sails and much more can be reliably and nimbly mounted at just the right height using mobile work platforms.

Some impressive pictures went round the world from Cologne this August. Hundreds of thousands of young people congregated on the Marienfeld just outside the city and made the Catholic World Youth Festival 2005 an overwhelming success. But this would never have been possible without extensive preparatory work. The disused Frechen brown coal mining fields in the Rhein-Erft district outside Cologne were chosen for the event's finale. The whole area spans around 250 ha, equivalent to about 350 playing fields - enough room for the million or so people who would attend the closing mass. The hill from which Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the final mass rose 10 m out of the flat landscape. 5,500 lorry-loads of earth had to be dumped there in just 55 days. The altar was constructed on the top of the hill, its roof "floating" above in the shape of a white cloud. Several mobile work platforms from Gardemann, Alpen, were brought in to erect this huge construction. These vehicles were also used to put up large-format posters in Cologne's city centre.
Ask any workman or service provider faced with the task of working on buildings in town centres and they'll tell you: There is less and less room to manoeuvre equipment and materials in narrow streets, while authorisation and road blocks are subject to more and more regulations. So compact, manoeuvrable and light-weight work platforms are the answer. Because they don't need so much space, are easier to position and can stand on terrain that cannot withstand high ground pressure.
With the introduction of the new EU driving license six years ago, the maximum permissible vehicle weight allowed by the standard category B driving license is now limited to 3.5 t. Many managers are faced with the problem that their younger employees are no longer permitted to drive the conventional truck-mounted platforms up to 7.49 t. One alternative, for example, are the light city platforms made by Ruthmann. They are mounted on a light Sprinter van chassis and thus weigh a mere 3.4 t, which means they can be operated by holders of the new category B driving license. So this spring, Gardemann introduced a whole fleet of them into its range.
Safety and cost saving are other advantages of these work platforms. Georg Höing, installation expert at Bungert Werbetechnik, Münster, was recently faced with the task of replacing two 80-m2 bill poster surfaces on a warehouse building, at a height of 56 m. Bungert decided to do the job with work platforms. "It was vital for us to lift the delicate advertisement panels, comprising 15 prepainted elements measuring up to 4 x 1.5 m each, safely into position," said Höing. "The spacious deck weighing 500 kg had numerous advantages over a scaffold. If we had used scaffolding, we would have had to hoist each element separately. What would have happened if we had damaged any of the sheets doesn't bear thinking about."
Erection went extremely smoothly: the platform driver would manoeuvre the personnel cage into the most favourable position to help the Bungert advertising specialists with their task. And what about the cost? Considering that it would have been necessary to build over a protruding warehouse, scaffolding would have cost twice as much, the company explains. So the platforms were the obvious choice.
With one of the largest building sites in the German state of North-Rhine/Westphalia, Koelnmesse is currently expanding its capacity. Four halls erected at the north end of the exhibition grounds will provide 80,000 m2 of new gross exhibition space in time for imm cologne 2006. As pillar-free constructions providing usable heights of 11 and 15 m, they are fully drive-in - ideal for capital goods and large exhibits.
M+W Zander, Stuttgart, a subsidiary of the Jenoptik group, installed the building technology in these huge halls. 6 m long and 1.40 m wide ventilation ducts had to be installed under the ceiling to handle the 2.7 million m³ of air that will be circulated every hour. This is a challenge even for scissor lifts with their large working decks.
Working closely together, M+W Zander, Gardemann and the TÜV (German technical inspectorate) devised a tailor-made solution: To transport the cumbersome ventilation ducts, the face-end guard rail was removed from the scissor lift working deck, the remaining elements were reinforced and eyebolts fitted for attaching the worker's safety harness. Reinhardt Reschke, supervisor engineer at M+W Zander, about this successful collaboration: "The bulky duct lies securely on the platform and we save a lot of valuable time with the conversion work." These specialists advice will no doubt be called on many more times before the task is finally completed.

m+a report Nr.8 / 2005 vom 08.12.2005
m+a report vom 8. Dezember 2005