The custom gantry which Royal Wolf assisted in the design, provided a unique platform for several lunchrooms, change rooms, washrooms, modified platforms, a central office and a first aid office for staff during the 133-week build of the major retail and residential tower called the ‘Rosenthal Project’.
The containerised portable buildings were stacked on top to provide a complete construction worksite solution within a compact footprint that’s resilient and will protect against construction materials, debris and other potential falling objects.
According to Brian Rhodin, business development executive at Royal Wolf, their brief was to come up with a solution for sufficient accommodation for all of the people who work on site during the entire run of the project, utilising some of Royal Wolf’s 6m and 12m cabins.
“It’s really about building that ‘little city’ to accommodate the site that we have to work with, and because we can work with multiple different footprints, we will sit down with the client to work out the most optimum and economical way of using the space that they have,” Rhodin said.
“It really becomes about building the right facilities to meet the clients requirements, and we offer our clients some real solutions when it comes to their site accommodation, whether from an operational or a budgetary perspective.
“All of the stackable solutions that we do basically work on the principle of counterweighting, so we’re applying weight to the top of it to stop it from blowing over. Because this was hung in the air, we weren’t allowed to counterweight the thing.”
To counter this, Royal Wolf used a Dovetail Twist Lock, which is a mechanism that is used to anchor the cabins down. The company worked closely with the gantry manufacturer to incorporate this into their design.
“If you look at those containers on the back of trucks as an example, basically what happens with that is a forklift will pick that container up and put it straight onto the back of the truck and kept in place with a locking mechanism, which has a little handle on it that locks it into place,” Rhodin said.
“The Dovetail Twist Lock works in a similar way – that type of locking mechanism is utilised when you stack one container on top of another, but with this we had a double-sided arrangement where we locked the two of them together.
“So what we did was we utilised something similar to what they used on the trucks and welded those onto the gantry, allowing us to start building right on it. This meant that instead of using counterweighting, we’re actually just locking them in place as a modular system.”
Usually, a project of this type could take two to three days to install, but Royal Wolf needed to finish the build overnight to navigate around the specific local council and road traffic requirements.
According to Rhodin, Royal Wolf’s biggest achievement in this project was that they were able to execute it so quickly, given the timeline and council guidelines that they had to work with.
“A lot of credit goes out to the guys that were working on this – there was a lot of working at heights, we were working at night, and we needed to coordinate three different companies that were all involved with the project,” Rhodin said.
“Once Royal Wolf had worked out the actual design, then it was really just about the coordination of it all. This was done in North Sydney and semi-trailers are not the best over there considering the roads are very tight.
“The coordination for the deliveries had to be right – we couldn’t have more than one truck on site at any time, so it was really about getting the process started back at our yard.
“We needed to figure out what product went on to what truck and at what point in time did it have to be on site, so that we could instantly pick it up and move it in place once there, then get the truck out in time to make way for the next one.”
After four months of careful planning, Royal Wolf was able to do this in record time – taking only nine hours to complete.