When I got it for my loft conversion on the last place it was £500 cash for three sides of a building...
Might be worth buying a tower. If you don;t need it to be ultra light weight they are not that pricey. You could always flog it on ebay after.
There's nothing like reading a thread like this through and thinking well I've been in all those situations - changing CU's with the power on, removing chimney heads, plumbing , wiring , brickwork, drains and so and yet in this house's major make-over I cannot think of one really alarming or funny situation. Rather 'sad' really as it does mean I've been successful in making sure I didn't have an incident worth laughing about later in the pub.
I did however help my brother refurbish a barn for his business - this meant removing all the grain threshing and crushing equipment. There had been a discussion about the amount of wood worm in the upstairs floor which I had poo-poo'd saying it was fine. Anyway as you can guess the inevitable happened - I jumped down from some piece of machinery I was dismantling and went straight through to oxter level; my brother even deeper in the machine shouted "John, John, come and help Rob, he's fallen through the floor". John does come rushing through, saying "Where, where?" and trips over my head.
Rob
John Rumm wibbled on Monday 03 May 2010 22:22
Being half the height and 2 sides - I can see this going the right way. I'll phone a couple later, might be worth it if I can jig a few roof repairs in at the same time.
Is there a way to span a gap with a tower? In fact, it's worse. The dormer is about a meter back from the edge of the house, but at the front, I have
3 bay windows, so nearly 2m between flat ground and the bit I need to work on...Though it would be cool to have a tower - much cheaper long term, and I have storage space...
For those who haven't seen it, this is pretty funny:
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Tim Watts saying something like:
Have a look for Kwikstage, etc. That's the steel pre-formed scaffold loved by builders on smaller jobs, as opposed to the traditional 2" pole stuff. About 200-300 quid would get you plenty, enough to do two bays and reach your roof. At the moment there's a huge surplus of this stuff on the used market, with so many small builders hitting the wall.
A very tame one which I only mention because it's topical (happened yesterday afternoon):
Decided it was finally time to get the Flymo out and cut the lawn - it lives in a shed down the garden which barely gets accessed at all during the winter. Shed door is about 18" off the ground and is accessed by an short open-tread staircase - on climbing it I recall thinking 'hmm that's looking a bit knackered and rotten; better put that on my list of round tuits before it breaks completely and someone hurts themselves.
Fetched the flymo and carried it out onto the steps, when with the extra weight, the inevitable happened - Crack! and I plummetted earthbound, heels hitting the ground straight-legged. It hurt, but I think I'll live.
David
Grimly Curmudgeon wibbled on Tuesday 04 May 2010 01:57
Thank you - interesting looking stuff - I'll keep an eye out for that too :_)
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You could span that gap with a variation on a cantilever made with a few scaffold poles and clips. This is part of my tower with cantilever used on a neighbour's house. The tower would need to be braced if free-standing.
DIY towers can be had for about £100-00p. I have two 6'x 4' bought for £80-00p a few years ago and a few extra made to measure sections for narrow spaces.
Cic.
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Forgot the pictures:
ttp://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x223/coldpics/DSCI0012.jpg
Room for one of these?
Tim
I managed to crash a building firm's minicomputer a few times with the wrong keystrokes. Probably whatever gave me Save or something in WordPerfect didn't do the same thing.
Owain
Mmmm, for such a consistent and predictable force, gravity causes a surprising number of visits to A&E.
Owain
About 20 years ago we developed software for VMS, we only had a couple tiddly uVAX 3100's, but the software was often installed on much bigger VAXen, control-P didn't have any effect on the console of our machines, unfortunately I managed to type it on the console of one of Texaco's large machines, after a few seconds I realised and managed to type "C" before the dreaded cluster state transition, plenty of people noticed though ...
Tim Downie wibbled on Tuesday 04 May 2010 11:16
Yes, certainly round the front. Can these be manhandled over gently sloping ground (the instructions allude to this, but I wonder how heavy it is)? Round the back is flat but have to go over grass and up a gently sloping concrete path to get there.
It's an interesting idea - it would enable all manner of minor roof remedials to be carried out, like repointing some of the hip tiles.
Owain wibbled on Tuesday 04 May 2010 11:26
Gravity's not the problem, it's the sudden stop at the bottom!
BTDTGTTS...exactly!
It was the cleaner cleaning the keyboard on the console of the PDP-11 that managed to hit the 'break' key and suspend the whole machine..
When working over a window I find an 8ft length of 4x2 inside the room across the frame makes a great anchor for the ladder.
I find the step off the roof back on to the ladder even harder.
4.8m width of house frontage, scaffolding with 3 lifts, top one about 2' below gutter line (so I can step onto the roof too), with the structure cantilevered over (i.e. not supported by) a low level bay/porch roof, was about £380. Same price at the back where there's an additional 2m dogleg, but no cantilever required. These allowed me to completely replace facias, gutters, strip off areas of the roof and stack tiles on the scaffolding in order to replace felt, battens, valley gutter, fit eaves tray, etc. 2.5m width tower up gable-end, wrapped around chimney above roof, with lifts about every 7' all the way up to allow maintenance to brickwork, flaunching, pots, aerials, ridge tiles (although I had to bum my way along the ridge well past the scaffolding). £430, including one planned extra visit to rearrange the top lift.
All the lifts have guard rails and kick boards. I do have a fall arrest harness for going out into bits of the roof which don't have a scaffold lift just below the edge to catch me if I slip off.
Prices are usually for 4 weeks. In theory, there's a nominal charge (something like 5-10%/week) for additional weeks, but I've never been charged it. Indeed, there can be a delay getting it taken away. I've heard London is more expensive.
Yes. Work out all the things you can possibly do whilst you have it there. If you will be climbing onto the roof (or the scaffolders will), have some spare tiles handy, as they can break. Scaffolders will replace tiles they break if you provide them with spares.
Ladders are included (and they're damn heavy single section steel ones, fixed to the scaffolding, not aluminium ones you probably have yourself). If you have a lot to carry up and down, get a rope and pulley included on the scaffolding too. That was useful for all the mortar and other roofing materials to repoint my valley gutter, but I didn't bother on the other erections. (I've got quite used to carrying buckets of mortar and tools up ladders now).
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