Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire’s famous coastal city, still charms visitors with its Victorian architecture and beautiful Marina. Standing proudly in the city centre, the Hull Maritime Museum building was originally opened in 1871 as Hull’s Dock Offices and has seen many ships sail past its windows. A hundred years later, the building became the city’s Maritime Museum in 1975. Now, after 50 years, an ambitious restoration project is breathing new life into the museum: carried out by Simpson Construction of York Ltd, the buildings receives in-depth pipe replacement, insulation works, and roof repairs, to name just a few.

Challenging lifts

On the outside of the building, a scaffold was installed to not only bring workers of various trades to their individual workplaces, but also to enable works directly on the façade. For more efficiency in site logistics, the general contractor opted for the long-term hire of a hoist and found the perfect solution in the 2-tonne transport platform GEDA 1500 Z/ZP provided by Speedy Hire. Glen Philips, responsible project manager at Speedy, sums up the challenges of the lifting project in Hull:

“At first, we had to speak with the scaffold engineer as we needed to make a few alterations to the scaffold. Having confirmed the comparatively low anchoring forces, we could proceed to anchor the machine directly onto the scaffold instead of the building. This was the better alternative since the building’s original historic façade needed to be protected and could not be drilled into. We then also went on to alter the standard scaffold segmentation of 2-meter bays to 3-meter width to accommodate for the wide unloading ramp of the hoist. This way, the contractors were able to off-load their often bulky and palleted materials directly from their trucks onto the hoist platform and from the platform into the building."

Longstanding partnership paired with the latest innovations

Represented in hundreds of hire depots all over the UK, Speedy Hire have been a GEDA customer for many years. Their hoist fleet comprises many different GEDA hoist models – most prominently, the 2-tonne capacity GEDA 1500 Z/ZP transport platform, type “GD”. For the museum’s renovation, the hoist was commissioned as a material hoist and chosen specifically for its spacious platform. Standing parallel to the building, the GD-platform spans an astonishing 4.35-meter loading width and can be loaded and unloaded easily by means of a forklift. All contractors on site were able to benefit from this – as scaffold equipment, steel beams, and plaster board pallets needed to go to different levels over the full 25m height of the building. To level out and protect the cobbled historic streets in Hull’s town centre, rubber mats were put underneath the hoist and the surrounding. The low 32-Amp electrical supply also favoured the use of the Geda Hoist as the old building needed all its power to feed all the works. Upon asking, the main contractor was more than pleased with the Geda platform, saying it did much more than they originally thought it would be used for. For Speedy Hire, it once more proved to be a reliable, versatile, and efficient machine.

Safe, ergonomic and efficient: properties of the GEDA 1500 Z/ZP GD

The GEDA Transport Platform 1500 Z/ZP is available in 16 different platform versions – 12 of them holding a load capacity of 2,000 kg in different platform sizes. Each of them can be commissioned either for transport of people and material or for materials only – making it Britain’s most popular transport platform in the industry. Ergonomically light-weight, the masts can be set up safely by two installers, allowing a quick and simple erection of the machine up to 100 meters height.