These are exactly the questions Rick Wade (project manager) from Production Technology in Dubai asked himself when he learned he was about to have his busiest run-up to Christmas ever. Shows by Queen and Paul Rogers, Kylie Minogue, and George Michael, in the space of three weeks; and all of them had committed to provide a full production show, not some scaled-down version for the Middle East.
"For a production manager like Albert Lawrence with Queen, taking a show like theirs around Europe is relatively straightforward," said Wade, "in that the resources of companies like Stageco and ESS are readily to hand. Whatever Albert needs in terms of roof size and weight loading, they can supply. With increasing concert activity here and across the UAE, we at ProTec saw that the time had come for us to provide a similar service. We approached Total Fabrications (TFL) who had in the past provided us with some of their 'off the shelf' EHD roofing systems, and we'd always been very happy with them. Now we needed something bigger and stronger, yet also just as fast and easy to set-up."
Wade spoke to TFL, part of the Total Solutions Group, back in the early summer of 08. "It was a happy coincidence," said group CEO Chris Cronin. "We'd only recently engaged Malcolm Richards, a structural engineer with whom we've had a relationship over the last 30 years, to take another look at our roof structures, and come up with ways we could apply that model to stronger, larger structures."
What Richards's investigations turned up exceeded Cronin's expectations. "Malcolm looked particularly at stress management within the roof structure, and found that we could, with the addition of a few modifications, up-rate the roof loading of our existing Roof Systems substantially. This wasn't as big a surprise as you might imagine - we'd always thought this might be the case, but the demand wasn't there at the time we first developed the roofs, and so we'd never looked at it. We did, however, plan for this increase in capacity and had always engineered the tower systems that supports our roofs to exceed the roof-loading by a substantial amount."
What ProTec has purchased is in fact two of TFL's up-rated EHD Roof Systems that each provide a new maximum 24-tonne load capacity on a standard 25m (w) by 17m (d) stage (excluding PA wings). "The great thing is," said a visibly enthused Wade upon completion of the Queen load-in, "as you can see this show has a 30-tonne LED screen; how did we do that? The main components of the two HD Roof systems can be combined to create a roof with a slightly bigger footprint and a whooping 40-tonne load capacity. And the great thing is, I thought this would take maybe half a day longer to rig; to my surprise it's a fast and easy to erect as the old roofs."
Structural changes to TFL roof systems are in some cases, backward compatible. Existing roof owners should contact TFL direct for further information.
(Lee Baldock)
