Retrofitted Cladding Supports in Covent Garden

Now, i’m not one to speculate as to how this situation occurred, BUT… missing some 500-odd plates that are required to support the majority of your building’s exterior facade seems like a little bit of an oversight to me. This landed on my desk from Apex Steel Structures who carried out the fabrication, site setting out and welding of these additional plates. Every run of plates was different due to the variances in the supported material loads, existing beam sizes and how the cladding was to be fixed. The brief was short and concise “you have access to 10, 12, 15 & 20mm plate. Please make the site welds as small as possible.” and we got on with it. Some only required thin plates but needed a stiffener, some had thicker plates to accommodate a slotted hole, some were double or triple span supporting multiple brackets and some were a combination of all of the above. Every plate was chamfered in the workshop so that only welding from the outside face was required; a little extra time in a controlled workshop environment is generally preferred over additional site works.