first tier focus
The Bath Row building
was within 4mm of the
vertical over 12 storeys
Whatever may appear to be happening in the housing market, Great
Britain is still a small crowded island that needs more and more new
homes - which has some significance for the production engineering
sector and its methods.
Precision in
construction
EVEN if house prices are starting to fall and
mortgage lenders getting tougher, the construction
industry still seems to be on a roll. The latest
Government statistics, released in September, show that
output rose by 3% in the second quarter compared to the
previous year, and the amount of new work starting on
public sector housing increased by 23% compared to the
previous year. This has proved to be a valuable market
for some forward-thinking companies in the
metalworking sector.
Henley Building Solutions, for example, started off
as a general engineering fabricator, but when it was
asked to do some work on a construction project it saw
an opportunity. The developer was using a well-known
proprietary steel construction system, but there were a
lot of problems in getting it right. Henley’s owners
looked at the system as engineers and thought that they
could come up with something better. After 18 months’
research they came up with a system that uses
prefabricated steel wall panels that are assembled on site
on top of a carefully laid out sole plate to form the
internal and external walls of the building. Each room
is topped with a steel and concrete cassette floor that is
also fabricated off site and fits exactly on top of the
walls of the room.
To make the wall panels, roll-formed steel studs (the
vertical structural members in a wall) are laid up in
precision laser cut jigs and MIG brazed together. The
cassette floors are made in a similar way, with the steel
structure fabricated and then the concrete poured in
two stages - first of all the ceiling of the room below is
poured; when that concrete has set, acoustic insulation
materials are added and then the concrete is poured in
to form the floor surface. Stairwells are assembled as
modules using laser cut components and dropped in
place a floor at a time on site.
The precision of the jigs gives a very accurately
constructed set of building components that can be
quickly assembled on site by relatively unskilled
workers. Follow-on trades - such as painters, plumbers,
electricians, and so on - can start work on the lower
floors while the upper floors are still being constructed,
and less time and money is wasted than on conventional
building projects. The strength and accuracy of the
86 MWP november 2007
system mean that it can even be used on quite high
buildings. Earlier this year Henley completed a 12storey
student accommodation building in Bath Row,
Birmingham, that is the tallest building of its kind in
the world.
Precision at the heart of everything
The phrase Henley uses to describe its approach is
‘precision in construction’ and as the company’s
marketing director Tim Smithson explains, that lies at
the heart of everything it does. ‘A lot of the techniques
we are using now are techniques we were using as a
steelwork fabricator making components for
engineering applications - so when we were looking at
developing the new building system it was a question of
looking at how we could use the technologies we
already had. We don’t buy in components, we roll and
manufacture them all ourselves - which is fairly
unusual compared to other manufacturers in this
business.’
The company has also designed its own roll-forming
line, which has been purpose-built by a specialist
company in New Zealand and will be installed in
Henley’s new Corby factory. This incorporates
programmable pre-punching of the coil and cut to
length, so that kits of parts can be produced for
complete panels. ‘The way we fabricate the jigs for
putting our wall panels and floor cassettes together
means that when the panel arrives on site it is
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