Giant forklift trucks are lifting panels and pods up to eight stories high on a project in the centre of Sheffield. B&E talks to Ocon Yorkshire about how they have replaced cranes with something more versatile for the project.

Forklift trucks are flexible machines when it comes to manoeuvring in tight situations, but Ocon Yorkshire stretched the boundaries of their versatility when it used them to replace cranes on a project at St Georges, Sheffield. The company hired the UK’s tallest forklift to sort out a particularly tricky problem – how to fit wall panels and over 1,000 bathroom pods into a city centre construction site it considered too tight for cranes.

Ocon is currently onsite with the £48m scheme to build a 900-bedroom student village, 250 non-student homes, leisure and retail space and an underground carpark. Commercial director Graham Ellis tells B&E the company has no room to negotiate extra time on the 120-week project. “It’s a pretty fast track project in terms of the numbers of beds,” he says. “Because it’s student accommodation, it adds the extra pressure that we’ve got an end time fixed to when the students start university.”

Ellis says the city centre project also has very tight special constraints. “We have only one access point onsite. It’s a 4.5-acre site, but it’s still very restrictive,” he says. “We’re also surrounded by buildings and we have got to consider the people who use them. Most of the area is residential, so we’ve got to make sure we don’t upset the neighbours.”
Ocon decided it could shave 12 weeks off the construction time by using offsite techniques. The company is working with Kingspan Offsite to use external wall panels for the project, and Ocon is also reducing the amount of dry trades carried out onsite by importing bathroom pods from Poland.

Ellis says the company had to carefully plan the project’s logistics to accommodate offsite techniques. “It’s just-in-time  delivery and we can organise the logistics from our end,” he says. “The site is on a kind of island with public roads surrounding it. This lends itself to not storing too many materials onsite and bringing in panels in small loads.” To get round the constraints of space during the project, Ellis says Ocon decided to use forklifts instead of cranes. The forklifts have a lift of 25m, and can take bathroom pods off the back of a truck and fit them straight onto the floor in buildings of up to seven or eight stories high.

“There aren’t too many of these in the country at the moment,” Ellis explains. “They’re like normal forklifts, but their arms extend. When it goes to its full height it puts out the outriggers so it can do the lifting.” When they are not lifting panels and pods into place, Ellis says, the forklifts are handy for other duties. “It works out quite well in terms of getting multiple use out of them,” he says. “It’s more expensive than a conventional forklift, but it can be used in place of a crane. The same driver can drive it and use it for other jobs around the site.”

Considering how Ocon has had to use lateral thinking to solve a tricky problem with the St Georges scheme, it is surprising that when people talk about Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) they usually refer to innovative construction products, such as the panels and pods that were supplied to the project. Ocon has pushed back the boundaries of MMC, and shown how a contractor can adapt the traditional use of machinery to create speed and versatility onsite.