By Rick Schwolsky
If you're tired of fighting with your rusty old pump jacks or trying to squeeze one more job out of those twisted, chewed-up double 2x4 poles, consider upgrading to one of the state-of-the-art aluminum scaffolds made by Alum-A-Pole or Qual-Craft Industries. Your crews will be faster, safer, and happier working from one of these systems, which we put to work with Rosewood Construction, one of Boulder Colorado's leading custom builders.
Set-Up. Both Alum-A-Pole and Qual-Craft provide rugged, square aluminum poles, pump jacks, workbench brackets, braces, and padded bases. Qual-Craft also makes a spike-bottomed base that anchors the pole into the ground and would be great on sloping sites. Place a second-tier staging platform on either system's workbench brackets and you have a waist-high cutting station that also serves as a safety top-rail.
Only Alum-A-Pole provides its own aluminum staging platforms, workbenches, safety net, and safety end-rails that come OSHA-approved as a system. If you go with Qual-Craft, you'll have to get your own platforms and set up your own safety provisions to meet OSHA regulations.
Setting up each system is pretty similar. The aluminum poles come in a variety of lengths you can extend with additional pole segments. You feed the workstation brackets and pump jacks onto the poles the same way for both systems, then clamp the top braces onto the poles in a similar way. Both systems have safety/security chains that hold the platforms on the jacks. And both companies' pump jacks ride up and down the poles smoothly, without any chattering.
Click here to read full article from Builder Online
