Metrification and European Standardisation – HD1004 – EN1004

With membership of the EU came the pressure for standardisation. The construction industry had already adopted metric dimensions in the early 1970’s and many of the products on the market, having been designed originally in imperial dimensions, now found it difficult to adapt to the new metric dimensions.

PASMA played a leading role in representing the UK on committees involved in the drafting of HD 1004 – the Harmonisation Document which preceded the full European Norm EN1004 (as the UK was the major user of these products and some European countries saw the product as a threat to their traditional steel scaffolding). Whilst many concessions were won there was no possibility that a European norm would ever adopt anything other than metric dimensions. Over 20 years elapsed between a PASMA technical committee being set up in 1984 to deal with this issue and the final publication of EN1004. There was a period of grace where a harmonisation document HD1004 was in place. Towers designed to have a single 3ft Guardrail and rungs at 15 or 18-inch centres did not easily lend themselves to double guardrails of 1m with gaps of 450mm. The result for imperial dimensioned products was, in the short term, new guardrail frames and side guardrail adaption kits but long term they were facing an uphill struggle. Any new entrant to the hire market would naturally look to build their fleet with a metric product. A rear-guard marketing action by one of the suppliers of imperial dimensioned product used the theme “Your building was built in imperial dimensions so why not use an imperial dimensioned tower to access it” This argument had some validity with regard to internal ceiling heights but did not impress the market overall. There was also a separate argument that the working population in general was getting taller so that a 1m guardrail made more sense than a 3ft guardrail

As the Monopolies and Mergers report shows Youngman had, by this time established a market leading position with its Easibuild tower, primarily due to widespread sales to major tower rental companies. The writing was on the wall for all imperial dimensioned tower systems and Youngman’s desire to protect its market leading position coupled with its aspirations to expand sales into continental Europe led to the development of an entirely new metric dimensioned tower system which would fully comply with all the requirements of HD 1004, even as the standard was being developed. This new tower system, called Boss, was a fully HD 1004 compliant tower system in the UK when it was launched in 1993. At this time the UK economy was just emerging from three years of recession and, therefore, hire companies had little appetite to invest in new products. Further, whilst Youngman guaranteed availability of Easi-Build for at least another 10 years, its customers could see the opportunities that lay with a metric system.   Youngman coupled a very high-profile launch with a trade-in deal (Stock Options) which resulted in massive adoption of the new BoSS Tower System.  The results can be judged by the current market share of the Boss tower in the UK market.

One company that bucked the trade-in trend was Turner Access in Scotland. They had a large hire fleet of Easibuild and, in conjunction with Brian Houston an ex SGB employee, rather than trade in all their old product they asked the designers of Alto to design a metric dimensioned tower that used as many existing Easibuild components (braces, platforms etc) as possible. Obviously, this required new metric frames and the opportunity was taken to incorporate a conical spigot similar to that used on Alto towers for which Turners paid a royalty.