The Explosive Growth Years

The forming of PASMA acted as a catalyst for almost explosive growth of the tower industry. Aliscaff were the next company to enter the fray. Their owner, Ken Richardson, had previously built up a large Zip-Up tower hire fleet in his East London plant hire business. Disappointed at the level of damage the product was getting on hire he set up a repair operation that became so effective that he became a repair sub-contractor for Zip-Up themselves. The next stage was to produce his own tower designed to reduce the damage experienced in use and also make the product more flexible. Aliscaff introduced several innovations including a patented Master Rung.

Just after PASMA was formed W. C. Youngman entered the market with their Easibuild/Snap lock tower. W.C. Youngman Ltd was a recently acquired (in 1969) ladder manufacturing subsidiary of steel scaffolding company SGB who, much later in 1986 were acquired by the Mowlem Construction Group. W.C. Youngman ltd had vast experience making aluminium ladders and like S&C saw aluminium towers as a natural extension to their product range. They also had a demand from their parent company SGB for a hire/rental product. Easibuild in its original configuration included a Master Rung used under licence from Aliscaff.

Aliscaff and Youngmans quickly joined PASMA and the trade association started to get into its stride. However, with just 6 members and no active user training being carried out it was still a small organisation with no paid staff. The roles of Chairman, secretary and treasurer were undertaken by volunteers from amongst its members and rotated each year. The writer was one of those who served a spell in each of these roles.

With the market growing rapidly, other manufacturers entered the market. Most notable amongst these were  Zig-Zag and NSG who produced the Eiger Tower. Zig-Zag was a subsidiary of Turner Scaffolding, itself another scaffolding subsidiary of the international BET group. The company was set up in Northampton by three ex Access Equipment employees including designer Tony Williams. With the move to metrification taking place in the UK and in the construction industry this product was produced with metric dimensions, albeit it still used 2-inch (50.8mm) tube. The original Eiger Tower was designed to imperial dimensions that made it compatible with Zip-Up.

This explosive growth in tower use was accompanied by a growth in misuse by its users resulting in high levels of product damage. The writer recalls fleet damage running at nearly 25% per year at this period. The main producers being geared up for volume production were not able to cope with repairs as efficiently as they might have liked and a number of repair companies sprang up. Some of these became very efficient and some went on to become manufacturers in their own right. Lightening Scaffolds, Ability International …. Can you help us add to the list?

The growth in the use of aluminium towers also encouraged other traditional steel scaffold companies to take an interest in the market. Some were determined to “beat them”, with aggressive scare stories of damage or accidents and others to “join them” by introducing aluminium tower products of their own. Worthy of note here is GKN Kwikform who introduced a tower call Kwiktower. This was probably the first manufacturer to design a tower that did not use 2-inch tube. Instead they used a much smaller diameter tube of about 1 11/16 which reputedly they had left over from the manufacture of an earlier formwork product.