road plate hire

A discerning client in East Sussex went the extra mile – quite literally – and went to the trouble of laying on 1,500 sq/m of ZIGMATS so his party guests can park on his land for a New Year’s party without fear or fuss of getting stuck.

Also a big shout out to the Southdown team who braved the winter gloom to get 20 tonnes of them installed in a day!

Pictures courtesy of Southdown

I’m very fortunate to operate in an industry I love and so enjoy the vast majority of my days at work. But some days, like Saturday 11 November – stand head and shoulders above the rest.

We purchased a 3 acre site a former cattery some 5 years ago. Since then we have successfully negotiated the often arcane planning system and with the help of friends, the community of our local village Henfield and a crack team of designers, surveyors, estate agents, planning consultants, financiers, insurers, lawyers, highways consultants, ecologists, architects, construction engineers and a host of trades including internal fit out teams, IT suppliers, electricians and EV providers and have successfully delivered out brand new HQ. Unit WEST, Southdown Enterprise Park.

The sense of gratitude, pride and satisfaction in having built something that not only provides a superb home for Southdown, but will provide a decent place of work and a source of income for the community for decades into the future is immense.

So it was fabulous to invite everyone involved to our grand opening and treat us and them to a day of fun and feasting to show our gratitude.

Thanks again to everyone involved – we couldn’t have done it without you.

Who knows, one day we might do it all again 🙂

Pictures courtesy of guests & friends of Southdown.

Taking advantage of a couple days between jobs, the painting crew took one of our Secure COSHH stores that has been out on a long term hire. She was solid, but a bit sad looking.

A thorough prep and a shiny coat of ‘Southdown’ blue and we’re good to go again!

Pictures courtesy of  Wayne McKinder

As engineers and construction/refurbishment specialists become more skilled they rely on us at ROADPLATEHIRE to create larger and more ambitious solutions.

These 9 metre long brutes were no exception.

Fortunately, the processing of them in our cavernous new 21 metre x 12 metre production hall was fairly straightforward for Lyndon and his experienced team. 

But weighing in at well over 4.5 tonnes each meant that loading them safely onto third party transport needed to be carried out with care and precision.

Director, Ryan Russell, makes it look easy with the recently acquired 6 tonne Linde fork lift, with its extra wide forks.

Contact the team on 01273 493300 for more information.

Pictures courtesy of Sam Tuffee

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve moved to a new purpose built facility for our ever expanding operations at the Southdown Enterprise Park near Henfield.

Our new address is:

Road Plate Hire
A division of Southdown Engineers Ltd
(Company number: 03390702)
Unit WEST
Southdown Enterprise Park
Shoreham Road
Henfield
BN5 9SE

///whizzed.prospers.ironclad

Extra care, extra service and extra large plates were required for this excavation mitigation in NW London.

Our ex stock 6×3 plates roadplates were the solution to this particular chasm.

Pictures courtesy of Scott Tait

A nice example of how a nice, quality decorative stone paved area can be saved from the rigours forklift truck, HGV and Genie access boom traffic. In this case a large retail space required renovation and a dozen panels TUFFTRAK showed their versatility. The load spreading capacity that’s so useful in traversing soft ground was used here to prevent cracking and marking of the sandstone pavers.

Pictures courtesy of Scott Tait

We were very pleased to help Oli and his crew from the Poynings Pumpkin Patch again this year.

As always, it was a great day out with good clean (well… sort of 🙂  ) fun for the whole family. Nobody minds sticking their welly boots on for the ‘on field’ action, but Oli’s care and investment to make sure your car stays well and truly un-stuck with a decent run of TUFFTRAK was heartily appreciated.

Working in our great capital city is always a challenge. Requiring care, patience, special compliances like FORS Silver but above all… planning!

So when our transport division were asked for help by our partners Kingswell Heavy Haulage and their client A.J.Wells Ltd we marshalled ourselves to dot all of the ‘i’s and cross all of the ‘t’s.

In addition to the issues surrounding a drop in the busy retail sector of Knightsbridge, just a hop, skip and jump from the world famous Harrods department store, working at night in a road closure and co-ordinating with about a dozen stakeholders, part of the job required the application of a HIAB outrigger jackload to a pavement area.

For those of you not familiar with the subterranean aspects of these ‘streets of gold’, a scratch of the surface invariably reveals a matrix of drains, telecoms, fibre optics, gas supplies, CCTV/surveillance infrastructure, electrical cables, abandoned voids and sewers that have been constructed and compounded since at least the mediaeval period.

All in all, never the kind of spot you’d want to be punching a hole through with an errant hydraulic cylinder!

So in order to prevent even the slightest chance of damage, it was calculated that some of our 2.0m x 2.0m x 25 steel plates will bring any potential ground loadings well below the safe threshold for cracking paving slabs etc.

Being equipped with our SALLY sockets meant that the laying out and subsequent recovery of them was simply documented and swiftly and safely carried out.

It’s not something a lot of us give a lot of thought to, but the business of the proper and respectful processing of the mortal remains of our nearest and dearest requires a good deal of engineering nous.

So it was interesting to get involved with a behind the scenes refit of Sheffield’s well patronised City Crematorium.

The site, at the somewhat Freudianly monikered what3words: ///visa.gets.ashes was in a partly demolished state in preparation for some monumentally heavy cremation plant to be installed. The team of engineers had broken a hole through the Victorian structure to the minimal size required to skate in the machinery. They, together with one of our highly skilled HIAB drivers, levelled and set two of our mighty 6x3x25mm plates, forming a lovely flat surface – ideal for skating plant across.

It goes without saying that the implications of this platform failing or being less than perfectly smooth and level, would have been very grave indeed.