Smooth Mover Tom Takes Break After Snooker Floor Challenge!

Engineer Tom Flint is dusting the chalk from his engineering cue after successfully playing a key part in delivering one of the smoothest warehouse floors in Britain.

And the surface, at safety equipment Arco’s huge Humberside facility, is not only worthy of The Crucible’s World Snooker Championships in Sheffield but, at a cost of between £6m and £7m, is now considered among the most expensive floors of its type in the UK.

“It had to be laid to DM2 floor flatness tolerance ahead of high bay racking being placed on it,” said Tom. “However, the overriding reason for the ‘flatness’ requirement was because the client needed to utilise both high-mast forklift trucks and Very Narrow Aisle (VNA) racking, both of which require a precise surface.”

Arco’s existing warehouse, NDC1, adjacent to Hull’s Clive Sullivan Way and not far from the Humber Bridge, had reached capacity despite lots of high-bay racking.
As a consequence the company rolled out plans to develop an additional warehouse, NDC2,  measuring 100m x 150m x 19m to the top of the eaves, important in light of its forklift and VNA requirements.

“Everything about this job has been ‘floor’ related,” added Tom. “The building structure was almost incidental compared to the ground upon which it was to sit because below the top crust of one and a half metres of stiff clay was liquid mud down to limestone!”

As a result 3,000 piles had to be driven into the ground using four piling rigs in order to support the floor slab. “Those alone cost about £2.4m and the concrete slab a further £1m. We anticipate that the floor will eventually have cost in the region of £6m-£7m, probably one of the dearest floors, for its size, in Humberside, if not the UK,” added Tom.

HBPW designed the piling and floor slab for the scheme, the only realistic solution to cope with heavy load bearing from product, racking and forklifts. “The real job here was most definitely the floor because the building structure, in this very rare case, was simple and almost an afterthought to the ground conditions. The client will be sure of uninterrupted operation of its forklift trucks – and their heavy loads – thanks to the DM2 floor flatness, almost better than a snooker table itself!” added Tom.