It's an exciting time for sustainability and steel product innovations in the Australian commercial construction industry, including recent, cutting-edge developments benefitting the installation of lightweight steel studs, according to Rondo.
Typically, lightweight steel studs are cut to length to suit the required height of the wall during the construction of apartment and commercial buildings and doing so takes time, creates noise, and produces steel waste offcuts.
To provide a more sustainable solution, Rondo has released an unrivalled telescopic steel stud to the Australian market, which adjusts to multiple heights to speed up construction and deliver a quieter and safer site.
The Smart-Stud has a C-profile like a traditional steel stud, except that it is proportioned to allow nesting of an R-profile, in a web-to-web orientation.
As the C and R profiles are nested together, they can easily telescope up or down to the required wall height and be installed into place.
The Smart-Stud is made on specialised machines by Rondo in Queensland with all other steel sections required in the wall frame, such as wall tracks, head tracks, and noggings, which complete the Rondo Smart-Wall System.
The new Hotel Indigo Brisbane City Centre is the perfect example of how the Rondo Smart-Wall System can provide a faster, easier, and more sustainable wall solution versus traditional stud framing systems.
The refurbished 16-storey hotel required the wall and ceiling contractors, North Australian Contracting (NAC), to install 2.9m walls that achieved wind-loading, seismic and fire-rating requirements.
As crane lifts for the wall framing were not an option and the hotel lift is only 1.9m, NAC knew that the use of standard steel studs would have been difficult, time-consuming, and costly.
To overcome this challenge, Rondo supplied NAC with all Smart-Wall components in lengths suitable for transporting up the Hotel Indigo lift.
NAC managing director Danny Simpson said, “To move almost 90,000m of wall framing up the fire stairs on this project would have been a logistical nightmare, would have required up to 26 labourers for each load, cost a lot and, more importantly, would have posed a completely unnecessary safety risk to employees and other workers on site.
“By utilising the Rondo Smart Stud system, we were able to move all the framing products safely and efficiently to the work front and deliver a finished product that complied seismically, structurally, and acoustically in line with all relevant legislation.
“The tradies loved it, the labourers loved it and our management team loved it. A truly great system.”
Once the Smart-Wall components were transported via the hotel lift to the correct floor, the wall framing system was easily installed into place by extending the studs up to the required 2.9m wall height and fixed into position.
Rondo’s engineering and drafting team provide helpful plans with the set-out of the individual wall panels and orientation of the components, and their manufacturing team prints details on the individual products that match the plans for fast and easy installations.
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