Bond Painting Ltd saved around a £20,000 scaffolding bill for St Georges girls school in Birmingham, when it opted to used the latest powered access equipment from Nationwide. The company, which was contracted to paint the school windows, took advice from Nationwide and selected a Genie S85 mobile elevated work platform for the job. This enabled the redecoration to be completed in just three days rather than the two weeks it would have taken had the company utilised scaffolding.

Thanks to its 27.9-metre elevated working height and 23.4-metre outreach capability, the Genie S85 was the ideal machine for the task. It provided the painters with swift and easily access to all of the windows at St Georges, even those where a deep ravine at the corner of the building would have otherwise meant expensive and time-consuming scaffolding. Instead, a concrete platform was laid alongside the gully, from which the fully rotational, diesel powered Genie provided the painters with access to even the most hard to reach windows. This task was made even easier by the fact that the painters on the Genie's platform were able to manoeuvre the machine from the platform-mounted control panel.

The Genie S85 unit is just one of 60 or so self-propelled, telescopic, articulating booms currently available from Nationwide, in a fleet that today numbers 6,000 booms, scissor lifts and truck-mounted units that are available from more the 50 depots spread across the UK. Much of their popularity is down to their outreach capability, which enables the boom's work platform to reach over obstacles, gaining access to areas that would be inaccessible to equipment where the operation is limited to vertical elevation.

Nationwide is part of the publicly-quoted Lavendon Group Plc and is headquartered in Lutterworth, Leicestershire. Its hire fleet is twice the size of its nearest UK competitor and all of the company's depots comply with Nationwide's ISO 9002 accreditation. The Group is also a major player in the European powered access market, trading under the name Zooom in Germany, France, Spain and Austria.

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January 2002 Nat2.017a