truFORM showing great form for the Newcastle Knights
EnergyAustralia Stadium, home ground to the Newcastle Knights Rugby League club, has just been renovated. The new grandstands were built utilising truFORM LVL Formwork Beams from futurebuild in the stands and step seating. The Knights will now try to emulate the well-known performance of truFORM to take them through the coming seasons.
David Gratton is the construction manager for the Oakdale Group of Newcastle and is a fan of truFORM. Oakdale predominantly carry out multi-storey residential and commercial formwork with a focus on medium rather than high-rise projects, in the Newcastle and Sydney Metropolitan area.
The EnergyAustralia Stadium has three tiers each with its own challenges for formwork. The lower concourse is partly on ground and partly suspended with steep seating at the front, the second level is the new corporate level, and the upper concourse is designed to support the steel structure for seating and the roof.
Oakdale Formwork used truFORM in a specially developed table form system. The table forms are prefabricated off site and placed as towers to form the soffit of the slabs. Conventional formwork is also built on site with bearers and joists supported on frames. The table form system also significantly reduces the safety hazard of working at heights on site and is particularly suited to band beam and slab construction as used in shopping centres and carparks.
truFORM is Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) beams intended for use as joists, walers, bearers and soldiers in concrete formwork. Available in five sizes, the truFORM is painted with a bright orange colour both for moisture protection and easy identification on-site. The ends are also colour-coded for easy length identification. Literature is available for easy specification from the futurebuild web site. truFORM has many advantages over conventional timbers and Gratton explains why the LVL product was the obvious choice for the stands:
“The benefits to us are the strength; it easily outperforms the traditional F7 solid timber alternative. Also the truFORM is straight, true and stable. It doesn’t warp and twist as conventional timbers do from time to time…so the chippies like the LVL. It’s a very good product.”
The soffit of the seating on the corporate and upper concourse was difficult to form due to the shapes and steep slope and a 2 metre deep splay beam directly behind. In these situations working out how to do the job is nearly as time-consuming as actually doing it, but the reliability of truFORM is a substantial asset.
On the upper concourse the entrance tunnels to the seating, known as vomitories, used a mix of precast and in situ walls. Oakdale’s client John Holland Construction went with the steel structure for the roof and seating mounted on thrust blocks protruding from the slab. These thrust blocks needed to be included into the formed vomitory walls and made the formwork complex.
Oakdale designs a lot of their own formwork solutions and likes to use truFORM because it’s so easy to design and work with. Oakdale were actually one of the first users of truFORM in NSW, sourced from distributor Big River Timbers in Sydney. According to Gratton, truFORM has been used for the entire existence of the company going back to 1996 when the product was first introduced to the market.
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