Partial Lift Removal (Out of Hours)

In March 2022, we were instructed by one of our main clients to carry out the partial lift removal of a passenger lift in a WeWork building in West London.

Due to the nature of the building and the number of people using this office during the day, we were asked if it would be possible to carry this lift removal out during the night when there would be less traffic in the building.

We carried out the partial removal over seven floors, removing all equipment other than the guide rails in the shaft, the full removal of all motor room equipment and the painting of the lift shaft and motor room. Our first task was to carry out the fitting of flooring protection across all of the newly finished wooden flooring throughout the building, ensuring nothing could be damaged or marked. 

The main obstacle was to be the suspending of the lift car on our 3-ton electric hoist, as there was a large concrete bedplate in the motor room that had made the hoist rope holes very small and hard to fit any lifting equipment through whilst the ropes were intact. Having come across this many times, we had no trouble working around this; positioning the counterweight on one of our own aluminium super props and tackling the car off of the guide rails, de-roping the lift and then removing the geared lift machine and concrete bedplate first and then positioning our hoist ready for the lift to be lowered down into the pit area. 

A temporary lighting festoon was then hung and powered up so that all 240v circuits in the shaft could be isolated and removed. 

Utilising one of our 3-ton electric CM Lodestar hoists, our engineers lowered themselves down removing all doors, entrances and shaft equipment, this was cleared from the site straight away as there was no storage available. Being licensed waste carriers, this is no issue and all redundant equipment was recycled and waste transfer notes provided to our client. 

Whilst the car was still fully intact and we had the use of our hoist, we then carried out the shaft painting off of the moving platform- an efficient method of keeping mess and timescale to a minimum. 

The car was then lowered into the pit and dismantled, cut into suitable-sized pieces and removed from the site. 

We then supplied and fitted more floor protection for the installation team who were due to start in the coming days, leaving them a perfectly clean and painted lift shaft and motor room ready for the new lift to be installed. 

All lifting equipment used was supplied by ourselves from our own fleet of equipment which is available for hire. 

Disclaimer 

These blogs are not methods of work to be used to work on lifts. Our team of highly experienced and trained engineers carry out these tasks and they should not be performed by inexperienced, under-qualified or incompetent people.