NZ Ski

The project is a chair stacking building for maintenance of ski lift chairs. Structural steel is used as the building’s columns, beams, and rafters. The chair lift rail runs through the building hanging off the structural steel.

It is an L-shaped building with steel cladding to the exterior. Chairs from the ski lift can be taken out of service for repair in this building. Structural steel was used for strength and durability for this project.

Structural steel has allowed steel cladding to be used on the exterior as the steel forms all the strength of the building. Structural steel made the installation extremely quick as all members were trucked straight to site at 12,000 metres above sea level and installed on custom foundations. The steel members were also pre-coated with topcoat and intumescent coating prior to leaving VIP coatings to go to Queenstown.

The off-site epoxy intumescent painting was a compliance and site win as there was no need for multiple touch-ups on site, and the client did not have to topcoat any of the structural steel. The project was painted with Zincilate11 + Armourcote 510. This gave the steel its zinc primer base coat, and the intumescent fire rating came from the Armourcote 510 epoxy coat – a strong, durable system completed off-site prior to delivery.

The key challenges were the altitude for installation and the wind factor for crane operation at 12,000 ft above sea level. Logistically, we couldn’t overload the trucks as the climb up the mountain was on gravel with tight bends.