Bluestone Resort Park, Wales

Background

A new Serendome was to be installed at the Bluestone Resort, which would provide an enorous transparent canopy to ‘house’ all outdoor activities. The overall construction costs came in at £7.26m. The dome is 116m in length 77m in width and 22m from internal floor to the highest point in height.

Radius were initially approached to provide a lifting solution for the framework only, but the task quickly developed into the need for a building, lifting and installation solution for our client, Novum Structures. Our dedicated lifting team worked closely with the client’s project team to identify and agree the programme of works.

The Radius project team consisted of a Project Lead, Site Manager, Site Foreman & Steel Erector as well as a dedicated team for setting out various locations for the build of the trusses, nodes, cranes, mats as well as position for the trusses, foundations, base nuts and the propping heights for the trusses.

Challenge & Solution

Phase one of the project was to offload and check all the materials using a telehandler; phase two was to build up the frames which consisted of 5 large beams. Once this was completed phase three of the project commenced which was the actual build of the dome, consisting of the frames being lifted into place using a combination of telehandler, crawler and mobile cranes. Once these were installed we were ready to build and install the trusses.

To ensure we delivered the project on time, we utilised two teams; one responsible for building the trusses and another team lifting and installing them into place. Each truss was built on ground level and lifted into the air. Upright legs were lifted using a roto telehandler solution, these were then bolted to the roof truss and the complete module bolted with its upright legs into space module ground caps. Each roof truss was then tied back in to the previous roof truss to give stability until the building was fully constructed.

Once the final roof truss was installed and the framework was complete, Radius derigged and removed the cranes from site.

The Serendome is the UKs largest adventure park under a transparent roof, bringing the outdoors indoors. The name Serendome was unanimously voted by the Bluestone team, “Seren” means “Star” in Welsh and the clear umbrella will act as a window to the skies, whatever the weather.

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