Supporting a 200-Ton Extraction: Uni-Span at Vanguard, Midrand

When a former Nissan plant changes hands, not much stays where it was. That was the challenge facing the team at Vanguard, Midrand, following Chery's acquisition of the site and it's what brought Uni-Span on board.

Work began on site around 25 June. At the centre of the project was a piece of equipment Vanguard referred to simply as "the crown", a large, heavy piece of client equipment that needed to be removed in sections to clear the way for the plant's changeover. The final section alone weighed in at over 200 tons. Uni-Span's role wasn't to remove the crown itself. It was to make its removal possible and safe.

The crown sat surrounded by a hollow-core slab, which needed full support before any extraction work could begin. Get this wrong, and you're not just risking damage to the slab, you're risking a structural failure with a multi-hundred-ton piece of equipment involved, directly above an underground section of the building.

Our team engineered and installed custom scaffolding and formwork, purpose-built for the geometry and load of this specific site, nothing off-the-shelf. Working alongside MTS Formwork, who carried out the on-site works, we built a birdcage support structure beneath the slab. That birdcage was the critical piece: it prevented structural failure during the extraction and removed any possibility of vehicles or equipment dropping into the underground section below. With a 200-ton final section coming out, there was no margin for the structure to give.

The crown came out in sections, safely, with the slab and underlying structure fully supported throughout. It's the kind of project that doesn't make headlines outside the industry but it's exactly the sort of engineering problem Uni-Span exists to solve.