Installing a nameplate? Choose the right scaffold.

For a nameplate you hire the Altrex MiTower, a model built around a single user. That suits what you take with you: a cordless drill, a box of plugs, a small spirit level and the plate itself. Nobody has to come up with you and you carry the parts in alone as well, which saves a great deal at an entrance in a shopping street or on a busy canal. The build heights are listed at hiring a MiTower.

Here the width of 75 centimetres counts for more than the deck area. Entrances often sit in a porch, between two pilasters or behind a low railing, and then every centimetre you build narrower is a centimetre closer to the wall. On the deck itself there is space to spare, because every tool for this job fits in one bucket. What you do want is to be able to take half a step sideways and judge the plate from another angle.

Note the distinction with a sign panel. If it is a board metres wide, hanging on several anchors, that two fitters have to level together, then you would sooner hire a mobile scaffold with a taller build; the wider panels are covered on the page about a name sign above a shopfront. There the weight decides, here the accuracy. Installing a nameplate is precision work with almost no load, so the build you hire can stay light enough to move on your own between the steps and the railing.

Measure to the top edge of the plate, not to your hand. If the plate sits at eye level beside a front door level with the pavement, you need nothing at all and a booking is money wasted. It changes at a building with a basement, where the entrance lies a metre or a metre and a half above street level, and with a plate that goes above the fanlight or against the underside of a porch. Then you are at three to four metres.

Work from the place you will actually stand, so from the pavement and not from the top step. Add to your platform height the roughly 2 metres your arms cover, and those two figures together give the working height. A build of 4 to 6 metres is therefore nearly always right for entrance work, and it leaves margin if the plate has to go higher after all. To see what an in between size delivers, look at a tower of five metres.

Hire a build that turns out too low and the thing that suffers is not safety but accuracy. Drilling above your own shoulders means the bit wanders, the hole ends up crooked in the joint, and the spacer then never pulls tight against the plate. You see that later as a plate hanging slightly out of true beside a crisp door frame. Half a metre more working height in the rental booking prevents that entirely and costs almost nothing extra.

The ground in front of an entrance is almost never flat. There are two or three steps, there is a fall towards the gutter, and sometimes the build ends up half on the pavement and half on a drive. So do not stand the tower on the steps themselves but in front of them, and take up the difference with levelling plates under the castors on the low side. Then put a spirit level on the deck and confirm everything really is square before you climb.

Round the feet you have to keep room for the folded out stabilisers, and at an entrance those collide with everything: a cycle rack, a planter, a stepped threshold with a handrail, a lamp post. Walk the spot a day ahead and move what can be moved, because during assembly you do not want to be shunting anything. At a building on the public highway you also put out a cone, so nobody rides into the tower while you are standing there with a plate in your hand.

Think about the door itself as well. At a practice or an office the entrance has to stay usable, so put the build beside the reveal rather than straight in front of it. If that is genuinely impossible, agree with the occupier that people come in the back way for a morning and pin up a note. Installing a nameplate should not shut an entrance for a day. How to level on a surface that will not cooperate is explained in the article on a tower on uneven ground.

The fitting itself takes an hour. Marking out, four holes drilled, plugs tapped home, the spacers tightened and the plate clipped on: if the brickwork cooperates you are done before the coffee. The day goes on everything around it. The set has to be unloaded, you assemble the build, you roll it to the right spot in front of the entrance, and at the end you take it all apart and bundle the parts neatly. So reckon on a single hire day in which the fitting is only a small share of the time.

It becomes two days if more has to happen at that wall. A row of plates at a block of flats, a bell or intercom panel being replaced at the same time, or an illuminated plate needing a cable through the wall: then waiting comes into it, because an installer works to his own moment. Plan those two days consecutively so the tower does not have to leave in between. The rental price for a day or a longer period is on the tariff page per model.

Keeping it longer has been kept deliberately cheap. Day one is the only one charged at the whole tariff; every day after that carries ninety five per cent off, so a spare day in the booking barely registers. On fixing work that is sensible: a wall of hard engineering brick, a bit that gives up, or a plate that turns out wrongly engraved will upset your morning. So set the collection day a day later than you actually think you need.

A deck of 245 cm is generous for this job. A nameplate is seldom wider than half a metre, so you only have to place the build once and you simply stay on it until the plate is on the wall. That saves the most time, because it is the repeated climbing down to look from the pavement that mounts up. So tape the plate to the wall with double sided tape first and judge it in one go from the pavement, before a single hole is drilled.

Take everything up in one bucket, including a second bit and a handful of spare plugs. Climbing down for a forgotten screw is the biggest waste of time on fixing work from a tower. In old brickwork, drill into the joint rather than into the middle of a brick: a hole in a joint you make good invisibly later, a hole in the face of a brick stays visible as long as the building stands. If there is stone around the door, shift the plate across to the brickwork beside it.

Where it usually goes wrong is the relationship to the surroundings. A plate that the spirit level says is right can still look crooked because the door or the wall itself is slightly out of plumb. So look at the whole thing from across the road before you tighten for good, and leave the build standing until you have genuinely made that check. Only when the plate reads straight from the street do you tighten up and start dismantling.

The material arrives as a complete set of numbered parts. A working day booking that is in and paid by 15:00 puts the earliest van at your door the working day after, and while booking you pick the arrival day and the return day yourself. Point out at that stage where the parts may be left: not in the entrance where residents or patients have to pass, but in a hall, a bike store or a strip beside the pavement nobody has to step over.

Putting the parts together is down to you. We erect nothing and no built up tower rolls out of the van, but a clear manual travels with the set and a video online walks through the order step by step. Because this model is reckoned on one user, you do it without help and are ready to drill within a quarter of an hour. Build on a flat stretch of pavement and only then roll it across to the entrance, so you are not manoeuvring between steps with loose parts in your hands.

Once the plate is up, the tower comes apart again and the parts go back where they were dropped. On the return day you chose at booking, the van collects everything, so there is no taking anything back and no trailer to arrange. If the fitting runs a day late because the engraver has not finished the plate, let us know through the contact page of the depot; the collection day then shifts with you and the build simply stays put.

In weight terms this job asks very little. A deck in class 3 under EN 1004 takes 200 kg per square metre, far beyond a cordless drill, a bucket of fixings and one person. The point with this model lies elsewhere. It is meant for one user at a time, and that limit is not a suggestion, so let a colleague direct you from the pavement rather than joining you on the deck, even when holding the plate steady together looks easier for a moment.

Below you ordinary life carries on, and at an entrance that is busy. Post arrives, visitors walk in, and a bike gets propped against the wall in between. So cone or tape it off, leave no drill lying on the edge of the deck, and lock the castor brakes as soon as you climb, even if you are only up there ten minutes. Move the build only when you are standing on the ground and nothing loose is left on it.

Outdoors the weather counts even on an hour long job. In a stiff wind you postpone, and in rain a metal deck turns slippery while you are holding a plate and a drill. Work half a day later in that case; the tower is there anyway and an extra day on hire costs you almost nothing. Installing a nameplate is never worth a slip on a wet deck. What else applies is summarised briefly in the piece on safe working at height in practice.