Safescaff H-Frame Safety Scaffolding - Detailed Information

01What Is Safescaff?

Safescaff is a facade scaffold, certified to EN 12810-1 by the Turkish Standards Institution (TSE), that rises level by level as factory-welded H-shaped frames are stacked and locked together with ledgers and braces. It is the standard-compliant version of the system known in Turkey as the "H scaffold", "frame scaffold" or "safety scaffold".

The part that carries the load is the 2.00 m H frame, in which two uprights and the cross tube joining them are welded into a single piece at the factory. As frames are stacked, the scaffold climbs one lift at a time; every lift gets steel decks, guardrails, toe boards and ladder decks for moving between levels. Ties set out for the specific project hold it to the building.

Because it uses only a few component types, it is one of the quickest scaffolds to put up on flat, regular facades. That is why it is the everyday choice for rendering, external insulation, painting and cladding on residential, office and industrial buildings.

02Where Does the Name "Safety Scaffolding" Come From?

For many years the H scaffold was the most widely used facade scaffold in Turkey. Much of what stood on site, however, was not built to any particular standard: tube wall thicknesses, weld quality and the layout of decks and guardrails varied from one maker to another, and timber boards and incomplete guardrails were a common sight.

This began to change with the Safe Scaffolding Project (GİP) run by Turkey's Ministry of Labour and Social Security. According to the Ministry, from 2014 onwards facade scaffolds were brought into certification against EN 12810-1, and submitting the scaffold's structural calculation and detail drawings to the municipality became a requirement of the building permit application. With Annex 5, added to the Regulation on Health and Safety in Construction Work on 31 December 2018, an EN 12810-1 certificate of conformity became an explicit requirement for facade scaffolds.

To tell the new, standard-compliant H scaffold apart from the old type, the Turkish market started calling it "güvenli iskele" or "güvenlikli iskele", meaning safe or safety scaffolding. So the word "safety" does not refer to a single technical part; it is an established market name signalling that the scaffold is manufactured and certified to the standard. Safescaff takes its name from this.

03Where Frame Scaffolding Came From

Steel tube began to replace timber poles in scaffolding early in the 20th century. In the United States in 1934, a patent was granted for a metal tubular scaffold devised by a mason who had been injured when a timber scaffold collapsed. Ready-made frame scaffold systems as we know them appeared in the 1940s and were used extensively in the rebuilding that followed the Second World War.

The idea behind the frame scaffold is simple: move most of the connections from the site to the factory. Instead of joining tubes one by one with couplers, the welded frame cuts erection time and makes connection quality a matter of manufacturing rather than individual workmanship. Over roughly 80 years, and together with the standards, this approach has grown into a system with defined load classes and rules for decks and side protection.

04Technical Data

We manufacture every Safescaff component at our factory from TSE-certified steel tube, joined by automated MAG welding. Every part is protected against corrosion by a molten-zinc coating applied to EN ISO 1461.

05What the Code on the TSE Certificate Tells You

Safescaff's TSE certificate of conformity identifies the system with this code: EN 12810 - 4D - SW06/250 - H1 - A/B - LA. It follows the designation format set out in EN 12810-1 and sums up, in a single line, the classes in which the scaffold has been tested and certified. Being able to read this line is the quickest way to know what you are working with when you buy or hire a scaffold.