Snowcast Construction - Glasgow
When Glasgow Housing Association took over the Glasgow housing stock their aim was to renovate the homes of 80,000 local residents and create 6,000 construction related jobs over 5 years.
College Lecturer, Jim Snowball, soon realised that there was no one training provider who could teach the skills needed to create 300 new jobs a year. So two years ago Jim decided to go it alone and set up Snowcast Construction, specialising in roofing and external wall insulation.
Jim Snowball uses his skills as a lecturer in these trades to take applicants aged between 16 and 55 from the Local Economic Development Offices throughout Glasgow and give them the opportunity to retrain with Snowcast.
Initial roofing training is split into two. For the first 3 weeks apprentices are familiarised with materials, applications, tools and health and safety and over the following 4 weeks they are taught how to strip a roof. They are then sent out to site for 6 weeks to put their new found skills into practice. At the end of this period they are brought back into Snowcast’s training centre to develop their skills further by learning to batten, load and tile a roof. They are then sent back onto site to work alongside an experienced tiler for 10-12 weeks to help develop their confidence.
Apprentices who complete the training successfully are then offered full-time employment with Snowcast. As Jim prides himself on the quality of Snowcast’s work and the skills of his workmen, all apprentices are trained to batten by initially using a traditional hammer and nails and then progressing to a Paslode gas nailer. Three times quicker than manual hammering, Jim has found the Paslode IM350 1st fix nailer invaluable not only for time and labour savings but also because of the reduced risk of HAV.
Now suffering the consequences from many years of swinging a hammer, Jim wishes they’d been around in his day. But apart from the obvious health benefits, Jim finds that because nail bouncing is eliminated by using a Paslode nailer, there is no gauge slippage and therefore less likelihood of having to restrip a completed roof.
This makes a huge difference to both the quality of workmanship and overall productivity.
