Fitting fairy lights at the AUTOSTADT customer centre
For the annual winter event, the organisers of AUTOSTADT in Wolfsburg had planned numerous technical and optical features, including the pylon soaring 25 metres above the roof of the customer centre.
Flashing fairy lights were to be affixed to a total of 10 steel cables on the pylon.
The challenge for us was that there was neither fall protection nor a ladder or any other climbing aids on the pylon.
The climb had to therefore take place tediously using one of the shorter steel cables.
The 30-metre-long fairy lights were first pulled along the steel cable to the top of the pylon in November 2003 - all flashing lights were then individually affixed to every single cable during subsequent descent.
Over 2 extremely long days, the fairy lights were successfully fitted by two height workers and one AUTOSTADT lighting technician, with the help of several hundred cable clips, in often squally and rainy weather conditions.
In January 2004, this part of the winter event installation was taken down again with 2 height workers and one technician over 2 days in cold but clear weather conditions.
Merry Christmas.
We repeated this project in December 2004.
However, this time, it was to fit a total of 14 fairy lights.
And so this year we were able to rejoice about a lower pressure system, as well as horizontal snow fall, meaning the entire duration of the installation with 2 height workers had to be extended to a total of 4 working days because of the large number of fairy lights and the slightly more difficult weather conditions.
Dismantling took place "without any further incidents".
