12.07.2007

JCB gives Loadall

JCB has donated a Loadall 540/140 telehandler to the Black Country Living Museum as a contribution to the Museum's £10 Million Streets Ahead fundraising campaign.

The £10 million expansion will create a brand-new 1930's high street, building on the Museum's successful living history displays.

The 14 metre, 4,000kg handler will help with the construction of Old Birmingham Road, a 1930's High Street, centred around two buildings, one from Oldbury and the well known Hobbs Fish and Chip shop from Hall Street Dudley.
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Richard Fox-Marrs,MD of JCB Loadall ,(L), and Ian N Walden of the Black Country Living Museum

In each case the bricks from the buildings were recorded, cleaned and numbered. They were then crated in wooden boxes to keep them safe until ready to be used. The JCB Loadall will move the crates and place them on the scaffolding ready for the bricklayers to put the bricks back in their original position.

Since starting on the Tipton Road, Dudley, site in 1976 the Museum has rebuilt two dozen houses, shops and workshops, brick by brick, often manually lifting thousands of individual bricks onto scaffolding.

The telehandler will not only make this work less strenuous but safer and more efficient, and by keeping the bricks in crates until they are on the scaffolding will minimise the risk of the numbering sequence being upset.