Installation and dismantling: three days on site

1–10 days

on-site installation time by stand type

Stand types

Istanbul and Germany

the two bases our site crews work from

About us

Day one: floor and structure

The first job after walking into the hall is measuring. The stand boundary is marked against the floor plan, the shared wall line with the neighbours is checked, and the columns and floor ducts are compared with where the drawing puts them. Skip that half hour and you pay for it on day two, because a cut panel does not uncut itself.

Marking is set out against the hall’s own reference lines, not against the line the neighbour has drawn. Their crew can be out too, and two errors compound. Asking the hall manager for the grid reference is the cheapest verification available on day one. If any doubt remains, the line is struck twice and read by two people separately.

Then the platform goes down. If the floor is raised, cable runs go underneath it that same day; there is no second chance. The load-bearing structure goes up on day one as well, because ceiling elements and lighting rails hang off it. By the end of the day the stand should have volume: even with the walls open, the heights, the grid and the circulation widths ought to be visible on site.

The commonest cause of delay is vehicle access. Delivery slots are allocated by the organiser, and a missed window usually moves to the next day, dropping the whole schedule back in one step. Planning freight around the build order is therefore an installation decision, not a logistics one. Floor and structure travel on the first vehicle; graphics do not.

Day two: surfaces, power, graphics

Once the wall surfaces are closed you work from inside the stand. Electrical installation and lighting are connected at this stage. The hour at which the organiser energises the mains is known in advance and the crew waits ready for it; everything that can be done without power should already be finished. Socket counts and load distribution belong in the workshop calculations, not on the floor.

Lighting adjustment is written into the schedule as a job of its own. Beam angles, the light falling on the product and the glare across a printed surface only read properly once the hall goes dark. So the adjustment is left to the evening; done in daylight it gets redone on opening morning, and those hours appear nowhere in the plan.

Graphics come last. A printed surface fitted early in a dusty hall looks marked by opening day. Tensioned fabric, vinyl and lightboxes go on in that order, and each has its own settling and tensioning time. Vinyl will not bond at low temperature, so the state of the hall heating also decides the fitting hour.

Day two is also the checking day. The approved visual is held up against the real stand and the gap closed there rather than at handover, where the same correction costs something else entirely. How the design decisions land on site is set out on our stand design page.

Tear-down is not the build in reverse

Tear-down looks like the build in reverse, and is not. Three days to build usually means one night to strike. The hall turns into a place where hundreds of stands come down at once, and the forklift queue, the goods lift and the door traffic set the pace rather than the size of the stand.

Using the same people for the strike as for the build speeds it up. Someone who knows how a joint went together also knows which screw comes out first. A crew brought in cold does the same job by breaking things, and a broken part does not travel to the next fair. Across one night that difference is measured in crates.

So the tear-down plan is written before the show. Which parts come back and which are scrapped. Who packs the products. Where the packaging materials live during the fair. When the crates stored under the stand go missing, striking it takes twice as long, and panels carried without their crates arrive too scuffed to use again.

Returning material is counted and its condition noted before it goes into storage. That record earns its keep when the next quotation is prepared: what needs replacing is decided from the record, not from memory. The venue waste separation rules go into the same plan, since material left unsorted can attract a charge.

What makes a build take longer?

Hall height, rigging permission and stand type. On a double-decker, the structural sign-off and the staircase alone add a day.

Does a crew stay on site during the show?

Keeping one technician on hand is the right call. Lamps, sockets and broken hinges surface during show days, and if they are not fixed within minutes the stand starts to look neglected.