Bollards

A bollard is a short post that stands between a vehicle and something you cannot afford to have hit. Bollards go in at the corner of a building, either side of a roller door, around a switchboard, a gas meter or a fuel pump, along the edge of a footpath where a car park meets it, and across an access lane that only some vehicles are meant to use. On New Zealand sites they turn up wherever drivers and structures share the same few metres: warehouse floors with forklifts running through them, industrial yards, transport depots, retail frontages, school entrances and lifestyle-block gateways. Most people who buy them have already paid for the damage once. Group One New Zealand designs, manufactures and installs them, working out of Islington in Christchurch.

What a bollard is actually holding back

Two jobs, and they are not the same. The first is guidance: telling a driver where the vehicle route ends and the pedestrian route begins, marking out a loading area, keeping traffic off a service lane. A slim post does that perfectly well, because nobody is meant to hit it.

The second job is impact. A bollard protecting a switchboard, a shopfront or a stack of pallet racking has to absorb a real vehicle at low speed and stay standing. Whether it does comes down to things you cannot see once the job is finished: the diameter and wall thickness of the tube, whether it is filled, how deep it is set, and what it is set into. A post concreted into a proper footing behaves very differently from the same post bolted to a thin slab. That is why a bollard is worth specifying rather than picking off a shelf, and it is the honest answer to the question people ask most often about whether a bollard will stop a car. It depends entirely on how it was built and how it went in.

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Where they go, and what they are fixed into

Placement decides whether a bollard works. Too close to the wall and a vehicle still reaches the wall. Too far apart and a car threads between them.

The fixing depends on what is already there. New ground lets us dig and cast a footing, which is the strongest result. An existing slab usually takes a base plate anchored into the concrete, and the slab’s thickness and condition decide how much that will hold. Before anything is dug or drilled, services get located, because the spot that looks obvious for a bollard is often exactly where the water main or the power feed runs.

From the site visit to a bollard in the ground

We work in three stages, and for bollards the sequence runs like this.

Design. We’ll come out and take a look at the site and discuss ideas with you about the best solution for your situation. That visit fixes the positions, the spacing, the height, the fixing method and the finish, and it is where the removable-versus-fixed question usually settles itself.

Manufacture. The bollards are cut, welded, capped and finished in the workshop to those dimensions, along with any sockets, base plates or locking hardware.

Installation. The crew sets out the positions, drills or excavates, fixes the bollards, makes good the surface and leaves you the keys for anything removable. Concrete needs its curing time before the area takes traffic again, and the crew will tell you on the day how long that is.

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Get your positions marked up

Two bollards that look identical from three metres away can behave completely differently when something hits them, and the difference is buried in the wall thickness, the fill and the depth of the footing. That is the part worth getting right, because it is the part you cannot change afterwards without breaking concrete.

Phone us on 027 424 0600 or email info@groupone.co.nz, 7am to 3pm Monday to Friday. Group One New Zealand, Unit 1, 37 Foremans Road, Islington, Christchurch 8042. NZBN 9429053752833.

Call 027 424 0600 to Request a Free Quote