A facade lives or dies on installation. We have seen premium panels ruined by rushed fixing, and mid range panels still looking sharp after fifteen years because the installer knew the trade. If you are a building owner or a contractor buying ACP for the first time, this is the process you should expect to see, stage by stage, and the points where it pays to look closely.
Good installers spend serious time on the survey. The building is measured as built, not as drawn, because concrete never quite matches the drawings. From that survey come the shop drawings: panel layout, joint positions, cassette sizes and fixing points. This is the stage to review branding, panel module and joint lines, because changes cost nothing on paper and a fortune on site.
Approvals run in parallel. For facade work the contractor submits the panel's fire classification and Civil Defence approval with the material submittal. If the supplier cannot produce those documents quickly, the programme slips before a single bracket is fixed. It is the most preventable delay in cladding work.
| Stage | What happens | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Framing | Brackets and aluminium subframe fixed and levelled on the wall | Alignment, fixings into structure, tolerance for movement |
| 2. Fabrication | Panels routed, folded into cassettes, stiffeners bonded | Clean fold lines, correct returns, protective film intact |
| 3. Panel fixing | Cassettes hung or riveted to the subframe, floor by floor | Consistent joints, panel direction arrows followed |
| 4. Sealing | Joints closed with backer rod and sealant, or left open on ventilated systems | Neat lines, weep paths left clear, no smeared sealant |
| 5. Handover | Film peeled, facade washed, snags closed | Film off within weeks, not months, in UAE sun |
One detail worth its own sentence: panels carry a direction arrow on the protective film because coil coated colour has a grain. Fix one cassette upside down and a metallic facade shows a patch in a different shade forever. Good installers check every arrow. So should whoever signs the handover.
A Gulf facade swings through big temperature changes every day, and aluminium moves with it. The system needs designed gaps and sliding fixings so panels can breathe. Cassettes screwed tight with no allowance will bow within a summer, and the wave you see across some facades at sunset is exactly this mistake, made permanent.
Behind a ventilated facade, air moves and any water that gets in drains out through weep paths. Blocked cavities and sealed weeps trap moisture against the wall. It is invisible at handover and expensive at year five. Ask how the cavity drains and expect a confident answer.
As a rough guide, an experienced crew fixes 30 to 50 square metres per day once framing is done. A villa facade runs a few weeks end to end. A tower is programmed floor by floor alongside the other trades. Fabrication capacity is usually the real bottleneck, not the fixing.
We manufacture and supply, and we provide fabrication support with CNC cutting, routing and folding. For fixing we work alongside experienced UAE facade contractors and can point you to crews who know our panels well. See our fabrication and installation page.
Usually yes. The subframe fixes to blockwork or concrete and the new facade sits proud of the old surface. This is exactly how re-cladding projects replace old panels without stripping the building back to structure.
In our experience: thin skinned panels that show every fixing, joints with no movement allowance, sealant smeared instead of tooled, and protective film baked on by the sun because it was left for months. Every one of them is avoidable for free.
Get the panels, the fabrication and the technical support from one factory, with Third-Party Certificates ready for your submittal.
