About
Bluco Projects inspects, maintains, repairs and designs climbing structures — delivered by an IRATA Level 3 technician who reaches what others can't, and grounded in the standards the work is judged against.
Bluco Projects is led by Simon Downing, an IRATA Level 3 rope access technician with around sixteen years in the field. The practice started where the work started — climbing, and reaching difficult places safely — and grew into something more specific: inspecting climbing structures properly, against the standard they were built to.
That combination is the point. Plenty of people can find a defect; fewer can tell a duty holder what it means, against which requirement, and what has to happen next. The rope access gets us to every part of the structure up close. The standards knowledge is what turns access into judgement.
We built our own inspection system to hold that method — because the off-the-shelf tools didn't capture it the way the work demands. It's not something we sell; it's how we keep every inspection consistent, every finding traceable, and every report clean to hand over.
Competence
Bluco's roots are in industrial and wind-turbine rope access. Simon remains IRATA Level 3 certified and takes on rope access sub-contract work in the wind sector — and that experience, assessing structures at height against a standard on someone else's asset, is the same discipline brought to every climbing wall inspection.
The other side of the rope
Alongside the inspection work runs a long-term black-and-white photography project documenting the engineered structures the job puts us next to — the same eye for detail, pointed at the thing itself rather than its defects. Inspection and photography are two expressions of the same sensibility.
Bluco Projects