MiniTec supplies dugouts for 2011 Asian Cup football competition

The 2011 Asian Cup football competition, staged by the Asian Football Confederation in Qatar, featured 16 national teams, including Australia, South Korea and Japan, with many Barclays Premier League players in attendance.

MiniTec first ventured into the sports shelter market in 2006, using its modular Profile System to build FA standard dugouts customised in blue and gold livery for its local team Basingstoke Town FC. While normally used for machine frames, workbenches, machine guarding, conveyors and automated production lines, the durable and modular extruded aluminium profile framing system can equally be applied to architectural applications such as sports dugouts or outside shelters. The aluminium profile system offers flexibility in design using MiniTec's own innovative CC-Assembler CAD and parts listing/pricing platform, or this package may be used in combination with major CAD programs with over fifty 2D and 3D CAD formats available. Structures can include acrylic panels with customised colours and logos, and complex curves can be applied to the extrusions for aesthetic and practical design variation.

As might be expected from an oil-rich nation with one of the highest GDP per capita in the world, the dugout shelters for this competition are rather special. MiniTec designed, built and installed dugouts in all five stadiums used for the Asian Cup Finals. Each stadium has two 23-seat team shelters and a mobile Fourth Official four-seater shelter, which all include colour-coded and club-branded Cobra race-car leather seats. For the showcase Khalifa Stadium, where the finals were held on January 29, an extra elaborate shelter design included additional curved Profile System rails for the roof-line and gold-plated minarets to reflect a classical Arabic architectural styling against the backdrop of the magnificent 40,000-seat stadium.