New Reptor in Ireland

There may not be any snakes in Ireland but there is certainly now one Reptor! Scott, our chief engineer was down in Oranmore (near Galway) yesterday commissioning a new S 38 SX Reptor for its new owners.

They began the pour at 7am and had finished pouring the 200m³ by 1pm with every load going straight through - as you'd expect from a new Schwing.

Now is it off to celebrate with a Guinness or a Jameson's?

Sweet!

Just arrived! The third batch of our (predictably) popular sweet boxes has just been put safely away.

After noting which sweets were more popular in the last lot, or rather which ones tended to get left behind in an otherwise empty box, we swapped a couple of varieties for some new ones. I'm pleased to say the lemon sherbets are a new addition - these will be my personal favourites I'm sure. (Although I must point out at this time I have not actually had any).

These are of course strictly for our customers (other than the odd box opened out for us by the MD) and certainly make an interesting and possibly quite unusual 'promotional product'! And if it helps remind people about how much they love Schwing Stetter, all the better!

Schwing Gallery

The drive to fill up our office wall space with working testimonies to our products continues. The original lines of pictures along the hallway has been extended through into the room beyond as we try to visit more clients on site and showcase the work they are doing using their Schwing Stetter machines.

It's not just this hallway, we've put up pictures all over the place. It's more pleasant than looking at blank walls too.

Perhaps we'll end up with people popping round just to see our collection of concrete placement related images! Although I suspect the National Gallery will be resting easy for a bit longer...

Need A Lift?

On a recent visit to the Merseylink bridge building site I was
interested to see a Schwing S 24 X on top of an isolated platform. Another  S 24 X was at ground level, pumping concrete up to the raised one and the end of the lower one was connected directly to the pipeline on the boom of the upper one so the concrete was being pumped from ground level through both booms to the end of the upper one. The lower machine was doing the pumping while the other was placing the concrete!

I need to thank Mark Reilly from Reilly Concrete Pumping for this wonderful shot above showing the Schwing pump being lifted onto the platform - and also for the picture on the right here showing the crane about to lift it up - click on the shot to enlarge it.

Apparently a number of methods were tried in order to get the pump up onto the pylon including a large net before this 'mobile platform' was tried.

Mark very kindly showed me round the whole area where Reillys, who are supplying the concrete Pumps for the project had no less than 7 Schwing Pumps on Site! Three of them can be seen in the shot at the bottom including their new S 52 SX.

Safe Slewing

A few days ago I gave Scott, our chief engineer a lift down to the docks to pick up a new mobile pump - just rolled off the ferry from Germany. However beforehand there was a client nearby who needed a quick problem solved.

They were about to start using an SPB32 separate placing boom to place the concrete on a new development which was quite close to some high voltage power lines. Of course any metal (or earthed object) getting too close to these things is inviting serious trouble so they wanted us to restrict the slewing angle so the boom couldn't get too close to the lines.

We climbed up the tower and Scott set to work and programmed the necessary restrictions and had tested the results in what was probably less than half an hour while I took a few shots from the platform.

It was interesting to see an example of the variety of things our engineers are asked to do. It was also interesting (and quite affirming) to see how quickly and easily a Schwing Separate Placing Boom can be adjusted in this way.

Boom Up Stairs

As regular readers will know, we have been doing some renovations here at Schwing Stetter HQ in Perivale. And this has left us with some spaces to fill in terms of brightening up the place. The stairwell was one such place and I was asked to produce a connected series of 5 shots of a new S 52 SX and its boom to fill the void above a sections of the stairs.

Creating such a series was as interesting challenge as it's not a just a quick photo cut up and stuck on the wall.

A second visit to the S 52 SX at Merseylink was organised (thanks to Paul and Mark at Reilly's) which was luckily a short pour so the pump operator had the time afterwards to raise the boom to the right angle to get the shots. I wanted the angle to roughly match the angle of the stairs so it could reach from the lower left corner of the space to the upper right one.

Finding a spot to take the shots from wasn't easy given the fence in front of the truck but I tried from a few different places and came away with a few sets of five shots that were usable. I needed five separate shots as a single shot would not have been a high enough resolution for large canvasses like this. The actual shots overlapped by quite a lot and I needed to find the ideal size to crop them down to so that they were small enough not to overlap each other too much, whilst being big enough to get a decent shot of the truck mounted pump itself in the bottom left image. There was also the issues of ensuing the colours and exposures matched properly - Photoshop is a very useful tool...

There is actually a bit of overlap there on the finished canvasses - making the boom look a little longer compared to the size of the truck, but for a boom that can reach the other end of an Olympic sized swimming pool anyway, the exaggeration is quite small - the S 52 SX really is an impressive piece of equipment.

A few calculations were required to get them in their correct positions on the wall with the whole display centred properly but I think people would agree that the finished display was worth the effort.

Surrounded By Work

How many times have you learned about something new that you'd never noticed before and all of a sudden you see examples of it everywhere you look?

Early last year I considered the fact that when learning how something is done, we often find we didn't even realise there was a problem needing this solution prior to finding out about it. I had not really previously considered how concrete reached the top of high rise buildings before finding out that we can pump it with specialised Schwing machines.

I suppose partially related to this is that once you are aware of a 'new' technology, suddenly you start seeing it all over the place.

It is probably just a random cluster but I have recently noticed a lot of concrete pumping equipment about the place as a drive about London on various errands. I will often find myself trying to identify the model of concrete pump or placing boom and see which company is responsible for it. Over the last week or so I have whizzed past a Camfauds mobile pump (I think is was an S 28 X) working on a site very close to my home, a Byrne Brothers Separate Placing boom near the city (pictured left and identified by our chief engineer as an old 3 section, 27 metre Schwing boom - still going strong), a mobile pump in Putney, one or two Concrete Mixer trucks bearing the Schwing Stetter name and a couple of our mobile pumps being driven to or from site as I have travelled around. I do try to get a picture if my camera is to hand and I'm walking or it's safe and convenient to stop. I took the picture above of a Schwing SPB 30 Separate Placing Boom a short while back when visiting the Isle Of Dogs. I hope this isn't all a sign of impending madness...

Recycled Investment

I was very pleased a couple of days back to go and visit a site in East London where the company MixIt have just installed a new Stetter Concrete Recycler.

The new site is on the Thames just East of London City airport and they produce a lot of fresh concrete at their new facility there.

Jim Taylor who owns the business saw the value many years ago in recycling the leftover unused concrete because it gives him free aggregates and water to use in fresh batches that he would otherwise have to pay for.

It also saves him from having to pay to send all that unused concrete to landfill, which, leading to less landfill is also positive thing for the local community and environment as a whole.

It was interesting seeing it all working together, and in conjunction with a silt press machine for further cleaning of the recycled water.

Normally extra cement would need to be added to fresh batches where recycled water collected in this way was being used but not here. Jim added a silt press machine to clean the water to the point that it can be used just as fresh water in new batches.

The reclaimed aggregates add up to several tons per day and while not a lot in the grand scheme of things, that is money still saved. In fact Jim, who has another similar set up at a different location said that the whole system at the other location, including the silt press paid for itself in six months.

Having the recycling system also allowed the company to gain it's ISO 14001 certificate which is quite good for landing certain jobs where the end client is concerned about environmental impacts.

All in all it seems that MixIt's investment in a Stetter Recycling system is paying serious dividends.

A Day To View

Paul Reilly, Brendan Reilly, Neil Coupe, Mark Reilly

The UK Concrete show has once again come and gone and once again I popped on up to the NEC in Birmingham to see what the great and the good of country's concrete industry wanted me to know all about.

Like last year's it didn't appear to be exceptionally busy but I did manage to speak to a few people I knew which I enjoyed.

The top team from Reilly Concrete pumping who recently bought an S 52 SX mobile pump from us were all there as was Neil, our Financial Director so we took the opportunity to get the photo at the top of Neil with Paul, Brendan and Mark Reilly in front of the new S 52 SX which they thoughtfully brought along with them to display.

It was heartening to see that Camfauds had also brought along a Schwing mobile pump which they had proudly on display. Their's was a new S20 machine.

I also got to see Utiform's new VH2 machine which I hear is already quite popular, so all in all, when added to general look round at what's going on in the industry, a day well spent.

A Big Machine

A couple of days ago a very large box arrived which took our engineers several hours to open... Well actually that's not quite it, but we did take delivery of this, the first of the new generation Schwing S 52 SX mobile pumps which, had it come in a box (I'm not sure how it would have been transported) would certainly have taken a while to free from it's packaging.

One thing is certain though, and that's that this is indeed a big machine. Being able to pump concrete 52 metres into the air obviously requires a big machine. If you think about it 52 metres is actually a long way. It is more than the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool.

This machine is on it's way to Reilly Concrete Pumping based in St Helens, (between Liverpool and Manchester) and I hope to head up that way and get some shots of it once it's in action when I can.

All Lined Up

A long-standing client of ours, Easymix Concrete recently decided to all get up very early one Sunday morning and get some promotional shots of their fleet including Volumetric Truck Mixers and Concrete Pumps. They also made a short video of the exercise (above) which really looks rather good. It turns out that their marketing guy, Ben, also has a background in video production.

It was a big event for the company. They gathered all of their vehicles very early on the Sunday morning and drove across their hometown of Croydon. The whole company came out in force to show off the growth of the business over the last 10 years, and friends and family joined them in the yard for lunch afterwards.

As Ben told me, as well as general promotion, the reason for this was that seeing as their fleet has grown in size so much, they were curious to see how it would look altogether on the road. What is particularly heart warming is that every concrete pump in the fleet is a Schwing. For the record that's four Truck Mounted Static Pumps and one S20 Mobile. Here they are on the right (taking pride of place...)

It's great to see our customers doing well and reaching such important milestones.

Everyone Happy

Leading concrete frame specialists MPB Structures have just taken delivery of four new Schwing Concrete Pumps. MPB have been in the industry since 1987 but have only recently been a Schwing Stetter client, having previously sourced their concrete pumps elsewhere.

Having purchased a Schwing S36X late in 2014 and received it in early January 2015, they were so happy with the equipment and level of service from Schwing Stetter (UK) Ltd, that they placed further orders for a Schwing SP1800D tier 4i, 2 more S36X’s and an SP2800D. All have now been delivered.

Everyone here works very hard to ensure our customers get the best possible service and equipment and it is very fulfilling when this is recognised by our customers through further orders.We are extremely happy to be working with MPB who have invested in a broad range of Schwing Stetter technology and we hope this is the beginning of a long lasting partnership.