New Screed Hopper

Last Friday I went to visit Total Concrete's new Stetter batching plant to get some shots of their new screed hopper. Rather than a long description of it, here's a short video showing what it does...

A Day in the Life (of an S20)

A few months back I was invited by James Harding at Hardcrete to take some video footage of a day's pour in Chorleywood. They had recently bought a new Schwing S20 mobile pump and were happy to allow me to film for the day while they poured the 150 cubic metre concrete foundation for a new home.


We particularly wanted to show the main feature of the new S20 in that it could set up without extending outriggers beyond the edge of the vehicle itself, demonstrating that the machine could set up in very tight locations - a good thing for working in cities and towns in particular.

While I was there everyone working on the project was happy to say how pleased they were with the new Schwing machine - which is always great to hear.

We even set up a time-lapse camera and got the drone out for a bit of aerial footage! Several weeks later I had managed to edit it down to under 7 minutes. The result is above...

Concrete Manual On Disc

A couple of months back I was asked to dig out any copies of a CD we once did (before my time here) of a concrete placing manual. After opened a large number of boxes in storage I finally found the original master of the file which turned out to be a pdf of scanned pages from a manual.

The task was then to press another batch of discs with a slightly different front cover with more up to date shots of our machines (including Reilly's new S 38 SX). I thought an updated file might be a good idea too and so did an OCR (optical character recognition) on the images so people could search through the file for particular words and phrases.

I've pressed up music CDs before but not data ones but the concept is pretty much the same so sent the files off to the local disk pressers and hey presto - several boxes arrived this morning with the above merchandise! So if you'd like a concrete placing manual on disc, you know where to come!

Stadium Tour

Yesterday I left very early to make the long drive up to St Helens (between Liverpool and Manchester) to get a shot of the new S 38 SX Reptor at work on site with Reilly's. Unfortunately the job was cancelled at the last minute so instead, Mark Reilly rose to the challenge and we took the pump round to their local Rugby stadium and set it up there. The pump driver set up the boom to look as if it were pumping concrete to some imaginary job on (or over) the roof of the stadium and I got the necessary shots!

Of course it's a bit of a give away that there's no truck mixer, no workmen, in fact no job site paraphernalia at all. However the point was to show the reach and to some extent the flexibility of the new 5 section boom of Schwing's latest mobile offering - and I think we at least did that.

Reptor Video

It seems, looking at the viewing statistic that you blog readers rather like the videos I put up from time to time and also stuff to do with the new S 38 SX 'Reptor' mobile pump.

Well then as a special Schwing Stetter May bonus - here for your viewing pleasure is a combination of both!


This short video showing the new mobile pump at work was sent to me this afternoon by our good colleagues in Germany and as soon as I saw it I thought I need this to be public so our customers and friends can see this amazing new machine at work.

Enjoy!

Why Pump Concrete?

The continuing refurbishment of the offices continues to yield items of interest. A few months ago we filled up a bunch of boxes with 'inessential general office stuff' (for want of a better phrase) and packed them away in storage. We recently brought them back and had a bit of a sort through, unearthing a not insubstantial collection of corporate videos.

Not wanting to lose these historical, if not interesting corporate records, we thought we'd transfer them to DVD.

The first of these, which can be seen above, is 'Why Pump Concrete', a 1990s 10 minute justification of using concrete pumps for building projects. All the concepts still apply today, but what is interesting is that the advantages of pumping concrete needed to be pointed out, indicating they were not so self evident back then as they would seem today.

The collection of videos contains a fairly wide scope of material including some interesting short documentaries about tunnel building, assembling a Stetter Compact Batching Plant, a 'catwalk' parade of Schwing Pumps in front of a cheering crowd and how to service a flat gate valve, right through to one which started with a promising soundtrack but soon became a not-so-riveting 15 minutes showing a chap shotcreting a wall.

Most if not all of these will make their way onto our dedicated YouTube channel so feel free to subscribe if all of this sends you into shivers of anticipation...

The promised Utiform video is still in post production (these things do take a short while) but should be ready in the not too distant future. (Keep watching this space...)

Reaching Inside

We recently wanted to show how manoeuvrable the boom on one of our S36X mobile concrete pumps is. By way of demonstration we parked it near the entrance to our workshop and poked the boom in through the door to show how easily it can reach into an enclosed space.

As can be seen above the large rotation angle of the tip section (238° since you ask) not only makes it easy to steer the boom into such a space but also increases its flexibility once in place.

As you can also (just about) see, it was positioned using a radio remote (via a Vector control system) - so you can easily position yourself where you can best see what's going on.

I know that I was impressed!