Training For Cats

Today was the second of two days of training in our offices conducted by a gentleman from Caterpillar engines. As readers may be aware, our static pumps all now come with Cat engines and so it is important for our engineers to fully understand the technical aspects of these.

This training was to bring us up to speed with the latest (full and final) specifications for diesel emissions using Diesel Emission Fluid (AdBlue being a popular example). This means our engineers are now qualified to maintain the latest generation of Caterpillar diesel engines.

As well as our own engineers, we invited engineers from a couple of our clients, Coinfords and Careys to come along to the training too - because the more our customers get out of their Schwing Stetter equipment, the better it is for everyone.

Swash No Buckle

A bit earlier I was asked to gather up some information about pump pressures with regard to the angle of the swash plate. Now not being an engineer, this term went straight over my head and so Hughie, the MD very kindly took some time to show me what this meant.

I had seen plenty of hydraulic system drives (the bit that that turns engine revs into hydraulic oil being pushed around the system) but had never known how one worked. I am pleased to say that now one more of the many wonders of hydraulic engineering has  been revealed to me, and very interesting it is too!

Basically a circle of cylinders and pistons connected to an angled plate spins. Both the cylinder block and the angled 'swash' plate spin at the same time so the swash plate pulls the pistons in and out as each cylinder/piston moves around the circle. The changeable angle of the plate determines how much the pistons actually move in and out for each revolution.

The pistons moving away from and out of the cylinder block are drawing hydraulic oil into those cylinder while the ones moving back into it are pushing the oil out, having brought it around to the other side, and so oil is forced to move continuously from one side to the other. Ingenious!

Seeing (and have a play with) the cut away working demonstration one above really helped me to understand what was going on. So now next time someone talks about the angle of the swash plate, I'll know what they mean.

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!

Filling the Space

It's not often that we have rows of empty shelves and storage space in our parts warehouse but we've got some now due to a major reorganisation of our parts storage. Towards the beginning of the year we expanded the warehouse area by extending the mezzanine floor over the reception area and now with everything moved about we have put more shelving into the newly created space.

The reason for all this? It's all because of the wonderful new Schwing 'Reptor' S 38 SX mobile concrete pump that we are now selling!


When we add a new machine to the Schwing concrete pumping arsenal, we need to make sure that we keep our promise to have the full list of necessary spare parts available, as we do across our entire range of products. That's why Schwing Stetter can usually get you up and running again within hours of a breakdown.

So the new shelves will soon be stocked with S 38 SX parts, and you'll soon be able to order them - assuming you're lucky enough to have a new S 38 SX pump!

Mug Shots

This morning we took delivery of our second lot of promotional mugs (the one on the right). I'm very pleased with these.

We got our first lot (the one on the left) in December last year. They were kindly drawn by the same chap who has been doing our Christmas cards and were so popular we thought we'd try another one along the same theme. That theme being concrete being pumped constantly around the mug by a ring of machines, all seemingly oblivious to the fact that it's the same concrete going round and round... Well we thought it was funny...

The first was a mobile pump and a static pump. The people who produced the mugs very kindly found a way to keep the image going through the handle to complete the effect.

The second is a separate placing boom, a truck mixer and a static pump. I'm sure these will be just as popular with staff and customers alike!

More Platforms

Such was the success of our new workshop mezzanine floor last year (and the new floor space over the new reception area) that we decided to add a double version at the other end of the workshop!

Once again the lads rose to the task and had the thing built and stocked in less than a month.

The view's not too bad from up there either!

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...

A Great Reception

If there's one thing you can say about our engineers at Schwing Stetter, it's that they are versatile. We have recently been making some adjustments to the workshop area, extending the mezzanine floor and sprucing up the reception area. And it was none other than our own engineers who did the major work.

We now have quite bit more upstairs floor space to accommodate our expanding parts inventory, and a much nicer front reception area (as you can see above).

Here are a few photos from different stages of the work...

Staircase reversed

Our Engineers' steelwork taking shape

The floorboards down and the new reception desk

Extra space for more (genuine Schwing Stetter) parts storage

Our engineers even install signage (note the new ceiling is now in place too)!

Merry Christmas

Well our Christmas cards have all gone out and we're just about ready to head off on our short winter break and begin the promised festivities! Have a wonderful Christmas and we'll see you in the new year!

My Lovely Mug

This morning we were the proud recipients of our new promotional coffee mugs! We have been drinking our hot beverages out of some very nice mugs (at the back here) up until now, its just that we though it would be nice to add a little humour and brightness to the experience. And so voilà - here they are!

The idea was two concrete pumps, a mobile pump and a static, pumping concrete round the mug endlessly and obliviously into each other's hoppers. The picture was cleverly executed by the chap who does our Christmas cards (we've been busy sorting those out too...) and the mug people even managed to make the image wrap all the way round going through the handle. Good work!

So now we have our new mugs, if that isn't a good excuse to visit Schwing Stetter for a nice new concrete pump I don't know what is!

Surprise Date

Our 2017 calendars have arrived from Germany and guess who's got the January spot? The opening picture is the one I took up at Merseylink of the three Reilly's pumps at dawn!

I knew they were putting my picture in there somewhere but it's nice to open the calendar and actually see it 'in the flesh' as it were. Nice also to realise that my 'work' will be hanging on thousands of walls around the world, if only for a month!

They have cropped the original a little differently to how I did (see mine below) - basically because theirs needs to fit into a square rather than a rectangle - I've think they've done it just fine though.

Happy January everyone (when it comes...)

New Platform

As we constantly strive for better ways to do things and increase our productivity, it was decided to make use of a whole lot of unused space a few metres above the floor in the back corner a create another mezzanine floor.

Robs design and workmanship once again came to the fore to build everything needed and over the last few weeks the whole thing was build and assembled from scratch. He was even able to tell me how weight each step was able to hold. Such a talented team we have...

The space to fill

Rob assembling the staircase

First part of steel structure in place

Structure taking shape

Flooring down

The view from the new platform

All finished

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.

Small Certification

Over a few months around the end of 2014 / start of 2015 we gained four National Small Series approval documents from the United Kingdom Vehicle Approval Authority, the VCA. This means that Schwing Stetter (UK) is:

"able to prepare for vehicles built in full conformity with this approval to be presented for registration."

The four certificates were for DAF, Mercedes, Scania and Volvo and mean we can mount mixer drums on these chassis and do all the bodywork with the national authority confident that the work will be carried out to the standard required for registration.

The actual certificates are three pages long and we decided it would be nice to display these, together with the vehicles they refer to. These four displays, shown above, now sit proudly in our board room.

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...)

Blast From The Past

This week we are moving the server to a new home in what was the stationary cupboard (as part of the downstairs refurbishment). So last week we were cleaning out the old stationary cupboard and as you can imagine, there were things hidden away in there that hadn't been seen for ages.

One such little nugget was this pile of promotional ash-trays, back from a time when handing out promotional ash-trays was an entirely acceptable thing to do. They came emblazoned with out telex number(!) and our phone number beginning with the area code 01. I'm sure this had become 0108 by the late 1990's and I think there was an 081 version since around 1990. That makes these at least 25 years old!

As expected this was from the time when we were still Burlington Engineers and wouldn't become part of the Schwing Stetter group for at least another 16 years (see more about our company history here).

Of course we were still working with Schwing pumps back then. In fact we had been doing so since before 1962 when we were made the UK and Irish distributor for Schwing GbmH. Compared to that length of experience, this ash tray is positively modern!

Picture This

Having been building up a stock of pictures of our machines out on site hard at work, it was thought time to start putting some of these on display. Here is the result so far - making one particular wall much more interesting.