A couple of mornings ago, Hughie the MD walked up to my desk holding up a copy of the new S 65 SXF brochure. When he reached my desk he opened it up to the back page and showed me the photo I took of the machine at Wembley filling up the inner back cover! It was a decent surprise and gave a me a laugh. It was nice to see another of my shots being used in a brochure!
This was the German version, for readers interested in a new S 65 SXF concrete pump, we should have brochures in English very soon!
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...
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!
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!
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!
As regular readers will know, a part of my job (a part I particularly enjoy) is to visit clients on site and get photos of their Schwing pumps and other Schwing Stetter equipment in action. The photos normally end up on our office walls in one form or another and on our website. I'm not a trained photographer but I'd like to think I have a reasonable eye and occasionally an image comes out particularly well.
One such image turned up after I spent some time with a camera up at the Merseylink Gateway bridge project where Reillys had three Schwing pumps working at the same time. We were so pleased with this image that we turned it into a puzzle - just for something a bit different and interesting. (It also features this month in the Schwing Stetter calendar!)
Last weekend I decided it was time to have a go at doing the puzzle. So on Saturday afternoon I cleared the dinning room table and emptied the pieces out onto it. For some extra interest, I rigged up my camera above the table to take a shot every thirty seconds to create a time-lapse video of the puzzle being done.
The 1000-piece puzzle came together over the course of the weekend with help from the whole family.
Sadly the camera did move a bit during the project - it was held to the room light fitting with cello-tape (this was a spur of the moment idea - not a major production!) so whilst I've tried to compensate in 'post production', there is a bit of movement and at times the corners are cut off. However if you can get past that, and like puzzles (and time lapse photography), and possibly concrete pumps, you might enjoy this little video... (It's 1 minute, 21 seconds long - in case that matters to you...)
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!
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.
Over at our German HQ, our opposite numbers have put together a rather good promotional video which they have playing in their reception area. They have been kind enough to forward me the file for this - so here it is for your viewing pleasure...
Part of my job is to design and procure promotional clothing like the branded caps t-shirts and polo shirts that we wear and (occasionally!) give out to clients... Sometime the designs are my own ideas and sometimes the ideas comes from Hughie (the MD) or even one of the staff.
For this one above (a one off exclusive run for Bauma) Hughie wanted to include a bar code and (at my suggestion) a QR code that could actually be read. And so here it is - a t-shirt that connects you to the internet!
The link is of course a page on our website specifically for people who have spotted someone wearing one of these cool puppies...
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.
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...)
Along with the plates and stickers we recently had made up, we also had a banner made by the same people to hang from the top of the factory. This we hung with pride this afternoon.
Oliver Connell (the company as opposed to the person - although it is his company...) were very kind in lending us their scissor lift for a short while to tie it up there.
When I first unfurled the banner across the floor I was very concerned that it was far too big. I had measured it and knew it to be around the right size to fit in the space we had but it just looked huge close up. Now that it's all the way up there stuck to the roof up I can't help thinking maybe it's a bit too small! Mind you, any bigger and it might not fit properly.
Either way I think it makes a nice edition to the premises...
Having churned out numerous custom built truck mounted static concrete pumps and other bespoke work for customers, Rob our chief welder remarked that it was unfortunate that people who saw them out and about wouldn't realise we had done all the bodywork customisation as well. They'll just think we did the pump but they won't know we started with a truck chassis which needed to be cut down and added everything on there ourselves.
So we've had some plates and stickers made up to let people know. Here is Rob proudly mounting the first such plate onto a customised truck mixer. And here it is below...
One of the things I really enjoy about this job is visiting some of the sites where our equipment is being used and in many cases noting how it is being used and how happy our customers are with it.
During one of these memorable occasions I visited a high rise development in Canary Wharf where they were using one of our SP2800 static pumps.
The offer to go right up to the top was too good to pass up. The view was spectacular (as you can see here.)
While there, I also managed to take this photo looking straight down with the actual pump visible in the picture and a truck pouring concrete into it.
It turned out to be such a great shot that I flipped it around a bit and used it in this ad which has featured in a couple of trade magazines. (You can enlarge these images by clicking on them.)
And yes, the customer was very happy with the machine!
