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.

Linked Images

A short while ago I wrote a post about the first new generation Schwing S 52 SX Mobile pump in the UK. The machine promptly went up to its new owners - Reilly Concrete Pumping in St Helens and after a quick showing at the UK Concrete Show, was out working almost straight away.

One of its first jobs was working on the new Mersey Gateway Bridge project which offered an excellent opportunity to go and take some photos of the new machine at work. The S 52 SX was one of three Schwing pumps on site. The other two were both Schwing S 43 SX machines and between the three of them provided some wonderful photographic scenes (as well as getting the bridge built).

Below is a selection of the photos I took on site (click on an image to enlarge it):

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.