Unexpected Brochure Photo

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!

The Big Beast - S 65 SXF

The biggest boom pump in Europe has arrived in the UK...

Unveiling the new Schwing S 65 SXF!

The first of these incredible machines has become the property of London Concrete Pumping. It's first job was on the new Wembley Park development and I was fortunate enough to be offered a chance to visit the site and take some pictures from a cage suspended from a crane. As you can see they came out rather well!

The best ones were taken with my 10mm wide angle lens which allowed me to get a good portion of Wembley Stadium in the background too (which does give a good comparison of size)!

With a vertical reach of just under 65 metres you can see this beast of a machine easily reaches to pour the slab at the back of the 11th floor. It shouldn't have too much trouble with 12 or 13 either.

This is only the seventh S 65 SXF so far produced in the world and is the actual machine featured being built in the promotional video below.



And one more picture...

Cover Shot

A few months back our colleagues in Germany were putting together a new brochure for the latest SP 2800 static pump and asked me if I could provide a photo. This meant tracking down a 2800 machine we had recently sold that was working on a site not too far away and that I could get on site to get some photos. Thankfully such an opportunity existed over near Canary Wharf.

Unlike mobile boom pumps which can make for wonderful shots because of the boom arched majestically against a skyline, static pumps don't naturally lend themselves to looking good in pictures. They are typically hidden away in a dismal corner out of the way which makes it even more difficult to get a flattering photograph. However as luck would have it, this one had a backdrop which included a raised railway line (the DLR), some buildings and if I waited for the right moment, the sun between the buildings which would reflect in the water on the ground near the pump.

The Germans were very happy with the result and as you can see, used one of my shots on the front cover of the new brochure, which arrived here at the office a few weeks later!

Her's my original shot:

Surprising Reception

I got a nice surprise the other day. Hughie, our UK MD had just come back from head office in Germany and showed me a picture of their new reception. The main feature in that new reception is a three panel image consisting of one my photos!

It was the one I took of the Reilly's job at Merseylink, which also featured in this year's calendar and also a jigsaw puzzle!

Who'd have guessed when I took that photo it would become so enduring!

And here is the original:

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...

An Interesting Puzzle

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...)

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.

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...)

Old Pictures

When a firm has been going as long as this, you never know what you might find lurking around the place. Yesterday, while sorting something in one corner of the workshop I suddenly noticed three pictures propped up by a pipe again the wall.

My first thought was that they were paintings; the years of grime mixed with the slightly surreal colours of old images combined to remind me for a moment of some of my dad's old paintings in his workshop. A couple of seconds and a slightly closer inspection revealed them instead however to be photos of some of our pumps.

What I found really intriguing was the last one (at the bottom here). It was obviously a very old style pump. Scott (our chief engineer) vaguely recognised it as one of our old Screed pumps from the 1980s - possibly from before Schwing and Stetter had joined forces or Schwing had patented the Rock Valve (both happened in 1982).

Scott also mentioned that one of our long serving old employees, Jack, features in the one in front of Tower Bridge (click of the image to enlarge it).

A few minutes with a damp cloth and some paper towel managed to remove most of the dirt from the pictures and so I was able to get the shots of them here on the right before placing them back where I had found them, albeit a little cleaner and brighter.

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.

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.

Boom's Eye View

Rob from R Pomphrett Pumping very kindly sent me some images recently including this spectacular shot from the top of his Schwing S24X boom.

He was using the pump to pour the footings for his own home extension in September last year and had a mate helping him out who had brought a GoPro camera with him. So while they had the opportunity they gaffa-taped the camera to the end hose, set it to take a shot every 30 seconds and extended the boom fully upwards.

They ended up with numerous good shots - this was about the best one. (Click on the image for an even bigger version.) What a great picture!