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!

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!

Hope For A Schwing From Above

Andrew at Camfauds Concrete Pumps recently alerted me to a story in The Construction Index about the building of a wind farm in Scotland, featuring a really good aerial shot (thanks to 360 Aerial Imagery Ltd) of the works. What was interesting to us was the two Schwing concrete pumps also in shot doing the work.

Scott, our chief engineer here was able to look at the picture and straight away identify them as a Schwing S34X and a Schwing S39SX. He even knew who they belonged to.

The actual story was about Hope Construction Materials having supplied the concrete for the foundations for 19 new wind turbines at Aikengall II Community Wind Farm, East of Edinburgh. The turbines, set to be commissioned in August 2016 will stand 145 metres tall and apparently be amongst the tallest in the UK and will collectivly generate 68.4 Megawatts of locally sourced energy, supplying more than 42,000 homes.

Hope provided almost 12,000 cubic metres of ready-mixed concrete from their Dunbar and Dalkieth ready mix plants for the project being built by renewable energy specialists Community Windpower Ltd.

It would seem Schwing Stetter was helping out too, pumping and placing the concrete.

Beer and Browse

The London Build 2015 Expo took place at the end of last week and I thought it might be worth a quick visit. So I headed over to the old Millennium Dome on Friday afternoon to see what the great and the good of the UK Construction industry had to offer.

I was interesting to wander round and see the various businesses touting their wares and services but I have to say the show itself scored a real winner with the offer of free beer and wine!

The overall show was not as big as I had expected it to be and there were no exhibits dedicated to concrete pumping - I suppose it is rather a niche market, even within the confines of the construction industry.

However it was a pleasant way to spend a Friday afternoon.

Shut It

As part of our drive to modernise the workshop, yesterday saw the replacement of the decrepit old roller shutter with a brand spanking new one.

The battered old manual door (now a pile of scrap - pictured left) which took up extra space poking horizontally into the workshop when open has now been replaced with an all singing, all dancing (well all rolling anyway) new version (pictured right), bring us rolling into the 21st century, at least as far as entrance to the workshop is concerned.

All the better to present new concrete pumps and mixer trucks to the world from...


Update (12th June)

I had a message from a reader yesterday posing what I suppose is a fair question. He asks:

"does the new roller door in the workshop have anything to do with the tricks with the 36X a few weeks ago?"

He was of course referring to the demonstration of the flexibility of the boom on a Schwing S36X as shown here.

The answer is of course no! Our engineers are quite adept at manoeuvring large pieces of equipment about and pump booms is one of their specialities - as you would expect!

The old roller door has needed to be replaced for quite a while. It was costing money in maintenance and repairs and it's time had come.

Evolving Concrete Show

Last week I popped in to see the newest London concrete-centric exhibition, Evolving Concrete. This was held in the Business Design Centre in Islington so it was relatively easy to reach (being that I am based in London).

What was nice about this one was that it was being put on by the Concrete Society itself rather than an 'events organisation'. So it was conceived with the specific needs of the industry in mind.

It was a fairly small affair - the picture above more or less shows the extent of it. However I did speak to some interesting exhibitors about various aspects of concrete and particularly, as the name would suggest, how concrete and its production is evolving. One of the most interesting nuggets of knowledge I picked up was about cement-free concrete which uses ground blast furnace slag in place of Portland cement plus a special additive. My second (but main) question was, "Does it react the same way to plasticisers, retarders and other admixtures?" - or in essence, is it just as easy to create a batch to send through a concrete pump? According to the gentleman I spoke to, the answer was 'yes'.

The main thing lacking from the show was the big machines you normally see at these things. It was clearly not possible to put a large mobile concrete pump or batching plant on the floor of this particular exhibition space and the only large piece of kit was parked outside across from the entrance.

I think it is good to have a concrete specific show in London - there are certainly a lot of people in the industry working close by. Although it certainly wasn't packed when I was there, which was around the middle of the day on Wednesday.  It was suggested that many people would turn up later in the afternoon when they had finished on their various building sites.

Perhaps the next one will evolve to be at a venue with more scope for larger equipment as well...

Still Hold The Record

I was recently looking into records for concrete pumping and was pleasantly surprised to find that we still hold the word record for vertical distance pumping of 715m which was achieved using a Schwing SP4000S stationary concrete pump by the team working on the Parbati Hydroelectric Project in northern India back in 2009.

The project was to create two pressure shafts each 1550 m long x 3.5 m diameter inclined at 30° to create a vertical drop of 750 metres. The main contractors, Gammon India Limited, chose Schwing-Stetter to provide all the concreting equipment for the job including batching plants, transit mixers and concrete pumps.

The two tunnels had to first be excavated with a TBM from the bottom up and then a steel liner was installed by lowering each 6 meter section from the top and welding it in place as they went. The surrounding annulus then needed to be back-filling with concrete (around 7,000m³ for each shaft) and this was pumped from the foot of the shaft upwards over a total 1.5km length (and vertical rise of 750m) and into place. We are talking nearly ¾ of a kilometre upwards here!

A total distance pumped of 1½km in a single line push would be impressive in it's own right without even having any vertical component. Setting the vertical record at 715 metres at the same time is astonishing.

The concrete pressure reached was over 220 bar as they pumped to the top section and the concrete at the top continued to flow at 12m³/hr.

What is even more astonishing is that the SP4000 which did the work is a medium range pump and not even Schwing's most powerful model, which is the SP 8800. In addition to that, the only ware parts that needed changing  during the 7,000m³ concrete pour (plus around 2,000m³ of water) were two kidney seals.

To get some idea of the high specification of the machinery we are dealing with here, when cleaning out the pipe with water any gap between the main wearing parts in the pump would have made it impossible to generate the water pressure required. It would have come squirting out of the smallest of gaps. However even after setting such a record pumping concrete, the SP4000 was able to pump water at this pressure - proof of the self-sealing and low wear features of the Schwing ROCK valve.

The Schwing SP4000 not only set the world record for concrete pumping, it took the world record in its stride and kept going! What an amazing piece of engineering!

Schwing Visible From Space

It seems our equipment has been captured by the Google satellites working away in Chiswick last year. If you visit W4 5XU on Googlemaps you will see building No 7 of the Chiswick Park development in the process of being built. Circled above are the low emission Schwing SP2800 static pump and the SPB30 placing boom used to build the new 12 floor, 31,000 m² building designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners.

Thanks to Andrew from Camfauds who kindly alerted us to this. They were supplying the Schwing concrete pumping equipment to Careys who had the contract for the building.

The structural work was finished earlier this year and building No 7 is currently being fitted out and should be ready for new tenants towards the end of the year.