Animated Ability

The people at our Head Office in Germany have been busy of late. Alwyne, one of our very good sales chaps came back from Bauma with a memory stick for me with some really good animations which the Germans had put together. They show the new S 38 SX 'Reptor' boom opening and reaching into some really tight spots.

One of this blogs most popular posts has been the one showing the S 36 S reaching into the workshop space. These animations show how the new Reptor (as in Reptile - Snake like flexibility...) can reach into a difficult space in a similar manner, and also shows it opening up under a restricted height (7.4 metres since you ask).

I have put them both on a new web page on out website. You can also see them below...

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 T-Shirt

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...

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):

Surrounded By Work

How many times have you learned about something new that you'd never noticed before and all of a sudden you see examples of it everywhere you look?

Early last year I considered the fact that when learning how something is done, we often find we didn't even realise there was a problem needing this solution prior to finding out about it. I had not really previously considered how concrete reached the top of high rise buildings before finding out that we can pump it with specialised Schwing machines.

I suppose partially related to this is that once you are aware of a 'new' technology, suddenly you start seeing it all over the place.

It is probably just a random cluster but I have recently noticed a lot of concrete pumping equipment about the place as a drive about London on various errands. I will often find myself trying to identify the model of concrete pump or placing boom and see which company is responsible for it. Over the last week or so I have whizzed past a Camfauds mobile pump (I think is was an S 28 X) working on a site very close to my home, a Byrne Brothers Separate Placing boom near the city (pictured left and identified by our chief engineer as an old 3 section, 27 metre Schwing boom - still going strong), a mobile pump in Putney, one or two Concrete Mixer trucks bearing the Schwing Stetter name and a couple of our mobile pumps being driven to or from site as I have travelled around. I do try to get a picture if my camera is to hand and I'm walking or it's safe and convenient to stop. I took the picture above of a Schwing SPB 30 Separate Placing Boom a short while back when visiting the Isle Of Dogs. I hope this isn't all a sign of impending madness...

Recycled Investment

I was very pleased a couple of days back to go and visit a site in East London where the company MixIt have just installed a new Stetter Concrete Recycler.

The new site is on the Thames just East of London City airport and they produce a lot of fresh concrete at their new facility there.

Jim Taylor who owns the business saw the value many years ago in recycling the leftover unused concrete because it gives him free aggregates and water to use in fresh batches that he would otherwise have to pay for.

It also saves him from having to pay to send all that unused concrete to landfill, which, leading to less landfill is also positive thing for the local community and environment as a whole.

It was interesting seeing it all working together, and in conjunction with a silt press machine for further cleaning of the recycled water.

Normally extra cement would need to be added to fresh batches where recycled water collected in this way was being used but not here. Jim added a silt press machine to clean the water to the point that it can be used just as fresh water in new batches.

The reclaimed aggregates add up to several tons per day and while not a lot in the grand scheme of things, that is money still saved. In fact Jim, who has another similar set up at a different location said that the whole system at the other location, including the silt press paid for itself in six months.

Having the recycling system also allowed the company to gain it's ISO 14001 certificate which is quite good for landing certain jobs where the end client is concerned about environmental impacts.

All in all it seems that MixIt's investment in a Stetter Recycling system is paying serious dividends.

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.