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.
Over in Saudi Arabia, what will be the tallest building in the world is currently under construction. Kingdom Tower in Jeddah will be over 1km high which is taller than four Canary Wharf towers standing on top of each other. It will house over half a million square metres of floor space across 240 floors. At 120m down, the foundations go deep enough to bury the London Eye or just leave the rooves of the three Barbican residential towers visible.
If you have already guessed that Schwing Stetter will be playing a major role in this development you would be absolutely correct. Indeed Schwing Stetter construction equipment and expertise is being used across the board.
To avoid long drives and unpredictable delays in the concrete supply, the concrete is being provided by two on-site Stetter HN 3.0Batching Plants. This is being pumped through 3,750 meters of pipeline by four Schwing SP 8800 D stationary pumps and placed by five Schwing Separate Placing Booms (3 SPB 35 and 2 SPB 30s). There are also four Schwing S42SX, truck-mounted concrete pumps.
Pumping concrete to these heights means that equipment will be working at pressures significantly above 200 bar. Every part of the pumping equipment, delivery line and fastening equipment will need to be reliable and durable so as to handle this pressure with high output volumes for the long period of time it will take to complete this project. This is when it's good to know about Schwing Stetter's reputation for reliability.
Given that a Schwing pump holds the record for the highest ever vertical pumping distance, it is perhaps not surprising that Schwing Stetter was asked to provide equipment and expertise for this work. For more details please see the full news story on our website.
Leading concrete frame specialists MPB Structures have just taken delivery of four new Schwing Concrete Pumps. MPB have been in the industry since 1987 but have only recently been a Schwing Stetter client, having previously sourced their concrete pumps elsewhere.
Having purchased a Schwing S36X late in 2014 and received it in early January 2015, they were so happy with the equipment and level of service from Schwing Stetter (UK) Ltd, that they placed further orders for a Schwing SP1800D tier 4i, 2 more S36X’s and an SP2800D. All have now been delivered.
Everyone here works very hard to ensure our customers get the best possible service and equipment and it is very fulfilling when this is recognised by our customers through further orders.We are extremely happy to be working with MPB who have invested in a broad range of Schwing Stetter technology and we hope this is the beginning of a long lasting partnership.
Yesterday we were officially recognised as an Investors In People accredited company.
According to the Investors in People website: "Investors in People signals an organisation that puts people first."
What this means for us is the recognition that Schwing Stetter (UK) values its employees and wants to see each member of the team reach their potential. It was also an opportunity to tighten up and formalise some of our internal processes.
The whole process began last year with an initial induction and staff interviews. Then with expert guidance we went through the process necessary to achieve the core standard. In many ways this just meant formalising things we were already doing. The very low staff turnaround rate already showed that people here feel valued and generally 'invested in'.
Some of the things that needed to be evident were staff:
being aware of their management line
feeling happy to contribute ideas
having the opportunity to progress in their career
having the opportunity to receive training
understanding where the company is going
having opportunities to discuss targets, achievements, shortcomings and possible solutions
not turning up each day just feeling like a number
Demonstrating all of these and other things has taken a short while but it has certainly been worthwhile for the company. It is also good news for our clients who can see that our staff care about the company, the products and service they are offering and the clients who benefit from them in the end.
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...)
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!
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!
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.
