Well. what a week.... Beside my normal million mile weekly drive I had the job of all Fail.. Damian Hurst (the artist type fella) and his wall of fail will be with me for a long time to come. I arrive at site nice and early and im told my the site foreman "so drive, how do you feel about what we are about to do" I ask "huh, its to early, what you on about? its a wall init?!?!" he replies "oh, you dont know....." I reply "dear god man, what are you on about, tell me now or ill be forced to break something" He then procedes to show me a bag of rock.. ROCK!.. 30mm agg, no smaller... im like "ok, whats this.." im told.. "oh thats the mix, but dont worry it will have plenty of cement" a quick call to my bosses and im told that the mix design has been queried as a non pump mix but we have been assured that with the pump specs ordered and the exact mix design this should pump, as such this is in the hands of the client and they are aware they may be difficulties.... ha! Now i love jobs that are a break from the norm, being based in London as you can immagine we have seen a lot of jobs that are out of the ordinary. So, anyway, this fella turns up in his nice clean suit tells me hes the 'specialist concrete technician' with over 25years experiance on this type of job. A few minutes chatting to him and its apparent he is some kind of excentric concrete guru who quite literaly knows it all.. so im happy, he expalains that he has adjusted the cement paste to act as a lubricant for the pump (where as the fines noramaly do that job) and he is 50% sure this will all go ok. I know 90% of operators would have stopped right there, wrapped up and left. However this is the sh!t i live for, I love this experimental stuff.. First load: lovely... he'd added a small amount of sand in order to assist the priming of the pump and getting going... second load.. nice and slow, everything going fine.. third load.... ....... FAIL! blocked solid from tip to cylinder.. blocked in pump, blocked in suck back... now i start to run around like some some of small fat ninja, waving my boom in the air etc... so finaly get her clear and off we go again.... FAIL!! 5.5 hours later i get her unblocked from the second attempt while they have been using a skip to try and complete the wall. Thankfully they didnt ask me to try again.. The moral of this story is that art looks nice just dont trust the bastards. Oh by the way this was meant to be a 50ft "egyptian" staircase going nowhere.. weird but cool. I was kinda disapointed it all went tits up. Rant over, I feel better.

Bug

You have more balls then me, I would not have done it. Did you have to break the boom down? Or did you clean it out without doing that.

Good luck next time

Ruck

it was a slight pain, i had to crack off all the 90's to try and find the blockages, once i had them out i managed to use a compressor on the sections still full. once cleared it was just the hopper to wash out. that in itself was a pain, there was so much rock at the bottom of the hopper i had to keep using my hammer to get it out. Still, just another days work.

bug what was the size of your boom??

schwing 34x thankfully not to big

your a better man than me I would have learned my lesson on the first go round not enough patience to have done it twice glad you got it all cleaned up and i hope you'll tell'm no next time