Construction

Time for a review of construction in general and concrete more particularly.

Their spades and shovels have no handles, following the Continental and Irish fashions.

Their wheelbarrows are built on wooden A-frames, with the wheel at the apex of the A, rather than on tubular steel, as is the case with us.

They do not seem to have caught onto the UK fashion for luffing boom tower cranes, and while you do see them here, it is mostly the horizontal jib sort.

Their concrete pumps and mixer lorries are similar to ours, but tend to come larger, and some of them run to six axles, which I have not seen in the UK. The one illustrated was in Hull, too far away to get a decent shot. But there was a four axle mixer truck waiting in the street where I was. I continue to wonder what happens at the end when you have completed the pour but the pumping tube is still full of concrete. How do you get it all out and where does it go?

The local paper in Watertown had an article on pouring the concrete for the floor of a box store in the winter when it was something ridiculous like 30 below (I think they mainly talk Farenheit in US weather). They needed space heaters, presumably very big ones, for this to work. The floor is still up there as they only had the grand opening quite recently; possibly Stratton Hardware, but their web site (reference 3) says nothing about how or when the store was built and I cannot now track the article down.

But sidewalks is what I know most about, having spent quality time on sidewalks over the last few weeks.

Most of the sidewalks are made of concrete slabs, maybe six feet square, cast in situ on top of a steel mesh laid directly on top of something like our type 1 sub-base, roughly what you would get if you washed all the cement out of wet concrete; not much sand and very little silt. Somehow they get a striated, rough finish, presumably anti-slip, but I never saw them doing this, so I don't know how they do it. Just about visible if you click on the illustration at reference 2.

Then there are the kerb options. Sometimes the kerb is cast, all of a piece, with the slab. This might or might not include a rounded steel corner to protect the upper road side edge. Sometimes the kerb is separate, usually concrete and about eight feet long, far too big to lay by hand as used to be the custom with us, presumably pre-cast. And sometimes they use sawn pink granite, presumably for the tonier, down-town areas.

Must make a proper study of how they handle the corners before we fly out. At the time our house was built in Epsom, they still went in for both properly shaped corner pieces and curved kerb stones, while now they just seem to butt the regular straights up any old how. A loss of craftsmanship & polish to the business.

Reference 1: for some good pictures of big concrete equipment see http://www.putzmeister.com/enu/index.htm, an outfit of whom I had not heard before today.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/fossil-leaves.html.

Reference 3: http://www.strattonhardware.com/.