Site Visit to Hughes & Salvidge
On Thursday 28th October Alex Sutton and Stuart Power; as part of their apprentice training visited a Hughes and Salvidge Demolition site in N. London. The objective of the visit was to give Alex and Stuart an appreciation of the applications which the machines Kocurek convert are used in. The visit was organised by Alistair Janson / Sales. Part of the day was discussing the activities sales undertake and to show it is not all about entertaining and that we also need to fully understand the customers needs and appreciate the pressures demolition contractors face in winning and undertaking projects.
Site Safety was of the highest priority and site Manager Wayne Geeves / Hughes and Salvidge signed us onto the site and made us all fully aware of the dangers before we were allowed to see the machines working. All suited and booted with Hard hats, boots and reflective jackets Wayne outlined the demolition project and showed us the programme of demolition works. We were taken to an old derelict factory which was of a brick and steel roof construction with concrete roof panels. This building was around 10m to 15m high. Wayne explained that one of his major headaches was identifying were all the services are i.e. Gas and electrical mains and that part of the delay on one of the buildings being demolished; was the disconnection a gas main; something you would want to cut with a scrap shear !
We then went to see the mobile plant working and amounst the various machines was the newly Kocurek converted Hitachi Zaxis ZX470LCH with the modular joint (as pictured). The new High reach equipment was on site sitting in its transport cradle, but unfortunately not going to be operated until the following Monday. However the machine was operating a large 10T scrap shear on its standard length equipment. Alex and Stuart were very impressed at the power of the Hydraulic shear, cutting main beams into short lengths ready to be loaded for scrap. Alex asked the site manager Wayne "why bother cutting the beams into such short lengths" and Wayne explained that to get a heavier and better load into the skips; cutting them into short sections was more efficient.
On completing our visit we thanked Hughes & Salvidge for allowing us to visit their site, especially the site manager Wayne who give up some of his valuable time to show us his project. Both lads covered in some concrete dust found the visit of great interest and both left with a better appreciation of the dangers and risks on a demolition site, but also how what start off as a sheet of plate metal in the factory ends up demolishing buildings around the world.
