Who knows anything about this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA7mF8zErOk

Squeezer....I bet Big Bob Weatherton could shed some light..not that he's old or anything like that...

It's a "Hopper" truck crane supporting a line from a truck-mounted Squeeze-Crete.  There were Squeeze-Cretes on the East Coast, when I got into the racket (1971), but they didn't do too well.  The crushed aggregates easily punctured the roller tube.  They did much better with river stone mixes, out West.

The rotary vacuum pump is still being manufactured.  Putzmeister's "Pumi" can be ordered with the rotary pump or with a piston pump.  The current design of the roller tube is much more dependable.

Many pumping companies started out with this type of pump.   It was one of the first types of pump that could pump lightweight concrete...replacement tubes & other internals were a good business when used in this application.

Let me tell you, when that squeeze tube would blow in the vacuum drum like whole9yards (Don) was talking about, you really had a mess on your hands. Inside that drum, your rollers would wear out as well as what they called the 'backing pad set' which was like a rubber trough formed onto a sheet metal backing that the rollers would roll the squeeze tube flat into in order to push the 'crete through the pipeline.

Good old Phil Jory (in Atlanta) made a damn fine living with these pumps right up to the latter years of his life. Bill Davis (Midwest in Indianapolis) I believe got his pumping operations started with one of these pumps too.

Quite a few of the old squeezers made their way into the explosives end of mining where they would use 'em to pump the ammonium nitrate into the boreholes. Obviously a more gentle 'push' is required here.

These pumps are still popular for certain applications...Blastcrete for one makes this type of unit & of course the ITC made somewhat of a comeback of the squeezer not that long ago too.

Gary Nichols once told me that, while at PACPUMP, they used a Squeezer to pump fish fingerlings from a tanker up to lakes to stock them.  The kill ratio, from crushing them with the rollers, was less than it was when they were humped in using 5 gallon backpacks.

Gary brought a 4" Squeezer to Atlanta for us at PUMPCO (pre Ainsworth).  He had more 4" system on the truck than we had in the whole yard.  5" was pretty much all we used.

Nobody would run it, so he took it to a job to "show us how to do it."  After much wailing on the 2-way, a few of the guys had to go bail him out.

He sent it back to Seattle, where it could make some money.

I remember "Dirty white boy " and "Guambat" having to bail him out on that thing. Dino warned Gary to stay in the office or he'd just cause more work for the rest of us. I learned on a squeezer and had some good luck with them but never in Ga. or Texas. As long as you pumped gout with just a tad of sand it worked well.It was a lot simpler to operate than a Thomsen 645 .