Show Report: World of Concrete 2015
Exuberance returns as the market heats up.
The hallmark of a great book or movie is the same as for a great trade show — when you are sorry to see it end. WOC 2015 will be remembered by many as the year that exuberance returned full force to this bellwether trade show. And boy, is it about time.
Official numbers told the beginning of the story: 55,779 attendees (compared to 48,000 last year), 1,460-plus exhibiting companies in more than 675,000 square feet of space (beating 2014 by 100,000 square feet). A one-year attendee gain of 15 percent for a show this size is impressive. If this trend repeats itself, WOC 2016 could exceed 64,000.
So who was here? While DeWalt was rather conspicuous by its absence from the show this year, Makita was packing them in with its crowd-pleasing four-stroke power cutter and a new 70-pound hammer that was happily decimating a big slab of that hard gray stuff. Adam Livingston, Makita senior product manager, walked us through some of its features.
“The new model HM1812 70-pound, 1 1/8-inch Hex AVT Breaker Hammer, features Makita’s Anti-Vibration Technology, a system of three components all working together to drastically reduce vibrations. The HM1812 hammer has one of the lowest vibration ratings in the industry at 6.5m/s².”
Those three components include an internal counterbalance (shown here in red) engineered
inside the tool, a key point of difference in Makita AVT tools. Next, the entire housing “floats” free of the hammer mechanism, which isolates vibration away from the user. Finally, rubberized, fiberglass-reinforced handles absorb remaining vibration to further reduce the amount of vibration that passes through to the user. The handles are reinforced to prevent breakage, a common failure area of breaker hammers.
“The HM1812 is launching here at World of Concrete and will be out in April/May,” Livingston said.
Makita conducted more cordless demos at this year’s show than ever before, led by the “1,090 inch-pounds of awesome” model XPH07 18V LXT brushless hammer drill. The tool was enlisted to perform a variety of job site tasks — such as mixing five-gallon pails of masonry mud and drilling step bits into corrugated metal — that have previously been the sole domain of corded tools.
Over at Metabo’s tent, Terry Tuerk and his team were keeping contractors at bay a little while longer as the industry anticipates the release of the company’s new 1,700-watt compact uber grinders, which are due to hit the U.S. market as you read this. Having seen them in action at the company’s plant in Nurtingen, Germany, we can tell you they are worth the wait.
What contractors were able to see and touch included Metabo’s W12-125 HD CED and W12-125 HD CED Plus systems.
“This tool is also offered in two versions, a W12-125 HD CED with a basic base plate and a CED Plus version that adds rollers to the base plate for effortlessly making perfectly straight cuts in concrete with an accessory guide rail, so you can use it the same way you would a track saw for wood,” Tuerk explained. “For free-hand cutting or crack chasing and similar work, the tool releases quickly and easily from the base.”
With perfect weather on tap and thousands of enthusiastic (and optimistic) attendees on hand, Tuerk’s summation of the show was no surprise. “It’s been just fantastic,” he said. “We have been busy every day.”
At MKT’s booth, national accounts specialist Charley Dowlearn was showing MKT’s new Sup-R-Stud+ IT Anchor.
“The Sup-R-Stud+ IT Anchor is an internally-threaded wedge anchor that mounts flush to the concrete,” Dowlearn explained. The advantage is that it eliminates the trip hazard of a stud anchor sticking up out of the ground. We also have an internally-threaded anchor for use with adhesive. It’s ICC rated for cracked concrete, and seismic and wind loading. It puts less stress on the concrete. And again, you don’t have the trip hazard.”
“Both of these anchors are new for us — this is their first World of Concrete appearance, so it’s turned out really well. It’s been a great talking point for us at the show.”
Similar to the action at Metabo’s booth, Mi-T-M equipment division manager Matt Hoefer was teasing attendees with hints of things to come, namely, a new Mi-T-M rotary screw portable air compressor.
“It will have a 38-hp engine and will produce 100 cfm at 100 psi,” Hoefer said. “It is coming this summer and we’re very excited about it.”
In the show’s Central Hall, the EZ-Drill booth was the place for highway gang-drills.
“This year’s show had a lot of traffic and we received interest in our popular slab rider models, especially the 210B,” said Randy Stevens, E-Z Drill’s vice-president of sales and marketing. “In addition, the show was a great venue for face time with our dealers to discuss the needs and wants they hear from contractors.”
The 210B SRA slab rider can stitch or drill horizontally, vertically or at an angle without disturbing the subgrade. The unit can drill 5/8- to 2 1/2-inch-diameter holes to 18-inch depths and has an auto-alignment feature that tracks the hole placement level for fast and easy repositioning. A roller bearing feed system provides friction-free drilling for longer wear life, less maintenance and minimized downtime.
Just three rows from E-Z Drill, at the Stihl installation, industrial product manager Dan Pherson was fielding a lot of interest in the smallest tool in the booth, Stihl’s recently released TSA 230, a 36-volt, cordless, Lithium-ion powered cut-off machine. With battery, it weighs just 12.5 pounds. He relayed how Stihl market research has identified an application where the TSA 230 can be immensely productive for contractors.
“We analyzed one of our TS500I gasoline powered cut-off machines that had been in the field with a masonry contractor and looked at how many times the machine had been started and how many hours it had been run,” Pherson explained.
“We discovered that the customer, who had owned his machine for two years, had slightly more than 100 hours on the machine — but had started it almost 5,000 times! He explained that as his crew lays block, they get to points where they need to make a cut to work their way around a light pole or an electrical fitting. They start the machine, make one cut, place the brick, and then they’re back to laying brick again. So that machine was frequently used to cut just one brick at a time.”
Pherson sees the Stihl TSA 230 as perfect for this kind of work.
“This is going to be an outstanding machine for that application, because you can just grab it, release the safety, squeeze the trigger and cut. You’re still going to need a gas-powered machine for long or deep cuts or heavily reinforced concrete, but for your onesies and twosies, you can actually get your job done faster with the TSA 230. Plus, it has zero emissions and much lower noise than a gas-powered machine.”
The 210B SRA slab rider can stitch or drill horizontally, vertically or at an angle without disturbing the subgrade. The unit can drill 5/8- to 2 1/2-inch-diameter holes to 18-inch depths and has an auto-alignment feature that tracks the hole placement level for fast and easy repositioning. A roller bearing feed system provides friction-free drilling for longer wear life, less maintenance and minimized downtime.
Next year — here before we know it
World of Concrete 2016 will be held February 2-5 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. You might want to mark your calendars now — if this year’s show was a true bellwether for how busy the industry will be the rest of 2015, then 2016 will indeed be here before we know it. CS
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