Willi Schwalm and the HutlinerPacker®
Role model and original

Work in sewers is nothing for the weak at heart. The people and equipment involved must be able to withstand rough going. Yet nonetheless, those doing the work need to rely on fine intuition as well. Willi Schwalm knows this craft from way back. Experience has shown that hardware used in sewers, to be effective and reliable, must be of the highest quality. Anything else is of little or no use. Willi Schwalm has built HutlinerPacker® in his machine shop for many years. For those not familiar with these machines, they are special systems used to install short liners and hat liners in underground sewer lines. The process is similar to stent insertion as practiced in vascular surgery. Willi Schwalm has a patent for his hat liner packer. And his rights to the names HutlinerPacker® and Hutliner® “Hutliner” (the original German term) are also protected by law in Germany.

 

 

A HutlinerPacker® is essentially made up of steel and rubber. That sounds simple enough, but in reality it is not. It must be designed, measured, cut and welded together. Nephew Bruno Schwalm is responsible for all steel working operations. Willi Schwalm takes care of all matters relating to rubber materials, assembly and quality control. Selected suppliers provide cut-to-size components made from premium materials. The craftwork done here is a cross between manual craftsmanship and an industrial joint venture. The results: top-of-the-line machines which can be sent into sewer lines between 100 and 800 mm in diameter to effect remote-controlled repair. And why the hat? To line and therefore resurface defective junctions between the main line and lateral branch lines. And there is a lot of work to be done here. The penetration of extraneous water or outflow into the ground can often be observed at the seams of the supply lines to the main pipe.

Willi Schwalm has long passed the company management on to his son Martin. However, Willi Schwalm still manufactures HutlinerPacker® in his workshop at Schulstraße 10 in Bad Hersfeld-Asbach. You frown when you ask how many have been built to date. At the beginning there was no counting. Today it has long exceeded the serial number 2,000 (as of 2019). Two thousand devices. That's not a lot, one might think. But a HutlinerPacker® is not a game boy. Only specialist companies own such a device. There are copycat products. But they are often of no use. You don't have to ask anyone in the industry about Willi Schwalm. There is hardly a specialist company that does not at least use a HutlinerPacker® from Willi Schwalm or knows its application. After all, there is plenty to do for everyone. The competition runs a distance longer than from here to the moon. Imagine that: around 500,000 km of public sewer network in Germany alone. Sewerage is an endless story. The same applies below: there is always something to do.

Just a stone's throw away, at Asbacher Industriestrasse 16, in the sister company Schwalm Robotic, the HutlinerPacker® are packaged and sold. Here, where Schwalm is increasingly devoting itself to partial sewer rehabilitation and robotic. Here too: all originals. All that is Schwalm.