Build it with Bigfoot! Concrete Construction Footing Forms

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Bigfoot Systems®
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Manning Award
Carpenter Puts Construction Industry on Stable Footing
Nova Scotia inventor of Bigfoot Systems® wins $10,000 Manning Award

For a great Nova Scotia yarn, click Once upon a Bigfoot!

"I was lying over in the hole and it was just like a lightning bolt came over me: 'By God, there's got to be a better way than this!'"

- Kirk Swinimer
Bigfoot Systems® inventor

Calgary, Alberta - Bigfoot Systems® is the original and only code-evaluated, engineered form footing for construction tubes that meets or surpasses building codes throughout North America. Inventor Kirk Swinimer of Chester, Nova Scotia, has won a prestigious $10,000 Manning Innovation Award for his simple yet elegant solution to a long-standing construction challenge.

Swinimer, a professional carpenter and construction contractor, got the idea for his Bigfoot innovation while building a deck for a client. Like many construction jobs, it entailed building footing forms. These small wooden box frames are meant to form a base for and hold upright the fiberboard construction tubes in which concrete is poured to make the column-shaped footing.

Hey . . . wait just a darn minute!

Placing footing forms is a painstaking task. Typically, one worker must level the wooden boxes in the hole and fasten the construction tubes, while another worker lines up the tubes and ensures they're all level at the top. Two separate pours of concrete are required to finish the complete footing.

Swinimer struggled that day, on a site that included buried tree stumps and roots, to place the wooden footing forms on level ground. "I was lying over in the hole and it was just like a lightning bolt came over me: 'By God, there's got to be a better way than this!'""

Swinimer's patented Bigfoot Systems is a cone-shaped footing form made of lightweight, recycled, high-density polyethylene plastic. The top of the footing is simply attached with wood screws to a standard construction tube, and the entire footing form is put in place as one unit. The unit is then filled with one pour of concrete, creating a solid, uniform footing from top to base.

Reduce labour by 90%!

Bigfoot Systems enables one worker to place the footing, reducing labour costs by 90 per cent. The Bigfoot also forms a seamless, one-piece concrete footing. This eliminates air pockets in the concrete and, eventually, frost infiltration and cracking at the base of the footing that can occur when a round construction tube is attached to the flat surface of a conventional wooden footing form.

Bigfoot Systems has undergone rigorous independent testing, and is professionally code-approved throughout North America for residential building and many commercial and industrial applications.

Made in a small Nova Scotian community that had lost its mining industry, Bigfoot Systems® Footing Forms are now used throughout Canada and the U.S. and is exported to Japan, Panama, Norway, Germany and Iceland, with plans to expand to Australia and New Zealand.

Swinimer has won the $10,000 Manning Innovation Award sponsored by The Edper Foundation.

Since 1982, the annual Manning Awards program has encouraged and recognized leading Canadian innovators with more than $3 million in prize money. This year's four major winners, who will be honoured at the annual gala dinner October 3 in Halifax, will share a total of $145,000.

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