Here are some big cranes we had on a pile driving job back in about 1975. This was in near Charleston, S.C. I believe we had about 1500 piles to install. Concrete piles were one piece and 60' long. The steel H piles were about 120' long and welded in 2 sections. I remember we had a LOT of failed concrete piles and had to drive a new one for each pile that failed. The pile driving rigs ran on compressed air. I know that is part of the reason I can't hear well now. The exhaust would make your ear drums hurt.
I can't imagine concrete holding up too well to driving... or is it something that is done all the time?
It is/was done a lot. They put about 6 pieces of 3/4" plywood in the pile driver head to soften the blow on the pile head. The piles went down pretty good, most of the time. You could tell when one was going to fail as it would start spalling concrete chunks right before it broke.
Building I-26?
No, we were building a big welding facility for General Dynamics. The place was designed to build aluminum spheres to haul natural gas from Algeria to the U.S. This was probably in 1975. They were going to put 5 into each oceangoing ship. They had tried building them outside, but the temperature changed so much during the day that they could not get the sections to fit together for welding. Our company designed enclosed structures where they could weld indoors. I think the plant is still there, in "Goose Creek"?? S.C. Jeff
Sounds like you were on some very interesting job sites. Thanks for sharing
There's a place in Australia that specializes in pre-cast concrete posts for livestock fencing. These posts are meant to be driven in like a wooden post with a pile driver and the major selling point is they don't burn or rot. They have through holes cast into them to run the wire through so no other pieces are needed when stringing fence.
That is pretty neat. I have not seen that around here, or anywhere actually. In Kansas I saw fence posts that were cut out of limestone. These were used as corner posts back in the old days. Jeff
I knew a guy that made some good sized concrete posts a long time ago... but it wasn't cost effective compared to wood so he never sold many.
Good old Vulcan hammers.Things tend to break a lot on them after a couple of hundred piles. Drove hundreds of timber piles with this 06 and a #1 Vulcan. Thanks for the pictures.
Did you wear earplugs? The exhaust on those Vulcan hammers is pretty intense. Do wood piles tend to splinter or break much? I have never been around wooden piling when it was being driven into place. Jeff
Yes i did wear earplugs most of the time, amazingly my hearing is pretty good still. The worst of the exhaust on those Vulcans is the hunks of ice that would blow off if you were not keeping the air dryed . We would go thru cases of methyl hydrate.That job was 3000 densification piles ,driven in poorly investigated ground. They finally paid us per pile whether it went in 10 ft. or all the way. Lots of breakage as most of the piles were hemlock and way off being actual piling grade.Some of the heads were close to bursting into flames when they reached cutoff height on the ones that didnt break. 8 months of fun n games. I like your picture from the 70s./Good old days .
Tugger2 all the wood pilings one sees around the Island and coast what kind of wood are they??
Yep, it's still there. Goose Creek is about 40 miles from me.
Well, I guess we built it pretty solid then. That was a long time ago, and it has seen a few bad storms since then.
watched some concrete pilings being pulled from the turtle river near Brunswick ga couple years ago. huge barge huge crane and 4 huge air compressors. they would punch 3-4" pipe down along side them clamp the pipe to the piers turn the air loose. the crane would tighten up put a steady pull on them then kinda shake em a little`15 to 20 minutes of that they would come slowly out the mud. that was probably drill rod they were shoving down cause none was bent
We drove hundreds of 18" octagonal concrete piles us to 140 ft long in Long Beach Harbor when I worked for GF Atkinson back in the 80s. We modified many piers to accommodate the then new supertankers. We would stick a 10" thick laminated plywood block in the bonnet for a drive cushion. When the cushion started on fire or started to kick due to one side failing faster we would pry the plug out and install a new one. If we never reached the desired bearing we would use a steel 12' long collar and add on 20 ft. Interesting thing about concrete pile is that at 120 ft the point is still receiving 90+ percent of the hammers energy. A 84 pound per foot H beam would only have 15% of hammer energy at the tip at that depth. The steel loses the rest in steel compression each blow. The concrete has little compression.
That looks like a awful big hammer being used for them sticks. No wonder they shattered. One could throttle them down and try to get a half stroke but that never seemed to work consistently. I believe Vulcan was bought out by Conmaco. That hammer looks to be about the size of a Conmaco 200 at about 40 thousand ft. pounds of energy per blow.
Most piling is fir ,especially if creo treated. The odd time we have run across cedar piles,kind of like finding gold.
The06 is 19000 and the #1 is 15000 ,both hammers are your typical for timber piles out here. That job was plagued with bad ground and the piles were just logs not piling grade hence a lot of breakage. In reality if you are trying to drive timber to a certain tip elevation thru boulders thats what happens when the higher ups tell you to just keep going,we have boreholes that tell us differently.Had to take a 270 and dig down about 15' and find some 3' boulders to convince them after too much wreckage.
As long as we're talking piles.... We are supposed to drive some 2"shd80 pipe again, we usually just take a full 21.5 footer and cinch a 6' choker around it then use the hoe the pull it down and in about 5-8 feet in this farmland soil... then you reach the hoe bucket over top and 'tap' them down to where you can get the heel of the bucket on them and drive em' the rest of the way home.... my question is since we don't have a pile driving hammer unfortunately what do you think about using a breaker hammer with a double ended sleeve - plate welded between the sleeves to drive with??? I figured a piece of 1/2 or maybe a couple different plates to conform to the moil on the hammer... ours is pretty well short and rounded anyways. This would only be used for finishing the drive because I don't think the hammer will reach very high and still be vertical. We'll be putting in 20-25 of em' I think.... and we're going with half sticks because I don't think you gain much in the way of bending strength after 5-6 feet of good soil penetration. This is mainly for a side load retainer type of fence. I keep trying to figure out a better way to do this and we only do these once or twice a year so any thoughts or suggestions are welcome Here are some parts I came up with earlier as I'd have to throw this together tomorrow on site If we go with it. The left piece is 24 inches long to drop on the pile and already has a 1/4 cap welded on the right end, then I'd add a piece of 3/8th then the piece on the right which also has some quarter inch welded to it.. would also need to shorten the right piece up as I don't think the moil on our hammer is much longer than 5-6 inches anymore.
It should work pretty well if the geometry of your machine will follow the lenght of the pile. Ive seen guys drive 8" pipe (competitors with excavators ) succesfully. You might consider your hoepac with a pocket welded on the bottom plate,see lots of fence post driven with those.If you had a ton of these to drive a small drop hammer could be rigged with a hyd cylinder pushing on multi parts of cable,reveverse effects of multi parts of line.Id build one of those if i didnt have a yard full of conventional cranes.Barring all that use short lenghts of pipe with threaded couplers and you should be fairly efficient.
Have thought about either welding or making a slip-on shoes for the plate compactor we have for the 120 but I think all we'll have on this job is the 36 and the 60 and while the 60 is plumbed for everything we don't have anything but buckets for it right now... I'll weld that thing up in the morning and see what happens.
If you havent got too far fabbing your driver up yet, think about some heavier plate for your drive cap.
I wish I'd have seen your post before I started... Actually things went pretty good... yeah that 1/4 + 3/8 + 3/16 layering of plate dented really quick!! first pile and it had a 3/4 deep impression to match our bit on the hammer so I quick and filled it in with some .035 wire three more piles and it was getting deep again so I filled it in again... after that it was pretty good. I cut the hammer side to 4 inches deep... as we only have about 5.5 inches on the hammer left This is after the third post, and I had welded it once after the first drive. The cx36 will reach to just about 10 feet and still be 90degrees at the hammer, so we tapped then to 9 feet with the cx60 to start them then I followed up with the hammer... took less than a minute to drive each one
Then I welded the same pipe as a top rail, hopefully it protects the fence a bit more...I'd have rather went with bigger pipe.... but these guys are so cheap.....would have rather went with more piles per lineal foot too... but....cheep cheep!!!
Nice work! You cant beat looking at a straight line of piles like that at the end of the day.Big or small they are all an equal challenge to get down to tip elevation.I find anything to do with pile driving needs all the meat you can put into the driving gear. Do you have any old hammer bits that you could trim the end off flat and use? With that and a piece of 1" plate for your drive cap and sched 80 pipe you could lots of those piles.
No extra stuff for the hammer unfortunately... one of these days I plan on doing a rebuild on it- when that happens I'll probably look at getting some extra bits for it and flatten one like you said.
Just for curiosity, what size is your breaker?
I think it's around a 450 pounder.
Hitting a boulder sure can cause things to go south it a hurry. A side kick in the pile on the one blow and a busted pile on the next blow as you try to get it stopped. Been there many times myself. Even on the concrete pile, when spalding starts on one blow its time to get moving as she gonna explode before the hammer gets stopped. They do not work well in rock encounters either.
From the skill set of the drivers in the lots you repair, I think the only thing you've done here, is doubled your repair work. 2 fences to fix instead of one. Now if you could have set those concrete blocks all around the interior , cabled to your driven in post- that might save the fences....
Well.... Not exactly. This is just to keep the ecos from sliding and to give a bit of backup to them. We have some fence lines with 16 foot jerseys in front of them pinned together an they will tip over a dozen of them with one trailer! The ecoblocks also protect the fence even when they get pushed into it as the fence doesn't get snagged and dragged hardly ever.
A lot of time we also drill and pin rebar behind ecos but depending on the paving thickness and how close to the edge of paving they are the results are sometimes not very good...