I guess this counts as an excavator... Took these pictures of it yesterday on a project we're involved with... They're building a new powerline and they had this LoDrill there to dig holes for the foundations. It's very impressive to say the least! Don't know much about it, never got a chance to ask about it... Looks to me like they took a Cat 330B and converted it to what you see here. Enjoy!
That's pretty cool spitzair. I've worked around a number of foundation drills, but all mounted on truck chassis. I haven't seen one fitted to an excavator. Sure would be faster than setting up a truck on the spot.
The last 2 jobs I've worked on had drilling crews on site. The first was a crew drilling soil nails, project I'm on now involves drilling shafts for bridge columns. I've seen Lo-Drills before, but the crew drilling on this job is running IMT rigs. Their rig of choice on this job is an IMT AF250. The 250 is no longer produced, the 240 is pretty close though. Part my outfit's contract is to export the drill spoils for the drillers, so we have a hoe dedicated to loading our trucks with spoils. I've spent a few shifts loading drill spoils with the hoe and working with the drill crew, it's interesting work that's for sure. The last shaft I worked around was 98 feet in depth I believe and about 9 feet across.
98 feet - 9 ft across, that's a big hole. Were they using pipe casings in the hole or liner plates? Yeah, you loaded quite a bit of spoils for a hole that big.
Cat does all kinds of crazy things with teir trackhoes. I know Cat sells or is in conjunction with John Henry. It is a rock drill that pins on where the bucket usually is. They take off the counterweight and mount a seperate engine and air compressor for hole flushing. They are pretty neat. The aux engine's fuel system tees into the "host" fuel system and there is a whole mess of wires running to the cab for control and monitoring of the aux engine. They are a pretty shallow drill sytem. They have I believe a 16ft starter steel and something like a 12 foot second steel. The one I worked on had the Aux engine gone. Turns out the guy burned up the airend on the John Henry setup and a new on would cost like $50,000+! He bought a truck mount IR portable air compressor from us and mounted it one the plate where the John Henry setup was. He paid (I think)$17,000-$18,000 for th IR compressor and was tickled pink!