O. T. - Wunn WILD Diesel Piling Rig

Nice video Deas! I have never seen a side boom used to drive piling. I have supervised driving concrete piles with a diesel hammer hanging from a crane boom--sometimes free hanging and sometimes with leads. The diesel hammers are nice as you can regulate the energy with the fuel flow to the injector, plus the contractors liked them as they could eliminate the operator for a compressor or seam boiler, but they are real dirty to work under!!

that was very soft soil they were driving in--not even enough resistance in the beginning to keep the hammer running.--Most of the pilings we drove to 8 blows per inch and then considered it driven to refusal---anything much higher than that and the concrete would start destroying!

Deas,

Glad you posted this. I too have never seen (or imagined) a pile driving rig on a side boom. I would think this rig would be for very specialized construction because all the piling I ever did was always located in the bottom of an excavation or in water. I never had a job that could be driven at grade like in the video. Maybe they dug the hole for pile caps after the piling was in but depending on the spacing, that could prove to be a chore also. On one job, we had to pre-drill with the piles on 8' centers. In order to get the drill spoil out, we had to use a mini-excavator and a Bobcat sized loader. It proved to be a real PITA.

Dan, seems like I remember driving out on 14" dia pipe piles 145' long at 15 blows per inch. Bedrock was over 200' down so they were just using skin friction to hold the weight of the structure (a steel mill.)

JanM