The third in our series of vulcanhammer.net ads for Pile Buck include this one, showing a Nilens diesel hammer driving sheet piling using a “spud” or “rail” type leader in the back. Nilens was one of Vulcan’s more interesting adventures in pile driving equipment. The method used is a typically European practice that has found its way to American sheet piling sites, mostly due to the Delmag hammer and its progeny.
More about European concepts of installing sheet piling are here.
On this, the twenty-second anniversary of the beginning of this site, we present another of the ads which Pile Buck allowed us to run in their books. It shows the Vulcan #1 hammer on the South Side of Chicago. It also features the URL of the vulcanhammer.info site, which is dedicated to Vulcan hammers and is a “child” of this effort.
We thank you for your support over the years and keep coming back.
This site has never had an “advertising budget” but in the last decade the publisher Pile Buck gave it the opportunity to advertise itself in its books Sheet Pile Design by Pile Buck and Pile Driving by Pile Buck. There were five in the series, and this is the first, using the assembly of the first 3100 hammer as a backdrop.
The ads were placed before the inception of the one site not mentioned on the ad: vulcanhammer.info, so the “Wave Equation for Piling” was still on this site. More about the Vulcan 3100 is here.
One of the concepts students in geotechnical engineering courses seem to have the most trouble with is estimating stresses in concrete piles during pick-up and setting them in place to drive. The basic problem is that it’s sometimes hard to get our heads around the analytical simplification of the actual situation. Let’s start by looking at the operation itself. These first photos come from a job in Delaware in 1998, using a Vulcan 530 to drive cylinder piles.
The pile starts on the ground. What we have here is “one-point pickup” where only one line is used to pick up the pile. It’s put in a certain place (more about that later) in this case using a “choker.” (Some piles have pickup lifting eyes, they are best cast into the pile at the time of manufacture.) In this position the pile is horizontal. Once the crane operator lifts the choker…
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Congratulations are in order to Jean-Louis Briaud, Ph.D., P.E., D.GE, Dist.M.ASCE, and Spencer Buchanan Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, for his election as President of the American Society of Civil Engineers for 2019-20.
Jean-Louis is an old friend and a great person. Our association goes back to the 1980’s when I was principal at Vulcan Iron Works and active in the Deep Foundations Institute. He has been an encouragement to me through the years, especially with this effort.
On this site he was featured for his “pet peeve” regarding consolidation a few months ago. He posed an interesting problem that needs some discussion. I believe he will challenge us to tackle other interesting and important problems during his term as President.
vulcanhammer.net 