Piling
After the Piling Rig arrived beginning of November, we had to wait a little for all the Pile casings to arrive in order to start piling.
Our piling guy, Gareth , was great in sorting everything out and working around the issues we had on site.
Due to the access problems, I really didnt fancy putting down a piling mat for the rig to stand on(basically just Gravel/Crushed stone put down to build a solid base for the rig-this is often needed and required by quite a few companies-depending how bad the grounds are) .
This would have meant to transport a couple of tons of Gravel into the site by wheelbarrow, and me and my back are really glad it wasnt necessary.
We where both comfortable that we could sort some kind of Platform for the Rig out if needed and so Gareth started the piles on the end of the building where there still was a solid tarmac base from before for the rig.
The Piles went in very smoothly and over the total of 30 piles , we had only 1 obstruction, where I had to dig down around 1.5 meters in order to remove an old brick wall that was buried deep under the surface :
We did have some minor issues with the piles moving from their original starting point due to some rock/hard bits in the way on the first few meters.
This resulted in 3-4 piles being out of their marked spot by approx.10cm.
It should normally be possible to compensate this with the ring beam widths. Worst case will be that the ring beam has to be made 5-10cm wider than planned, but this might be a good idea in any case.
In hindsight this could have been avoided by pre drilling all of the piles, exactly like Gareth wanted to.
I stopped him as I wanted as little spoil as possible, not realising that the spoil of 1 pre-drilled hole is hardly a wheelbarrow full.(I realised this later on when we predrilled near the sewer system and the very weak boundary wall) .
(Here is 1 Pile going in approx. 15cm from the 300 year old wall . It s shaking a bit, but holding up)
Our piling guy, Gareth , was great in sorting everything out and working around the issues we had on site.
Due to the access problems, I really didnt fancy putting down a piling mat for the rig to stand on(basically just Gravel/Crushed stone put down to build a solid base for the rig-this is often needed and required by quite a few companies-depending how bad the grounds are) .
This would have meant to transport a couple of tons of Gravel into the site by wheelbarrow, and me and my back are really glad it wasnt necessary.
We where both comfortable that we could sort some kind of Platform for the Rig out if needed and so Gareth started the piles on the end of the building where there still was a solid tarmac base from before for the rig.
The Piles went in very smoothly and over the total of 30 piles , we had only 1 obstruction, where I had to dig down around 1.5 meters in order to remove an old brick wall that was buried deep under the surface :
This resulted in 3-4 piles being out of their marked spot by approx.10cm.
It should normally be possible to compensate this with the ring beam widths. Worst case will be that the ring beam has to be made 5-10cm wider than planned, but this might be a good idea in any case.
In hindsight this could have been avoided by pre drilling all of the piles, exactly like Gareth wanted to.
I stopped him as I wanted as little spoil as possible, not realising that the spoil of 1 pre-drilled hole is hardly a wheelbarrow full.(I realised this later on when we predrilled near the sewer system and the very weak boundary wall) .
(Here is 1 Pile going in approx. 15cm from the 300 year old wall . It s shaking a bit, but holding up)
This was all done in 4-5days with a decent 7-8piles/day going in. We went to depths of around 5m average, with some piles going down 6m, some only to the minimum requirement by our Structural Engineer, which was 4m. 1 pile went down 3m and then didn't move an inch no matter how hard it was hit so we decided to leave it.
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