Pile driving on soft ground - GIF

**Altair** · Oct 28, 2021, 03:42 PM

Pile driving on soft ground.

Previously:

Vibratory pile driver - GIF
Pile driving in China - GIFs
Pile driving with spring-assisted hammer attachment - video
Solar pile driver - video
Human pile driving - GIF

**Ralphxyz** · Oct 29, 2021, 07:10 PM

As soft as the ground is how much weight would the piles support? There was no "driving" just pushing.

Ralph

**Frank S** · Oct 29, 2021, 09:30 PM

Originally Posted by Ralphxyz

As soft as the ground is how much weight would the piles support? There was no "driving" just pushing.

Ralph

not much but the idea may not be to support weight as much as to provide some stability for the sheet coffer dam they are putting the piles next to.
I was once contracted to build a new harbor and sea wall for a marina on a lake. Replacing 2 previous contractors 1 for non performance the other because his equipment just wasn't up to the task. his driver was a 600 lb drop hammer his tower was 28 feet to the crown from the water and his draw works was powered by an 8 hp engine slow to raise the hammer, Rod said it took his machine 60 taps to drive to the specified 20ft depth. When I built my machine the hammer weighed 1800 lbs the crown was 40 feet above the water powered by a 6 cyl Ford engine the hammer could go up as fast as it could fall.
the Marine engineer watched us drive our first pile in 6 strikes but I wasn't going all the way to the crown on the last 2 strikes only about half way , He wanted to see what my rig could do with a full stroke on the last 2 strikes . the piles were 60 ft long water was 30 feet deep and we were leaving them 8 to 10 feet above water line. We had to weld several feet onto that pile to make it stick out of the water as far as the others. All he said was if we weren't careful he'd have to buy more pipe

**nova_robotics** · Nov 2, 2021, 03:14 PM

I don't understand. Are the friction piles a bandaid for the sheet piles because the ground is too soupy?

**Frank S** · Nov 2, 2021, 05:02 PM

Originally Posted by nova_robotics

I don't understand. Are the friction piles a bandaid for the sheet piles because the ground is too soupy?

There is that possibility or maybe probability.
They could be setting the piles as an added insurance because the sheet piles may not have been ordered long enough to have been driven to a sufeincent depth to do what ever they were intended to do.
They appear to be working on the mud side of a levee so this is most likely just an effort to retard erosion or under cutting during storm surges