The Contig 600 is a pile cropper designed to reduce piles in a contiguous or secant wall formation where only two sides of the pile can be exposed and space between piles is tight.
For the first two weeks of this month it was used by Churngold Construction, working on behalf of Halsall Construction, to prepare the way for a new harbourside office block, Cargo Work, in Bristol.
Over the last few months, significant progress has been made on the development in Wapping Wharf. The concrete floor decks, load bearing internal walls and steel frames are now complete, paving the way for the creation of new workspace.
The 20,270 sq ft Bristol development is housed within the stone walls of the former J S Fry warehouse, now fully restored and exposed following the removal of the roadside walls that previously ran along Wapping Road.
Main contractor Halsall Construction handed Churngold Construction the contract for groundworks and reinforced concrete basement. A part of Churngold’s brief was the cropping of the concrete piles used in the development. These had to be dealt with efficiently, speedily and safely, with the resulting concrete residue reprocessed in an environmentally friendly manner. Churngold turned to National Pile Croppers (NPC). “Churngold invited us to site to see the difficulties faced with cropping of the piles,” said NPC director Lee Aston. “I must admit the complexities of site, and the way the piles have been laid out, presented a challenge. Fortunately, we have been working on an updated version of our Contig 600 cropper. This would prove to be the ideal tool for the job.”
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He continued: “With the new Config 600, two hydraulic rams mounted opposing at 180o provide the ability to position the cropper over the wall to reduce the piles. The wall thickness of the cropper allows it to slot between contiguous piles with spacing as close as 50mm.
“The original Config 600 was larger than anticipated, but has the ability to crop 750mm piles, whilst this is a good problem to have, it also caused issues addressing a 600mm contiguous pile with a 150mm (nominal) pile spacing. In order to develop a cropper suited to Churngold’s requirements, we aimed to build a cropper that had a reduced width, maintaining its structural strength, whilst also keeping the overall dimensions tight to a 600mm pile.”
The design and the development of the new Config 600 overcame issues highlighted during stress analysis while attempting to achieve the optimal jaw-to-pile interface angle. NPC found the right balance and the latest version enabled Churngold to crop 600mm and 450mm diameter augured piles in a contiguous wall format. These were installed leaving a nominal spacing of 150mm between adjacent piles, which provided a perfect case study for using the new Contig 600 V2.
Lee Aston concluded: “Feedback from the guys (Churngold Construction) on site has been highly complementary stating the cropper is performing better than expected, and it was expected to do well. The change in width dimension (of the new Config 600) had a major impact resulting in piles in the middle of the wall being able to be reduced where other croppers would foul on the adjacent pile resulting in the need for further cropping from the end of the wall of piles. The weight and centre of gravity of the new Config 600 has also been moved to provide noticeably superior manoeuvrability – all this whilst also maintaining the excellent pile finish expected of the NPC range of pile croppers.”
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