The title of the post is the pile driving company. Here’s the pile driving beast above. The pile driving machine is on the right, and some kind of control unit is on the left. These are powered by a diesel generator, which you see below.
The reason the generator is in the air, and it looks like the middle of the night, is because one of my neighbors complained to the city I was repairing my foundation! Like I had a choice of course. She complained about the disruption to the neighborhood by the noise and presence of heavy equipment on the street. This in turn led the city to come out with a fine tooth comb, go through all of my permits, and demand I follow all the rules to a tee.
This meant at the crack of dawn the pile driving company had to move their equipment from one side of the street to the other, and the placement of the equipment was measured to the centimeter. To satisfy my neighbor they had to place pieces of wood under their equipment, so the sidewalk wouldn’t be damaged, even though it had been on the sidewalk for two days by then already.
It also means instead of taking 4 days as originally planned it’ll now probably take 6 and span a weekend, meaning we all have to suffer from the disruption all that much more.
My neighbor by the way is Atelier Roos Sieraden, in Amsterdam.
Hanging from the pile driver is a large weight. It was a little hard not to be in the way when I took these pictures, and the space was very tight, so these pictures aren’t very good. Check out the guy’s mohawk!
This pile driver uses what they call the ‘Vibration-Free System’. It’s a little bit of a lie that it’s totally vibration-free, but it’s pretty close.
This seems to be part of the problem with Roos Sieraden complaining to the city, as she was probably expecting the whole neighborhood to be shaking as it did during the recent foundation work by my other neighbors, but that’s just not the case. It was probably a total loss-of-face for her to have complained so bitterly about vibrations that never occurred, that it just infuriated her that much more into complaining louder.
It’s actually kind of interesting because my other neighbor had his foundation done about a year ago by this same company, but it seems the technology and methods have changed since then meaning it’s a lot more quiet with fewer vibrations.
They are driving piles as I type this in the room directly below me, and it’s no problem. There’s a bit of noise and welding smoke, but hardly any vibrations.
As I understand, the piles are both driven from within the ground by this heavy weight, as well as sometimes from the top. The piles themselves are hollow tubes, that are to be later filled with cement. These metal pipes are in sections about 2 meters long, just about the clearance of the ceiling, and are welded to each other.
You can see the guy here fitting a new section of pipe over the driving weight.
Above is more of a distance shot. You can see the already driven pile on the floor to the right.
Here above you can see their collection of driving weights, together with an already driven pile in the middle.
So far I’m really happy with this company! They are really good natured, and seem to enjoy what they do. They’ve been really patient when it comes to my difficult neighbors. They also seem very skilled, which is very nice as it’s not uncommon with this kind of work to have the machines run by someone 25 years old with no previous experience. Of course I don’t have the bill yet…
Your neighbor is supposed to be a therapeutic place? haha..Guess it’s a place for customers who want to walk out angry (& wearing ugly jewelry) having absorbed their bad mood!
Sorry about neighbor trouble, but what a relief it must be to see the work being done so well!
It’s fascinating to see the timy machinery for such a hard work.
In the end the work took 7 days plus the weekend in between. We didn’t hear any more from the neighbor!
It’s been really interesting to not only see them work with the small equipment, but just how little disturbance they caused and how easy it was to live in the house at the same time.
There are many signs the ground under the house was disturbed, for example the old foundation settled a bit. This ground disturbance meant they had to reinforce one of my walls to keep it from crumbling. My house is also full of construction dust.
A few of the piles had to be driven harder than others. This is part of the ground disturbance, and the contractor warned me about this. Driving the piles means the ground gets compacted, so further piles need to be driven harder and the last few have to be driven the hardest. This meant near the end it was nosier with more vibrations.
At the very end, with very little damage to the house itself, they broke one of the main front windows! It’s quite a large, thick and expensive piece of glass to replace, but they promised to pay for it… Accidents happen.