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 […]
via Pile Buck Ads 3: Nilens Diesel Hammer Driving Sheet Piles — vulcanhammer.net
From the first time it produced drawings (the oldest on this site goes back to the 1870’s) until the late 1950’s, Vulcan produced all of its drawings using pen and ink, as described below (although I’ll bet that many weren’t drawn using the Rapidograph type pen shown below!) Many of these were drawn on linen. Above is an example of one, the general arrangement for the Vulcan 18C, from 1939. There are many more examples of these on the site.
More about Vulcan engineering is here.
via Hand drafting – TECHNICAL INK PENS — Construction and architecture
This post is something of a departure, in that it features the pencil sketch art of my great uncle, William H. Warrington (right, from his carte de visite.) But first some background is in order.
William H. Warrington was born 17 September 1846, grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He became the manager of the Vulcan Iron Works, the family business. Although he was very prosperous in business, he had an artistic side to him, and here we’ll present some of his pencil sketches. As is frequently the case in my family, I don’t have much “backstory” narrative for these, but what I do know I will share.
As best I can tell, most of these date from the 1860’s, when he was in his late teens. Some have an English or Scottish settings, and this may be from travels in the British Isles. His father Henry was an immigrant from Manchester, England, and his mother Isabella McArthur Warrington came from Scotland. Both made return trips to their native land; Henry in fact did not become a U.S. citizen until 1870, almost thirty years after he first came to the U.S.
Above: Two studies of young women.
William H. Warrington died 11 August 1921.
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 […]
via The Pile Buck Ads 2: Vulcan #1 Hammer in Action — vulcanhammer.net
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 […]
via The Pile Buck Ads 1: Vulcan 3100 Assembled — vulcanhammer.net
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.
Depending upon the configuration of the pile, it’s also possible to have two- and three-point pickup, as we can see from these photos, taken at the construction of a terminal in Portsmouth, VA, in 2005-6. The contractor is Weeks Marine, the same contractor that got Sully’s plane out of the Hudson after his famous “landing” in the river.
So how to we solve problems like this? Basically we assume that the pile is a horizontal beam, simply supported at the pickup points (or in the case of one-point pickup, at the pickup point and at the furthest end from the pick-up point) with the weight of the pile as the only load. One thing that can be done is to raise the distributed load of the weight by a factor for inertial effects during handling. An example of this is a 60′ long 12″ square concrete pile with a 50% increase for inertial effects with single point pick-up. We used the CFRAME program from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to analyse the beam, although most any beam software (or in some cases tables or hand calculation) can be used for this computation.
In this case we are displaying the output of CFRAME which shows each section of the beam/pile (i.e., one one side of the pick-up point and the other.)
According to the Prestressed Concrete Institute’s Recommended Practice for
Design, Manufacture and Installation of Prestressed Concrete Piling (1993), the maximum permissible stress (tension) for transient loads such as handling loads is as follows
For SI units, this works out to
Some specifications allow the prestress of the pile 
Other piles sizes and lengths can be computed using the methods described above.
Above is a valve gear diagram for the Vulcan 014 and 016 hammers. It shows the workings of the valve, its positioning during operation and other details. Although Vulcan made improvements after this drawing (valve liners and Vari-Cycle, for example) it shows the basics of the valve which has done well in Vulcan hammers for more than a century.
Above is a Vulcan diagram of the sheave and cylinder head assembly for Vulcan #2, #1 and #0 series hammers, which include the 06, 505, 506, 0R, 08, 010, 012, 508, 510 and 512 hammers. It includes the factory intended wire rope sizes for these hammers. Some additional notes are as follows:
The ad above is another Offshore Technology Conference ad from the early 1970’s. It was aimed at its industry: the oilfield was well endowed with hard-drinking, card-playing people, a simple fact that doesn’t fit into some peoples’ idealisation of the past. The onshore construction industry wasn’t much different, although the higher risks–and rewards–of the oilfield made everything more intense.
Contrast this with the following forty years later from Rusty Signor, then President of the Pile Driving Contractors Association and President of TX Pile, LLC, in an issue of Pile Driver:
In my last message, I ended with a different, more positive view on the news in our current world situation. This time, I am going to do another first: a book review. The book is Seven Men and The Secrets of Their Greatness by Eric Metaxas.
Certainly advice on engineering techniques, safety practices and legal tips are very important for our pile driving business; however, personal character development is also something to consider for most. You may or may not know of all the seven men in this book, but the ones you thought you knew are viewed from a very different standpoint than how you probably learned about them in school. The book focuses on their complete reliance on their spiritual calling. Since this is not a government publication, I can use the word God.
For instance, everyone knows about George Washington and the story of the cherry tree. However, did you know that he was a deeply religious man and that he relied on his faith in helping him make decisions? He prayed on his knees several times a day with a Bible before him. Washington believed that God had a special purpose for his life and that providence saved him from being killed. In one battle alone, three horses were shot out from under him and he had bullet holes through his hat and clothing. He empowered his men with God-filled inspiration and they would follow him anywhere. I bet you never read that in grade school.
Another man mentioned is Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. I recently watched the movie about his story, 42. Again, the movie didn’t really focus on Robinson’s critical reliance on his faith in God to be able put up with and finally put down all the Jim Crow nonsense. He had extraordinary athletic talent in basketball, football, baseball, tennis and track and field. Robinson also had a tendency for anger explosions dealing with racial injustices. His mother and preacher led to a deeper faith that controlled his anger and justice allowed would him only to be see won that with the restraint path to and love. The manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers was an extremely religious person who was looking for this sort of man: someone talented in baseball, but who also had a strong, Bible-based character. Everyone knows the rest of the story, but generally not the one centered on God.
In the business world, sometimes we get too caught up in our challenges with competition, problems with equipment, governmental codes, etc. We just need to stop and look up like these men did – to result in your success and happiness.
I’ve had experience on both the practical and “academic” sides of offshore pile driving and installation, but I’ve seldom seen a blunter and more accurate summary of the topic in the published literature than what’s above. Vulcan certainly experienced that during the offshore years.
The entire paper can be obtained here. The complete abstract is as follows:
Offshore pile driving is a high-risk activity as delays can be financially punitive. Experience of pile driving for offshore jacket structures where pile diameters are typically < 2m has led to the development of empirical pile driveability models with proven predictive capability. The application of these methods to larger diameter piles is uncertain. A major component of driveability models involves estimating the static resistance to driving, SRD, a parameter analogous to pile axial capacity. Recent research on axial capacity design has led to improved models that use Cone Penetration Test, CPT data to estimate pile capacity and include for the effects of friction fatigue and soil plugging. The applicability of these methods to estimating pile driveability for larger diameter piles is of interest. In this paper, recent CPT based axial capacity approaches, modified for mobilised base resistance and ageing, are applied to estimating driveability of 4.2m diameter piles. A database of pile installation records from North sea installations are used to benchmark the methods. Accounting for factors such as pile ageing and the relatively low displacement mobilised during individual hammer blows improves the quality of prediction of pile driveability for the conditions evaluated in this study.
The paper is Byrne, T., Gavin, K., Prendergast, L.J., Cachim, P., Doherty, P., and Chenicheri Pulukul, S. (2018) “Performance of CPT-based methods to assess monopile driveability in North Sea sands.” Ocean Engineering, 166, 76-91. Emphasis in abstract is mine.
