It's that time of the year. Whether you follow a formal liturgical calendar or don't, if the holiday comes and you're celebrating it, you're getting ready for it. In the construction industry, we live from job to job, and we not only have to prepare for the job to start, but for it to finish … Continue reading Loading Out: A Christmas Reflection
The Alemite ad above illustrates the importance of proper lubrication. Vulcan used and specified Alemite grease fittings in products such as the Hydra-Nut and others to help their customers do lubrication and other important maintenance items on their Vulcan equipment. The "outside" of the Hydra-Nut (U.S. Patent 3,938,427.) Introduced in the 1970's to directly replace … Continue reading Alemite and Vulcan Try to Get People to Lubricate Their Equipment
It's happened again: the paper "Vibratory and Impact-Vibration Pile Driving Equipment" has been cited by Mohammed Al-Amrani and M Ikhsan Setiawan in their paper "Prefabricated and Prestressed Bio-Concrete Piles: Case Study in North Jakarta." The abstract of their paper is here: In this research, we will talk about Prefabricated and Prestressed Concrete piles in general and … Continue reading The Paper “Vibratory and Impact-Vibration Pile Driving Equipment” Cited
I know I've spent a fair amount of time on site anniversaries this year. Those include the quarter century anniversaries of my two original sites: vulcanhammer.net and Positive Infinity. But I think it would be remiss if I didn't stop and say something about this one. I don't have an exact date when I uploaded … Continue reading Fifteen Years of vulcanhammer.info
Most people involved in the pile driving business know that, when you drive piles on a batter (angle) the energy from the hammer is reduced. But how much? This post attempts to answer that question, and show how Vulcan dealt with the issue. Let's start with single-acting hammers like the Warrington-Vulcan hammers: the rated striking … Continue reading The Effect of Batter on Hammer Energy
The whole point of impact pile driving is for a moving mass to be stopped "suddenly" and in the process generate a high peak force impulse which moves the pile into the soil. Pile dynamics people tend to emphasise the force on the pile head, while hammer manufacturers tend to emphasise the peak force of … Continue reading So What is the Force of the Ram?
The recent (apparent) sabotage of the NordStream gas line from Russia to Germany--and the effects of the loss of Russian energy to Europe--is a reminder to some of us of some fairly recent history about Europe and energy that bears repeating. Europeans used to be a lot better about remembering history than Americans, but it … Continue reading There Was a Good Reason To Develop North Sea Oil and Gas
One thing that many of the "old heads" in this business wish would come back are the dynamic formulae. In some cases they're still important as they're written into the codes. So how did they come into being? As noted in my discussion of The Engineering News Formula, and Its Treatment in Early Vulcan Literature, many … Continue reading Billiards and Pile Driving: Newtonian Impact Mechanics and Dynamic Formulae
The last of our series on "Checking the Soviets" will deal with the roller bearings for the S-834. Roller bearings, be they spherical or cylindrical, are an important part of vibratory pile driving equipment, although for Vulcan's machines cylindrical bearings were the rule. The bearings (#4 in the diagram above) were GOST 5721-57 3614 bearings. … Continue reading Checking the Soviets: The Life of the Bearings
In the last post Checking the Soviets: Determining the Bending Moment and Stress, and the Parallel Axis Theorem, we looked at a section which was represented to act as a beam. We learned that, if that's true, then the way to reduce stresses isn't just to add material, but to add it judiciously. In this section … Continue reading Checking the Soviets: The Long and The Short of It in Beam Analysis
vulcanhammer.info 