Ningbo Pile Extraction Project
A few hours south of Shanghai a contractor needed to remove 25 inch diameter steel piles from underneath a bridge. Since hydraulic vibratory hammers are so new to China it is not well known that they can go underwater. China still predominately uses electric vibratory hammers which don’t work underwater. This contractor prior to knowing an APE hammer can go underwater had an underwater diving team cut piles at the bottom of the sea floor as an alternative to extracting the piles. When told that our hammer in fact can go underwater the contractor did not believe it, so one of our good customers gave him a model 200 hammer for free to try on 12 piles. The job was a total success and now discussion is underway for four other jobs to use the same method involving more than 250 piles. This was a great step for APE to show how much more effective a hydraulic hammer can be against so many that are not convinced. The APE hammer is designed to go underwater without any change and because of its design it is unaffected by the high pressure.
APE China produces it’s first 200 and sells it in 4 days.
Just 4 days after manufacturing the first model 200 vibratory hammer in China it was sold to a private contractor in ShanDong. The hammer was recently shipped and used to drive 3 feet diameter batter piles 55 feet deep off the coast of TianJin for an oil platform. This was a huge step for APE China and we are all very happy that the hammer was used successfully. The success of this job has already been heard by many other people who are interested in APE products manufactured in China. This was a big team effort with much the help coming from Jerry Cors who had a crucial part in the assembly of the power unit and vibro, Steve Gough who sold the hammer, and Mr. Zhou who is our manufacturing partner in China. Our new employee Mr. Yang has also helped with many things from hands on wrench turning to translation of the manual.
