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.
