Cat goes paddling to build a jetty

by Nick Drew | Wed 08 May 2019

Cat goes paddling to build a jetty

Digger Man Blog Facebook group member Joacim Ek recently posted a series of stunning photos to the group which I thought were well worthy of a stand-alone spot on the blog of which the group is a spin off.

Joacim is a machine operator for Swedish multi-disciplined company Trellegräv AB who are based in Trelleborg. In early April Joacim was working on a project to build a new jetty at Smygehuk in the South of Sweden.

Joacim was hired in to do the piling works for the jetty operating his Caterpillar 324E hydraulic excavator which features a TAB boom and surprisingly for Sweden, no tiltrotator, I would suspect it was taken off with the machine working in the sea and replaced with a standard fit rigid bucket set up.

The piles Joacim was driving ranged in length from 6m to 9 metres and were driven into the seabed some 5-7 metres. The total length of the jetty was 64 metres and 48 piles had to be driven into the sea bed to facilitate it. The top of the piles stand some 1.4 metres above the normal water level.

It’s a very strange feeling wading out into the water in an excavator and on the odd occasion I’ve done it I was always nervous that something could break down on the machine rendering it stranded with the tide coming in, I feel its not for the faint hearted that’s for sure!

On this job for instance, Joacim said that they had one week where the weather was so bad that they could not work out there in the water. Apparently Joacim worked on another one of these around 5 years ago at Beddingestrand some 10km along the coast, this photo shows how the finished article looks.

We thank Joacim for sharing these cracking photos with us here on the Digger Man Blog.

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