Hillhead/QMJ 2024

News

Digging deep into construction machinery news

Cat goes paddling to build a jetty

Wed 08 May 2019

Cat goes paddling to build a jetty

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.

Loads more

LOADS MORE

This website and services embedded within it use cookies to offer you the best user and functional experience and to provide us with performance statistics. Please click more information to read about cookies and to view the cookies we use.

More information | Block cookies

If you choose to block cookies some parts of this website may not operate. To block cookies please do this within your browser settings. Most browsers allow you to block cookies within their settings and we have provided links to the most commonly used browsers. Please view our cookie details page for more information on the cookies we use.

Chrome | Firefox | Safari | IE

Accept + close