Historic photo from DA submitted to the City of Newcastle Council
Every job requires focus. Even more so for tight sites and then there are very tight sites with little head height with the added precautions of protecting an old historic building. We’ve just completed installing screw piers to strengthen foundations for the old Ireland’s Bond building in Newcastle NSW built in 1884. The façade of the 4-storey building remained includingkey structural beams and columnswith the majority of the internals to be renewed to a modern luxury spec for apartment living. Ideal Foundations had to come up with a solution to install within tight confines of up to 3.0m head height clearance in and around overhead beams. How did we do that?
The original structural design called for 40 tonne (400kN) piles which can only be installed with a very large excavator, which was not possible for the tight spaces of this site. So, Chris Elliott of Ideal Foundations commissioned a structural engineer to redesign pile loads down to a maximum 20 tonne (200kN) per pile and also ensure the piles were able to be located within the existing pile caps to ensure the builder did not have to change any of these on site. Due to the low head height we also had to limit the shaft extensions to a maximum of 1.5m to ensure the reach of the excavator at full stretch plus the pile were well within the limitations of the overhead space.
The photos and video below show how confined this job site was and requiring precision by the operators of the excavator. Well done boys.
