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Sometime for short lenght sheetpiles of about 6 to 8 metters can be install sing a small hydraulic powered vibratory hammer attached to a heavy excavator. The bucket of the excavator had been removed and in it’s place a vibratory hammer is placed. It will be powered by the hydraulic system of the excavator.

This video below shows a vibratory hammer mounted to an excavator arm. It’s installing a sheet pile walls. Most likely the wall is to stabilize the ground behind the sheet wall. Infront of the wall is an open excavation.

Now as mentioned earlier in my earlier post it is not a good practice to install sheet piles by banging the steel sheet piles using the excavator bucket. Doing this may cause damage to the sheet piles and as well to the excavator bucket. If you see a dented excavator bucket, then you are sure that the excavator may had been subjected to abuse beyond what the excavator had been designed for.

However, if the sheet piles are not made of steel but of vinyl sheeting ( easily recognizable from it’s clean white color ) than the installation can make use of the excavator bucket. Like this video below shows. Sometime when difficult ground is encountered, the area where the vinyl sheet piles are to be installed may be loosen using water jet prior to installation. Vinyl sheet piles are popular near water areas like sea wall, river banks due to it’s non corrosive nature. Here is a video on how vinyl sheet piles are installed with an excavator bucket.

Ensuring proper and correct interlocking between sheet piles is one of the key and crucial requirement during the installation of sheet piles. Usually this is done manually and can be rather tricky if the the sheet piles need to be interlocked at a height.

Thus this required the hosting of both man and sheet pile high up from the ground to get the job done. And thsi can be dangerous due to the height involved and difficult too as the person esuring the proper interlocking of the sheet piles has to communicate with the crane operator from a height. Further more it will be virtually impossible to do thsi when there is stong cross winds.

Now a company had come out with an igenious solution. A gadget called the “Universal Sheet Pile Threader” solves all the invconvinience and problem as mentioned above. It is completely safe and require only two men ( one infront and the other behind the sheet pile) to install the gadget and done on ground level (thus very safe)