It is time to replace manual disc cutters and hydraulic croppers when cutting concrete or steel piles. Here at MotoCut, we offer solutions for faster and safer pile cutting. We proudly present a success story of one of our customer, MDF Construction:
MDF Construction saves time and money with MotoCut pile cutter
Project in a Nutshell
UK-based MDF Construction was contracted to cut approximately 10,000 concrete piles at a massive Central Park warehouse construction site at Avonmouth, UK.
The ground at the site was soft clay, which meant that the piles were driven all the way down to the underlying layer of bedrock. MDF Construction was required to ensure a clean finish on the top of the piles to enable building a suspended floor on top of the piles.
Safe and efficient alternative for cutting piles
Traditional pile-cutting methods include using a hydraulic cropper attachment from an excavator or doing the job manually. Manual work is slow and hazardous and the old-school cropper makes a lot of mess, leaving the reinforcement steel exposed and causing cracks in the pile itself.
Not satisfied with the traditional methods, Michael Fasola, MDF Construction’s Managing Director, started looking for alternatives. He became convinced that MotoCut’s innovative product, a hydraulically-driven pile cutter featuring a pair of diamond cutting blades, would be the ideal solution.
So, MDF’s Caterpillar 308E2 CR midi-excavator was fitted with a Steelwrist XI2 tilt-rotator and a MotoCut Q-350 pile cutting attachment and put to work on the 600,000 sq. feet construction site.
Five-fold efficiency and increased safety
On average, a single ground worker using a diamond blade disc cutter would manually cut around 30 piles per day. Using a single excavator fitted with MotoCut’s cutter, MDF Construction got through around 150 piles per day. It took less than one minute to safely cut a single concrete pile.
For a constructor, this meant clear productivity and cost savings. In addition to high efficiency and quality cuts, MotoCut’s solution offered increased safety as it is operated fully from the excavator cabin.
When a cut was finished, the operator used the jaws to twist off the top of the pile. The pile top can then be loaded directly to a dumper or placed on the ground. At the MDF site, another excavator picked up the cutoffs and cleared the ground around the next batch of piles.
A tank mounted on the excavator provides water for dust suppression and blade cooling. On this worksite, each set of diamond cutting blades lasted between a day and a half and two days, after getting through between 200 and 300 piles.
