Case Studies

Breaking Thick Reinforced Concrete

During the winter of 2004, Precision Concrete Cutting was invited to bid on a project at a manufacturing facility, by a long time and valued contractor.

This project was interesting in the fact that the concrete was thicker than conventional cutting methods would allow. The 38” thick concrete was embedded with 4” x 8” I beams of varied length, running perpendicular to a 2’ wide x 3’ deep steel trough, which ran the entire length of a 20’ wide x 120’ slab, which was sloped considerably towards the trough from the outside edge, exposing portions of the I beams. The I beams were cast in place on a level plane to support the equipment. The equipment was removed prior to any work commencing.

We approached the project with a variety of ideas including, wire sawing, deep flat sawing, and breaking. Since the flat sawing would involve removing the I beams prior to cutting, that idea was quickly dismissed. Wire sawing was then considered, but also dismissed to keep costs within budget. We then concentrated on breaking.

To accomplish this idea we acquired two Rock Breakers, sufficient to break through the heavily reinforced concrete. With assistance from an excavator, to separate and remove the broken pieces, we tackled the project using two operators, working in unison, one coring and one operating both breakers. 224 cores were drilled 26” in depth to accommodate the breakers. Using standard wedges on one breaker and following it with a breaker set up with expanding wedges. We were able to adequately break, and spread the concrete, so that the excavator could then remove the pieces. The project was completed in just 6 days staying well within the time frame designated by the contractor.

Norton Breaking Web site Document (8kb-PDF file)

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"Trench Corner Cutting"

Early summer of 2005, Precision Concrete Cutting was invited to bid on a project at a manufacturing facility, by a valued customer.

This project was interesting in the fact that the concrete to be cut 162’x 10” thick 6” down below finished floor, was inside of a 30” wide trench. The objective of the project was to cut the top of the trench walls and sever them from the floor, to allow for floor slab replacement.

We approached the project with a variety of ideas including, hand sawing, wall sawing, and using our custom-designed curb saw.

Hand sawing would prove to be difficult since the trench was only 2’ deep and bending over to cut 6” below finished floor would be at minimum, backbreaking, for the amount of cutting needed.

Our next idea was to wall saw. This idea was quickly dismissed because of lack of room to mount the saw in the trench, and the time it would take, since we had a small window of opportunity to complete the project.

After all ideas were considered, we chose the curb saw. This option gave us the able to cut 6” below grade, and 10” deep horizontally. This would allow us to cut through the trench wall without being inside the trench. We were also able to do the entire cutting from one side of the trench, which proved to be valuable in the limited space we had to work in. Flat sawing was done on the slab 10” from the trench wall to facilitate removal of the trench corner for the repairs. Chain sawing and ring sawing were done to insure corners were completely free, and to cut the pieces into manageable sizes.

We tackled the project using two operators, working in conjunction with one another, one operating the curb saw and the other operating hand tools. By starting at 6AM we were able to complete the project in just 8.5 hrs, well within the time frame set forth by the customer

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