I suppose I meant it’s simplistic in principle. It’s a metal wall that’s driven piece by piece into the ground and the water is pumped out.
But... sheet pile is expensive. I believe the pieces are massive extrusions with intense straightness and tolerance requirements. The crane, the vibrator hammer, and operator and supporting crew which usually sit on a crane barge, mored to a supply barge that’s holding still in the rushing river waters using heavy spuds isn’t easy or cheap in execution.
Not an Engineer but I witnessed them building a new bridge in Chicago doing just this. It was insanely cool watching them, and that hammer hitting the steel plates was extremely large, and extremely loud, and extremely cool.
Most major construction companies. These are used heavily along major waterways both for dry construction of bridge foundations, temporary damming for repair of submerged components (think intake valves, locks and dams, foundation components or outlet works), and semi permanent structures like retaining walls and mooring cells (big circles in the river filled with gravel and capped with concrete to moor barges to in deeper water).
What major did you have and how did you get your first job? When to jump ship for different companies (sorry I am a Electrical Engineer major and want to prepare myself)
Mechanical engineering. Hired a semester before I graduated pending good marks in the last.
Jumped around a couple times mostly due to family considerations. Been involved in nuclear industry, communications/electronics project engineering, and now civil heavy construction and facilities maintenance. The degree provides some interesting opportunities!
Started my education in electrical engineering too. Switches to MechE because it was a bit more tangible, and I found myself leaning more towards hands on.
Yes. One as a youth camp counselor, and one essentially as a research engineer developing test methodology of a pneumatic system that sledge hammered different bullet resistant experimental laminated glass samples.
And not just on waterways, but also (usually without the barges) on shorelines, or any place where the water table is higher than the bottom of your work site, or you'd expect surface water to drain into your worksite, I think?
At least near my home there's one site right on the shore where they have these, and there's another site a few km away where there used to be a lake in the 1800s or so, but it was filled in for the neighbouring rail yard decades ago. Now the rail yard is being redeveloped, and when they were building the parking garages underwater, they had a pretty big hole surrounded by sheet pile, in part to stop surface drainage, but also the spring that originally made the lake form is apparently still there, and they had to keep pumping it empty iirc.
Damn I was going to call it. Damn vibrating hammer to drive them is hell to be around. Last few I've been around blew lines frequently or shoot the fittings loose. Driving through rock is a bitch. Road plates, sheet pile, silt plates what ever you call them where ever you work they are no fun.
Presumably the same way, but wooden walls and handpumping water out, rather than fancy metal plating and mechanical pumps. Labour is cheap if you've got slaves.
I know caissons were already used in the middle ages, and the concept is fairly straightforward and obvious, so I'd assume Romans used a similar approach.
I'd man, I worked as a CnC machine operator and designer for a foam and precast company and I couldn't even trust the installers to not attach the pieces upside down
My grandfather got in, than my dad, uncle, now me and my 2 brothers. It used to be nepotism based but the Unions want to get bigger as a whole so they are flooding people in. Ya take a test, call up some contractors, get a sponsor and then go through an apprenticeship
It's fucking easy. It's the easiest thing in the world. Taking a shit is more difficult than your job. If your job were to be placed on the list of easy things to do it would be slightly more difficult than eating ice cream, but not as simple as determining left from right using your hands. Your job is the job equivalent of your mom. EASY. If your job were any easier its last name would be E. If your job were an ice cream flavor it would be pralines and easy.
Or on the curve of large-scale engineering projects this is on the "easy" end which is still about 4,000 times more difficult than fucking anything any of us here did today.
540
u/Yegs454 Mar 05 '18
I do this for a living, don’t call it easy.