We have worked with contractor CR Reynolds to crop the contiguous piles on the Holmfirth Town Centre Access Plan, a £10.3 million scheme to make the West Yorkshire town centre easier to reach and get around.
The scheme is a partnership between Kirklees Council and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority. It aims to improve traffic flow, shorten journey times and cut congestion and carbon emissions, while making the centre safer for pedestrians and more accessible for vulnerable users. The work includes demolishing the former market hall, extending the Huddersfield Road car park next to it, and building a new café and bridge.
CR Reynolds as lead contractor
The lead contractor is Hull-based CR Reynolds. Founded by its chairman, Chris Reynolds, the privately owned company has worked in UK civil engineering and construction for more than 40 years and delivers civil engineering and building projects across the country.
600mm and 750mm contiguous piles
The new café and bridge stand on contiguous piled walls, made up mainly of 600mm and 750mm piles. Each cage holds ten 40mm reinforcing bars and the crop section is 1.5m. Drilling was to 10m or 11m, but with no refusal point some piles had to go deeper.
After talking the job through with CR Reynolds, we supplied a CFA cropper with the dog-bones and cylinders removed, used with one of our lifting frames.
"For flexibility, the cropper was set up to be changed around by the client as quickly and easily as possible to adapt to each pile," says Scott Fitchett, our sales director.
The CFA cropper is a linked modular unit that cuts circular augered concrete piles from 300mm to 1,200mm in diameter. Adding a half link changes its size by 100mm without touching the hydraulics, so the same cropper was reset on site for both pile sizes.
Tight gaps and a river through the site
The piles were large, misshapen and very close together, and the gap the cropper had to fit into changed from one pile to the next. A different excavator was needed on each side of the river, and the cropper's cylinders had to be moved or taken off to get it between some of the piles. CR Reynolds made those changes on site as the work went on, and our team visited throughout to check progress, monitor the cropper and head off problems.
"CR Reynolds' attitude throughout enabled us to provide the right and most effective solution," says Scott. "They worked with us to find the right solution, telling us of the configuration and then we made it happen. By doing this and by being fully onboard, we were able to crop 10-15 600mm and 750mm contiguous piles each day. This doesn't sound a great deal but due to the nature of the project and the piles, we worked with the CR Reynolds team to try out various setups to get the piles cropped in a tight space."
If you have contiguous or CFA piles to crop on a restricted site, see our pile cropper hire range or talk to the team.
This project has also been covered by Earthmovers Magazine and Ground Engineering.
