Large Diameter Drilling
Pile top drill
Large-diameter drilling that mounts on the pile and drills ahead of it, from 500 mm through to XXL monopiles of 10 m and beyond.
A pile top drill sits on top of a pile and drills the ground out ahead of it, so a pile can be installed through hard ground that can’t simply be driven. We design and supply pile top drills, and free-standing large-diameter drills, across an exceptionally wide diameter range, from around 500 mm up to the 10 m-plus XXL monopiles now used in offshore wind. We design the drive, the bit, the spoil-removal route and the structure as one system, matched to the ground and the pile.
Two markets, two design philosophies
- Tough, field-rugged drills – for the rough-and-ready end of the market, where the priority is a robust, reliable, repairable machine that keeps drilling in hard, abrasive ground with minimal fuss. Simple, strong, serviceable.
- Intelligent pile top designs – where the drill carries integrated tooling and sensing for applications that need more than a hole. These split into two very different markets that share the same large-diameter drilling machine: decommissioning (pile-cutting integrated into the bit, to drill out and remove a redundant pile) and surgical mining (geotechnical sensing integrated into the bit, with bit indexing so the system knows where it is and what it is cutting).
Designed as a system
Whichever end of the range, the pile top drill is engineered with its cutting structure, spoil removal (airlift / reverse circulation), drive and the gripping and handling tooling that locates it on the pile, including our conductors / pile-top extension adapters and gripping systems, so it works as one integrated machine, designed, assembled and commissioned under single-party accountability.