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When you see the steel-reinforced core you get a sense of the great strain put on the boring machine and drilling tools. In special foundation work the high durability and resistance to wear of Betek tools really pay off.
Betek – a leading global manufacturer of tungsten carbide tipped tools – provides its customers not only with ingenious tools of the highest quality, but also with personal service and extensive know-how in application techniques.
BESPOKE DRILL BIT
DRILLING DEEP TO REACH THE TOP
It is not without good reason that Frankfurt am Main is often called ‘Mainhattan’. If you look at the city’s skyline, associations with the American ‘Manhattan’ are obvious. In a prime central location between the exhibition centre, main railway station and banking quarter, the foundations for a new skyscraper, Tower 185, are currently being prepared – creating in the process a particular challenge for the firms doing the work.
During the construction of ‘Tower 185’ a bunker from the Third Reich became a major challenge even for highly experienced foundation digging companies Max Bögl and Ed. Züblin AG. The bunker wall had to be ruptured and 36 piles bored through it. Using three drilling machines – each fitted as necessary with drill buckets, bore screws and casing shoes – the firms created overlapping pile walls going 18.3 metres down into the earth. In the process the drills ground through the thick, steel-reinforced concrete of the bunker wall. A high percentage of operating costs in foundation work goes on tools. It is therefore well worth it if these are particularly durable and resistant to wear. Even in the toughest conditions of use, such as drilling through this bunker wall, special tool systems fitted with tungsten carbide tips excel due to their robust strength, which is achieved not least through the use of tungsten carbide of the highest quality grade.
Betek service engineer Thomas Neff followed the foundation work in Frankfurt with great interest – after all, Betek developed a special bit specifically for this task: the BKH81 round shank cutter bit, with which it was possible to achieve a significantly better tool life. Thomas Neff: “Outstanding and individually adapted tools are one thing. On top of that comes the fact that, with the knowledge we have from application techniques and from the experience that we have gained from close collaboration with users on building and excavation sites all over the world, we have such extensive know-how that it will be a long time before there’s anything new anybody else can teach us.”
