December 2021 Core drilling projects in North Carolina

Core drilling through concrete walls and floors

It seems to be a windy fall this last half of November into December of this miserable year. Pandemics, scam-a-demics, terror-a-demics, they are all amuck as Christmas rolls upon us this blessed year.

Luckily we are too busy core drilling to take part in any of that as two jobs this early winter has us coring 6-inch holes for dryer vents into some places that dryer vents don't normally go.

In fig-1, and fig-3 is shown the holes after they were cored both from the top and from the side to effectively make a ninety-degree corner that a plumber could fit some 3-inch PVC pipes into so that he could make an exhaust for a dryer vent. Unlike most dryer exhausts these were made to go out of the building through the foundation. As you can see there was quite a bit of water that was used to cool the core drill bit as it cut the concrete. These types of core drilling jobs are not like what you find during a course at your local tech school of construction. These foundation walls were uneven, low to the ground and already filled with water when we arrived. But we had been in tough situations before and with a few wooden wedges, a level, and some clever hammer drilling to anchor the core drill rig to the wall we soon had the holes drilled.

Coring concrete foundations

fig-2 is a picture of a small job on Fairview Rd, Charlotte, NC, right before you cross Park Rd when going past the South Park Mall on Sharon Rd. This is another 6-inch core drill hole for where another plumber needed to make a connection from the new home being built to the city's main sewer lines. As you can see it is full of water like a lot of foundation core drilling is. Again we did not have time to take a picture until after we had finished the job but we got one nonetheless. Fig-4 is a look at our new core drilling Ford f-350, magnum V-8 work truck that we have outfitted especially to take care of the toughest core drilling projects in North Carolina. Over 9000 starting watts, 50 gallons of water, 50 core drill bits, 3 core drill motors, and 3 rigs and core drilling stands, this truck is packed to hunt the bear of concrete walls or floors. Quickly accomplishing any core drilling need a customer may have. Retractable water hoses and electric reels make setup and teardown a breeze with any task that is within 100 ln. ft of this beast. With the ability to pump water as high as 40 ft vertically and 180 ft on grade. But back to our subject most core drilling for dryer vents is a minimum of 4 and a half inches to let a 4-inch piece metal dryer vent pass through a wall with just enough room left to apply water sealant around the outside to set it in place. It was because the plumber needed to have the pipe turn at a sharp 90 that the holes were drilled at 6-inches. This allowed two 3-inch pieces of PVC pipe to be joined with a 90-degree elbow inside the hole where the horizontal and the vertical cores met. A technic used by many commercial trades to make junctions inside walls and floors to make pipe go a different way when obstacles appear.

This is a picture of a six-inch core drill hole in a foundation wall

on the new building going up at 352 south walker street, Cary, North Carolina. Of course, it hasn't been popped yet, which is the term our company uses to indicate that the core rock had been drilled as deep as it needs in order for a steel chisel to been inserted into the kerf of the cut in the concrete and hit with a 3-pound hammer in break the core inside the wall at the base of where the core drill bit had been drilled too.

The black bubbly-looking covering on the foundation wall core drilling Cary, North Carolina is waterproofing that is typically used in the central North Carolina areas like Raleigh, Cary, Chapel Hill, and Durham. Like many newer concrete hardscape worksites built-in NC it was a fully masked Jobsite during the great pandemic which was raging at the time. The reinforced concrete wall happened to be 20 inches thick with a 1 1/4 inch rebar placed every 12 inches in the center. The is a tough, tough wall is all we could say when we were done, but not tough enough as we penetrated it several times to make way for 4-inch pipes to drain away waste from the new plumbing going into the building.

Afterward we headed to another job on the other side of the town of Wake Forest, NC. To drill several holes for a roofer who had to make for new roof drains for a building they had been doing for a few weeks and now was ready for the core drilling.

Just another typical day of a North Carolina Core Driller

Core drilling The Beer Lab in Mooresville, NC

Hanging off the wall just in a precariously dangerous place is our rig as we complete a Core drill 6-inch hole in the hollow cement wall that we are attached to.This particular project was for a local micro-brewery with a very cool name as you can see in the picture. GhostFace Brewing is brewed at a small micro-brewery. The name is The Beer Lab, which is across the railroad tracks from the What-A-Burger in Mooresville, NC. Not the National chain what-a-burger but the local to Cabarrus and Iredell counties What-a-Burger where they still make hamburgers Carolina style all the way here in North Carolina. The way to mount a machine that exerts a lot of force and weighs about 145 lbs once it's all hooked up is not an easy task. We use sleeve anchors and a pre-made pattern of where we locate the base of the core drill rig before we ever start to core drill with one of our 6" bits.

Sometimes when core drilling

you run against a fairly tough concrete wall. This wall had 1 1/2" steel reinforcing rebar every 13-inches embedded into the concrete. Right in the location that the plumbers need a six-inch core drill hole through the wall was 2 of the rebars had somehow gotten entangled inside the wall. Added to the pressure of the job was there were black sharpie marks made on the black water barrier where GPR (ground penetrating radar) operators had scanned the wall for any rebar that would be in the way of the core drill bit because the developer wanted to avoid cutting any rebar if possible.

Well, we cut through the two pieces that were matted together making the total amount of metal cut roughly 3-inches by 3-inches of the radius of the diameter of the 6-inch core drill hole.But in the end, we find six-inch coring in reinforced concrete commercial walls with alot of metal well within our abilities, cutting the concrete is the easy part.

inch core drilling bit for concrete concrete walls and floors. This is us in 6 inch core drilling hole in a hospital boiler room wall that happened to be close to 48 inches thick. It took three 12 inch 1 1/4 x 7 tpi threaded core drill bit extensions.