The air was rich with innovation. Cranes, drill rigs, and leader systems erected like skyscrapers. A new city had formed around a once-vacant parking space. It was a city of the future, and a sign of what’s to come for the Construction Industry in 2017 and beyond. This was Con Expo 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada… and it was brilliant.

Booth Highlights

Pileworks had joined forced with American Piledriving Equipment (APE) and shared a booth that was set up right in the main vein of the Silver Lot. APE had brought all of their traditional trade favorites for building foundations: real-life examples of Diesel Hammers, Hydraulic Impact Hammers, Vibratory Hammers, and even their new HD Drivers, capable of installing our threaded & coupled helical piling products.

Exhibit attendees also got to see a scale model of the new DodecaKong: the world’s largest piledriver, combining twelve of our model 600 vibratory hammers into one extreme machine! This hammer is actively at work in the South China Sea driving 100ft.-diameter pipe piles, which will be used as the foundation for a new island off the shores of Sanya. We showed the details of the hammer as well as photos recently taken in the field of the DodecaKong at work. Follow its progress at americanpiledriving.com.

Con-Expo Goes Virtual

The Pileworks crew offered an exciting and innovative leap this year by introducing hundreds of attendees to Virtual Reality, an amazing new medium that lets users feel like they’re actually in a virtual world with stunning realism! Developed by Ravenlight Marketing in collaboration with our in-house manufacturing crew, we had two VR experiences set up side-by-side, often with large crowds curiously watching the smiling faces of users inside the VR headsets. We had an APE HD Drilling Simulator experience created that put users inside of a real virtual excavator, and let them feel what it’s like to work in our field. They installed our patented threaded & coupled piling material with the APE HD200 Driver, screwing the piling into the ground and creating a solid deep-earth foundation. It was more than an amazing educational tool. It was actually fun! Users from 4 years to 82 years-old gave it a shot, and walked out certified VR excavator operators!

We also showed attendees APE’s new HD Mobile Mast excavator-mounted leader system in virtual reality, showing the full-sized 60ft.-tall mast in a tent no taller than 12 feet. Talk about weird, right? Spectators inside the VR headset (and an audience watching what they were seeing on a big screen TV) got to see the product in stunning detail, and got a great bearing on the product as a whole and how they could use it in the field. We also included a small-scale model, virtually, opposite of the HD Mobile Mast. Participants in the VR experience got a kick out of seeing a table with a scale model that wasn’t actually there! Some almost put the VR controllers down on the virtual table, thinking it was real!

So What’s Next for Foundation Construction?

We had some great talks with other booths, guests, contractors, engineers and project heads about exciting new foundation technology Pileworks continues to roll out with, much of it being used this year. Our hybrid Geo-Exchange™ Foundations allow a strong foundation to be built for buildings while also allowing a ground loop system to flow through the piling, using underground temperatures to regulate heating and cooling for a building that’s green, hydrocarbon-free, and more cost-effective than conventional heating & cooling systems. The future is brighter, greener, and better for Foundation Construction than it has ever been, before.

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