Trenching in Granite without explosives 

As ever, a fascinating glimpse of what it takes to work with such hard rock. The crystalline structure of the granite is even more evident in the way it fractures. Many thanks and stay safe!

As someone who does some rock climbing on granite and places protection in cracks in the granite this is very comforting to see the insane forces that it takes to break good hard granite.

A lot of work with amazing results. Awesome Job!

I ran a CAT 330c with a Atlas Copco HB 3000 for eleven years. 23 years in total,, breaking granite ledge was easy with a machine that size. If it was too hard or the cut required was deep, they would bring in a drill and “swiss cheese” the rock so it would be easier to break it. Did a lot of hand drilling back in the day. Your videos bring back a lot of great memories. I love the sound of ripping rock!

That's an amazing job! A trench with the expanding grout is a tough job..........and he was able to rip it out.... no hammer! Shows your skill level = 100! 🍻 👏

Now that is what I call HARD WORK. Watching you contorting and struggling when drilling I was just in awe of your ability to stay with it !!! Also I had no idea that such compounds existed.

Watching the breaker clawing the granite ledge reminded me of my dentist at work.

good job thank you learned about expando

1K+👍's up demolition Dave he's at it again he's breaking things I love it when he explodes them

Can't beat the sound of hardened steel ripping granite.

So interesting!

Can't bash it? Can't cut it? Call Dave! That's an amazing amount of work. I guess there are probably machine mounted drills, but unwieldy and expensive for a small job. Would certainly save your back.

I love using the ripper on my Komatsu 1.5t ‘hydraulic teaspoon’. Can’t wait to get my hands on some of that Expanda. Just looked at a video for the XCentric Ripper ( combo of ripper with built in hammer). Bit big for my machine, but looks like an awesome option, and should be made for smaller mach.

we rent breakers to go on the end of those excavators. I have also used hydraulic rock splitter that you simply drop into those drilled holes and they crack it open immediately. If you run into that sort of thing much you might look into those methods. Well, if they are available. You could make a good living just splitting rock if had this stuff AND you don't have to worry about killing yourself if you get it on you ! I mostly used this stuff on slopes and cliffs were you can't get equipment to it.

11:55 he and I envisioned that rock breaking off and flying straight at him like the one just before! As begins to back up.

Hats off to the drill operator. What a job.

Not an easy job....but satisfying to watch

You are indeed brave for standing a mere 2m from that ripper. When it started reverse dragging towards you, I squinted so hard that my eyes became nearly invulnerable.

Great job

First I've heard of Expando (relatively unknown in the UK) sure beats the hell out of using feathers and wedges especially in temps of 30 c plus.

More drilling positions than the Kamasutra. ;-)

Good job

That expando is cool stuff thanks for the vid! I would always use a jackleg over a plugger wherever I could, though! They are most certainly worth the investment!

They used to do this hundreds of years aho by pouring in water during wintertime, so that the stone would crack when the water turned into ice.

This reminds me of getting wisdom teeth removed.

Binge watching your videos Dave on this one seems this was a very inefficient way to break the rock for this situation. With light loads strategically placed you could have achieved same results in just a few hours. Did alot of trenching for pipeline and road ditching in a 2 ft hole we would use about a quarter stick of tnt and about 10 inches of a gell stick per hole. Sometimes less if it was a softer rock like sandstone. Gave a nice pop and usually not throw any rock more than 4 to 6 feet. I row of shot holes down the middle with relief holes on the out sides of trench to shape it and this would been done real quick well except the time it would take to drill it. The exspando is a good product in where you have boulders where blasting isn't an option and just to big to move with machines. But in ground like this the rock is in a suppressed state that counters the effect of the expanding material lessening its effectiveness.

I always find your videos fascinating, thank you for sharing! how do you not get white fingers with all that drilling?

Rock saw! Tesmec, Vermeer, whatever it takes. that is how I have done it. neat to see another option though!

Better living through chemistry!

Someone get this man a sonic drill !

Now that’s what I call a ripper

Granite is the hardest rock to get rid of big jack-hammers just make a dust and not realy breaking the rock.I used dexpan it's the samething Expando good stuff

Okay what sort of hand drill would you recommend to someone who wants to do this? Milwaukee sds and going up in successive bit sizes?

Bloody 'ell mate, yer in me light!

I am curious as to whether it ended up saving time or money to do it this way versus sticking with a breaker. My employer does a bit of rock excavation for house foundations. We are in sandstone and an experienced operator on a (rental) 20 ton ex and breaker took 3 weeks to cut 150 cubic yards worth of foundation and swimming pool out of the hillside. Looks like 100 feet of trench a couple feet deep took more than a week to drill and expand, accounting for some extra adversity. Do you regularly use Expando? Is it practical for moderate to large sized projects? Is it ever more cost effective than hydraulic breaking and ripping? Thanks for the video!

Not as fun as blasting, though blasting would be very interesting :), it seems to sort of worked. You really got to get a mini excavator for drilling. :) Thank you.

you need to treanch depp around the circumferrence of the entire rock in order to allow movement of cracking otherwise the chemical will ooze out of the hole!!!

I've got a few boxes of Expando sitting about for breaking up a big lump of granite in the middle of an established vineyard. Biggest challenge so far is drilling the rock - I've tried using a diamond core drill, but it takes a damn long time to get to any kind of depth. Might need to bring more power to the task with the kind of rig you're using for holes...

I want to dig a big hole for an inground tilapia pond - about 1.8m deep, 6m wide and 8m long (in the US). The top 60cm of the soil in that area is mostly hardpan, then under that you quickly run into some variation of rock and hardpan. Explosives are not allowed. Backhoes are not very productive, per some of the locals, who have tried digging in it with machines....unless you get really, really big backhoes (70l of diesel per hour!) What would you suggest?

hmm . . . I wonder . . when I was a kid, we used make a good sized fire, then put a big rock in it to get hot really hot, then we would take the hot rock out of the fire and drop it into a bucket of water. Once things had cooled down, you could easily break the rock with a hammer into smaller pieces which you could break with you hand. So I wonder what would happen if they drilled the holes in the rock and then inserted like a tube with holes in the tube and then pumped like propane gas or that welding torch gas thru the pipe and let it burn and heat up the inside of the stone drill hole until it gets real hot, then take the burner out and quickly put in another perforated tube into the drill, but this time, inject liquid nitrogen or maybe something not that cold. I wonder if that would cause the rock to be more breakable and pried apart with that big metal hook thing? ps. Please don't try this at home like we did as kid because when you put some types of rocks into a fire, they will explode on their own. Hey, I never said we were smart kids. But at least we were smarter than my Dad and his friends when the were growing up during WW2. They used to pick sides and 'play army' by shooting at each other with their BB guns. (No goggles or face masks). But they stopped playing that after one of them got hit in the throat by a BB and hurt really really bad. And I wont even mention the crazy stuff my Grandfather and his brothers got into when they were kids back in the 1910's (?) ( like around 1913 to 1917. I don't know what you call that time range. Its not the Nineteen-hundreds 1900s and not the Nineteen-twenties 1920s. If you know what I mean.)

Tough stuff

What is the name of the chemical used . please tell us name

👏👏👏👏👍👍

2hrs with a diamond saw or 2 days with expando

Get your self a Darda C12 Hydraulic Splitter... Just say'in... Amazing pice of kit..

Question is why are you drilling alone?. 😢 I always have about 6 people to rotate in groups of three , just to operate the drill

Is that drill working properly-I didn't see any dust coming from the drill holes. Poor dude looked like he was killing himself trying to drill. If the cuttings weren't getting flushed out of the hole he was just working against himself. Great video.

What a nightmare having to do that. All for 20 feet of trench. On another note you need to find a way of drilling those holes that ain't gonna break your back into a million pieces. I'm almost certain you can get those drills mounted on diggers.

Good old expando

Now this is a pain in the ass!

ever use a darda rock splitter?

yeah you needed your mini ex with the rail mount.

The Ancient Egyptians used to put wooden wedges into crevices chiseled in granite. Then wet the wood. As the wood expanded, the granite would crack along a desired plane.

To think men were doing this same thing 15,000 years ago while building megalithic structures all around the world- including the pyramids, Machu Picchu, and all over south America, in the pacific Islands, Easter Island, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Egypt. Really makes you wonder how they did it, since they didn't have our technology.

I'm an old blaster; I know its harder to get now, but what would have you used if you were to blast. For example, I would have loaded each other hole with about a slow burning powder and set the timing quite slow (20 ms ish). What would you have done ???

I think Ph goes from one (1) acidic to fourteen (14) alkaline.

see this pyrex with the expando powder all over it? (picks up pyrex with bare hands)....?!?!?!??!?!

I was gonna mention too, the goo does work, but you need somewhere for the rock to go. I would have drilled some relief holes, or diamond cut somewhere for the rock to go.

SIMPLEX man SIMPLEX

I have seen this video before.

I tell you what to do mate😤

Bet you underbid that one eh?, No explosives, that's crapola!

If it was easy they would have done it themselves!

fire to get it hot, cold water to shock it. breaks up easy.

hydraulic hammer wy not?

What was going in the trench?

Seems like a hydraulic hammer on 5he Trachoe would make quick work of that #7 granite

Lots of work (and revenue for you) because the pipeline folks do not care what it costs to remove the rock. As long as someone else pays the bill sounds like good revenue for you

I want to expand my bank acct. Does the goo work for that?

What were you running in the trench?

So basicly it's completely impossible to just get a pickaxe and start hacking through solid granite? Unless I have literally like million years to spend?

How much does that stuff cost?

No hearing protection for jack hammer!

5:20 Drilling positions are intresting.

Most contractors around here would have a sub diamond saw it.

a pH of 15 he said in the third minute...this is impossible.

lol ph of "15" is indeed very alkali. Kind of like a girl who is a "12" on the 10 point scale.

For the first few seconds, I thought he was speaking Mexican. Funny how some accents can be so similar to different languages. Good video though. Didn't know such a product existed.

out of curiosity why take it out at all? surely thats the ideal material to place a footing on?

Have you heard of the Sierra Blaster? No explosive license needed. www.sierrablaster.com/

just blast it 2 seconds theres no one around

Out in the WORLD the range of Ph is from 0 to 14 .... There ain't no such thing as Ph15. But you do it your way!!! at 3:08

Hole diameter?????!!!!! (No-one EVER says!!!)

Diamond Saw, job done, wtf is all this.

Dave you have to work out a better way to do this sort of trench than drilling by hand. You will stuff your body quick time if you keep that sort of thing up.Go back and take another look at the ergonomic positions you were in.Something has to change. Mark

Explosives are faster and make for a better video.

Isn't it easier to wrestle Crocodiles? :)

Dave don’t you get irritated when builders and homeowners wont listen to you when you say you can do something and they bulk you on what you say you can do?

HUMMMM YEEEA WHY NOT INCORPORATE THE GRANITE THATS BEEN IN THE GROUND FOR A MILLION YEAR INTO THE PROJECT 🤔❓❓ IT'S SURLEY NOT GOING TO BLUDDY MOVE

So there's going to be a "new housing estate project" in that dirt with "granite" underneath it? ROFLMAO. Yeah. You bet. No wonder that land was so "cheap".

And they want us to believe Egyptians carved granite with copper tools.....lol