LUTON AIRPORT - CORING

​In collaboration with Lagan Aviation and Infrastructure, Shepherd and Sons were involved in a runway verge signage installation at London Luton Airport.

Over a period of 4 nightshifts, our operatives utilised a bolt-down coring rig to create designated cable routes, drilling through reinforced concrete at a depth of 320mm, enabling a smooth follow on for the rest of the Lagan civils to intall the runway signage.

Runway verge signage needs a cable route to it, and next to a live runway the cheapest way to make one on paper, a trench, is the most expensive in practice. It opens a long continuous void beside an operational surface, it generates spoil, and it cannot be made good inside a single possession. Coring a line of holes through the existing reinforced concrete leaves the pavement intact between them, produces cores that can be counted out and removed, and can be stopped and made safe at any point when the possession ends.

The rig was anchored rather than vacuum mounted. A vacuum base needs a smooth, sound, non-porous surface to hold on, and airfield concrete with a brushed or grooved finish does not reliably give one; if the seal creeps mid-core the barrel binds. Bolting down costs the time it takes to set anchors and buys certainty, which is the right trade when the surface has to be handed back serviceable before the first movement.

320mm through reinforced concrete is a depth where the reinforcement matters more than the concrete. Bar slows the cut and consumes segments, so barrel specification and water supply are what determine whether four nightshifts is realistic or optimistic.

The cores were not the deliverable. Lagan's civils team had to install the signage after us, so the useful measure of this job is whether they could start on time and without rework: holes in the right positions, to depth, clean, and with the surface around them fit to work on. A coring crew that treats its own scope as the end of the job leaves that to somebody else.

This is core drilling within our aviation sector.

This was diamond drilling and coring work, delivered as part of our airfield surfacing sector.