Full Depth Concrete Sawing

Full depth sawing severs a slab through its entire thickness, so the piece inside the cut line is free and can be lifted out. It is the operation behind every bay replacement, every full-depth patch and every opening formed in a concrete pavement, and it is different in kind from a joint cut, which only goes deep enough to control where the concrete cracks.

A saw reaches roughly half its blade diameter, less the guard and the arbor. Our 900mm blade gives a confirmed 420mm in a single pass. That number matters far less than whether it covers the pavements you actually meet, so here is the range it has to cover:

Highway concrete carriageway, typically 200 to 350mm. Airfield taxiway and apron, typically 300 to 500mm. Port and heavy industrial hard standing, typically 250 to 400mm. Commercial and warehouse floor slabs, typically 150 to 300mm.

So one pass covers highway, port and industrial work outright, and the majority of airfield work. Where a slab is thicker than the blade reaches, the answer is to cut from both faces, which roughly doubles it, and beyond that the answer is not a bigger saw at all: it is wire sawing, which has no depth limit because the wire has no radius. Be wary of a headline depth figure quoted without saying which of those three methods produced it.

The cut is the easy half. A full depth cut releases a slab section that can weigh several tonnes, sitting in a hole, usually with services somewhere underneath it. The lift is planned before the first cut: where the crane or excavator stands, where the piece goes, and what happens to the exposed sub-base and the cut faces while the opening is open. A crew that cuts and leaves is handing somebody else the difficult part.

A core taken beforehand turns an estimate into a price: real thickness, real reinforcement, real depth of cover, and the build-up layer by layer. On any slab with services in or under it, that survey is not optional. Cutting blind into a pavement that carries fuel lines, ducting or post-tensioning tendons is how a routine job becomes an incident.

We are based at Little Westerhill Farm near Maidstone in Kent. Kent, London, Sussex, Essex and the wider South East are covered from our own yard, and longer programmes are mobilised UK wide. Full depth sawing is part of our concrete cutting service, and the reinstatement that follows is usually joint sealing or surface repair work on the same programme.