Pneumatic jackhammers and their destructive power

Areas of use

The first pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mer, invent­ed in 1897 by engi­neer Georg Lein­er, was used exclu­sive­ly in the min­ing indus­try. The cre­ation of such a tool was a break­through in this area, jack­ham­mers began to be wide­ly used in Europe, Amer­i­ca, in the gold mines of Africa and Mex­i­co, and lat­er in the USSR. How­ev­er, over time, hav­ing slight­ly changed and decreased, pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mers began to be used in the con­struc­tion of roads and build­ings.

With the help of a jack­ham­mer, you can destroy old walls, asphalt that has become unus­able, loosen frozen soil and com­pact­ed soil, cut an open­ing for a door, win­dow, niche, and more. Pneu­mat­ic ham­mers are used both in domes­tic and indus­tri­al scales.

In addi­tion to pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mers, there are also elec­tric, hydraulic and gaso­line. And although they usu­al­ly per­form the same func­tions, each type has both advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages.

Prin­ci­ple of oper­a­tion

Pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mers run on com­pressed air. It pass­es through the pis­ton-valve sys­tem and cre­ates a trans­la­tion­al move­ment of the strik­er, which strikes the work­ing tool (pike or chis­el). That, in turn, affects the mate­r­i­al, destroy­ing it. The source of com­pressed air is a com­pres­sor, with which the jack­ham­mer is con­nect­ed by a rub­ber hose.

Pneu­mat­ic ham­mers are more in demand among builders than gaso­line or elec­tric ham­mers. First, due to weight. Elec­tric and petrol ones weigh about 10–16 kg, while pneu­mat­ic ones weigh no more than 3 kg. Thanks to this, it is con­ve­nient to hold it in your hands and work with it for a long time. Sec­ond­ly, pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mers are fire­proof. This is impor­tant when work­ing in con­di­tions of high humid­i­ty, dust, the pres­ence of flam­ma­ble sub­stances.

How­ev­er, pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mers also have dis­ad­van­tages. The most tan­gi­ble among them is the need to con­nect a jack­ham­mer to the com­pres­sor.

How to choose a pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mer?

Before you buy a jack­ham­mer, you should cor­rect­ly approach the choice of tool. First of all, you should pay atten­tion to the strength of the blows and their fre­quen­cy per unit of time. Impact force is mea­sured in joules (J). House­hold mod­els, as a rule, do not have high rates for this para­me­ter — 1.6 to 5 J, but this is enough to, for exam­ple, chip off a tile or remove an old lay­er of plas­ter. In more pro­fes­sion­al ham­mers, the impact force is already esti­mat­ed at sev­er­al tens of joules. How­ev­er, both weight and size are much larg­er. The fre­quen­cy of strokes usu­al­ly reach­es 3000 beats / min. The high­er the fre­quen­cy of impacts, the faster the fend­er will cope with the task. Thus, the choice of tool should be based on the amount of work.

Anoth­er impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tic that you should pay atten­tion to when choos­ing a pneu­mat­ic jack­ham­mer is the pres­ence of a vibra­tion damp­ing sys­tem or vibra­tion pro­tec­tion. It sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces the neg­a­tive impact on the work­er’s hands and allows max­i­mum use of the ham­mer dur­ing the shift with­out strain.

And final­ly, when buy­ing a jack­ham­mer, be sure to check with the sell­er about the equip­ment, in par­tic­u­lar, for the pres­ence of peaks in the kit. Often they have to be bought sep­a­rate­ly from the instru­ment.

Source: TopClimat.com