Twenty thousand years ago, if you'd needed to dig a hole in rough ground, chances are you would have found yourself swinging a sharpened deer antler over your head. Modern pickaxes are based on pretty much the same idea. The long wooden handle and metal blade act like levers to magnify the force you generate with your back muscles and arms. It's simple technology, but it's very effective.
Today, if you want to dig a hole in a hurry and there's a thick lump of concrete or asphalt in your way, you're most likely to use a jackhammer, also known as a pneumatic (air-powered) drill, rock drill, or pavement breaker. A strong and skilled road worker can swing a pickaxe 10 times a minute or more, but a jackhammer can pound the ground 150 times faster—that's 1500 times a minute! Pretty amazing, but how exactly does it work?
The first time you saw someone digging a hole in the road with a tool like this, you probably thought the equipment was electric or powered by a diesel engine, right? In fact, the only energy involved in making a jackhammer pound up and down is supplied from an air hose. The hose, which has to be made of especially thick plastic, carries high-pressure air (typically 10 times higher pressure than the air around us) from a separate air-compressor unit powered by a diesel engine.
The air compressor is a bit like a giant bicycle pump that never stops blowing air. When the worker presses down on the handle, air pumps from the compressor into the jackhammer through a valve on one side. Inside the hammer, there's a circuit of air tubes, a heavy piledriver, and a drill bit at the bottom. First, the high-pressure air flows one way round the circuit, forcing the piledriver down so it pounds into the drill bit, smashing it into the ground. A valve inside the tube network then flips over, causing the air to circulate in the opposite direction. Now the piledriver moves back upward, so the drill bit relaxes from the ground. A short time later, the valve flips over again and the whole process repeats. The upshot is that the piledriver smashes down on the drill bit over 25 times each second, so the drill pounds up and down on the ground around 1500 times a minute.
Jackhammers, and the air compressors that power them come in all different shapes and sizes. The drill bits on the end are interchangeable too. There are wide chisels, narrow chisels, and tools called moil points for fine work. A skilled drill operator can loosen chunks of the road in just 10-20 seconds, making light work of what our ancestors—with their antler picks—would have found truly backbreaking work!
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