Rock Breaker on Hire for Hard Strata & Concrete

A hydraulic hammer on an excavator

A rock breaker is a hydraulic hammer mounted on an excavator arm in place of the bucket. The excavator's hydraulics drive a chisel that fractures rock, hard layers or concrete into pieces a bucket can lift. Because it rides on a standard excavator, it can work inside a basement, on a demolition site or along a trench without separate access arrangements.

Rock breakers are not listed as a separate category in our fleet. We deploy a breaker on one of our excavators as per your requirement and our availability at the time, and confirm the carrier class and terms in the quote.

When a bucket is not enough

How to tell if you need one

The best early signal is your soil investigation report: borehole logs that show weathered rock, refusal or very high blow counts at basement depth. Trial pits and the first days of excavation confirm it. If you share the report and the levels where hard strata start, we can suggest whether a breaker is likely to be needed, for roughly how much of the volume, and how to sequence it so the excavators and tippers keep working on other faces.

Breaking is slower than digging, so it changes the programme. Planning for it at the start, rather than discovering it halfway down, avoids idle tippers and missed slab dates.

Noise, vibration and dust

In dense parts of NCR the hammer works next to homes, offices and roads. We work within the hours permitted for the site, follow any vibration monitoring your consultant specifies, and keep dust down with water spraying from our water tankers. Hydraulic breaking is usually far more practical in an urban setting than blasting, which needs separate licensing and permissions and is outside the scope of this service.

What to expect from breaking

Breaking output varies far more than digging output. It depends on how hard and fractured the material is, how thick the layer is, the size of the breaker and its carrier, and how much room the operator has to work. Fractured rock and old masonry break quickly; massive concrete or unweathered rock can be slow going. For that reason we prefer to start with a short trial on the actual strata and set the programme from what it shows, rather than promise a rate in advance. Where only part of the basement is hard, we keep normal excavators digging the softer faces so the tipper fleet stays busy while the breaker works.