German demolition company makes fast work of motorway junction: Armed with ten Epiroc hydraulic hammers, Mexner GmbH dismantled the A60/A63 north bridge overnight.

The high volume of traffic using the motorway interchange every day – approximately 180,000 vehicles - posed a challenge to the construction service providers to complete the demolition of the freeway as quickly as possible, limited to overnight working, without causing damage to other carriageways. Thanks to the right equipment, the job was completed within a very short time.

The contract to demolish the north bridge of the well-used motorway interchange, which was built 60 years ago, was awarded to Mexner GmbH, a demolition company based in Bischofsheim, by Autobahn GmbH. Mexner had previously demolished the south bridge of the Mainz South interchange in 2017, which has subsequently been rebuilt. As a result of this work, they knew that the north bridge would also contain an extremely large amount of prestressed steel, so would require a large number of machines to handle this. 

After the demolition company had filled a drop bed to protect the roadways under the bridge, ten track excavators equipped with hydraulic hammers set to work on Friday evening and successfully completed the demolition of the bridge within the tightly scheduled time window during their nighttime operation. Nothing now stands in the way of the new bridge's construction. 

For the demolition of the North Bridge, the demolition company relied exclusively on hydraulic breakers from premium supplier Epiroc, whose regional distributor is Bischoff GmbH in Frankfurt am Main. From the HB 3100 to the HB 5800, all hammer sizes were in use. Managing Director Thomas Mexner comments: "We have deconstructed many highway bridges in the past. When faced with such high concrete grades with strong reinforcement, the hydraulic breakers from Epiroc are ideally suited. For us, they are the most powerful breakers in the industry," Mexner says, explaining his choice of the combination of high performance and low operating costs that characterize the Epiroc hydraulic breakers. 

Epiroc's heavyweight hydraulic breakers, the HB series, are specifically designed and engineered for primary demolition of massive reinforced concrete structures such as highways, primary rock excavation, and secondary crushing on construction sites and in quarries. The patented Intelligent Protection System (IPS) facilitates positioning and provides maximum idle protection by automatically adjusting the start-up and shut-down behavior during operation. This allows maximum efficiency to be retrieved with minimum risk, even under difficult conditions. Overall performance is optimised by the integrated AutoControl system by automatically adjusting and matching impact energy and impact rate during operation.