New Liebherr rig creates hundreds of piles in Poland

Here, the Polish company Budokop Geotechnika is using the deep foundation machine with full displacement equipment to install 1,772 piles for one of the city’s most ambitious residential projects with over 1,000 new flats in a premium coastal location.

The main challenges are the large scope of the project and the hard ground.

The LRB 19 is the successor of the tried and tested piling and drilling rigs LRB 16 and LRB 18 and was presented by Liebherr for the first time at bauma 2025.

Budokop Geotechnika is one of the first companies to use the deep foundation model on a jobsite. “We opted for the LRB 19 because it is powerful and highly mobile. Thanks to its compact design, it can be easily transported, which saves us a lot of time. The radio remote control, which allows the machine to be operated outside the cabin, ensures safety when unloading and loading,” says Wojciech Sukow, company founder and managing director.

The low transport weight of 48.2t, including the 8t counterweight and auxiliary winch, is part of the mobility concept mentioned by Sukow.

Budokop Geotechnika is using the LRB 19 with full displacement equipment in Gdansk for the foundation piles for more than 1,000 new flats. Here, the piles are not drilled out in this process but created by displacing the soil.

One advantage of this application is that it is very efficient because no soil material has to be removed from the jobsite.

The concrete for the piles is supplied by the 110 D-K crawler concrete pump from Liebherr, which was specially developed for such applications in deep foundation work. The piles are up to 9m deep and have a diameter of 360mm.

Particularly challenging is the large scope of the project with 1,772 piles, which have to be installed in just eight weeks, as well as the hard ground conditions.

Due to the coastal location of the construction site on the Baltic Sea, Budokop Geotechnika also has to work very precisely and safely. The groundwater level can be especially high in close proximity to the sea, which makes the application significantly more challenging.

“The collaboration between Budokop Geotechnika and Liebherr is a true partnership. I value the quality of the machine, the service and the technical support. We’ve been relying on it for a long time,’ says Wojciech Sukow, gazing at the piling and drilling rig LRB 19, which is being applied successfully in Gdansk.