If you are planning to build lakefront, a steel pile foundation is likely in order. In this video, Matt Risinger, master builder, walks us through creating a steel-pile foundation on a flat lot that drops onto a man-made constant level lake. While the water won't rise and fall, the water table is just a few feet deep. The first step is to have a geotechnical engineer collect core samples down to bedrock. From the top, the soil was good for a couple of feet, then soupy all the way down to the bedrock. Based on that finding, the geotechnical engineer recommended steel piles.While the finished project will look like a typical slab, the steel piles will do the heavy lifting in supporting the foundation. They are installed by first drilling a 10' hole, providing a starter for the columns. The steel piles come in 30' lengths and are 3/8" wall steel and 8" in diameter. A weld cap will keep the column from filing with water or mud and kept free to later fill it in with rebar and concrete. A forklift drops the first pipe in 30’. At that point, it is pressed down with the forklift. Since the rock is 50' deep, another column is brought in and welded, and the pushing down continues. At the last five feet before hitting rock, a crane-supported piledriver to drive the steel piles down to hit rock. Each of them holds 300 thousand pounds of bearing capacity and they are placed in a specific grid pattern to distribute the load. In effect the house is floating above the soupy mess. When the piles are in place, the concrete crew forms up the house slab and integrate the house's rebar into the steel piles. The concrete slab is 5" thick but the strength from the slab comes from the beams, the grid pattern. Inside the beams is a rebar layer integrated into the concrete that stiffens the slab, giving it strength. At the bottom of the beams the steel pipes are filled with concrete with rebar sticking out. That rebar will integrate into the slab rebar, completing a grid pattern of beams from the beams that's that grid pattern of beams with piles at the bottom of them So that the entire concrete slab sits on the piles. There is several million pounds of capacity on the steel.A yellow plastic vapor barrier is used that will keep moisture from the soil from getting into the concrete when the concrete is poured.