Diamond
drilling.

Drilling one-off cores or a full run? See core drilling.

What diamond drilling is

Diamond drilling is the method behind most of what we do: a diamond-tipped barrel rotating under water, grinding a clean, round hole through reinforced concrete, brick, stone, masonry or granite. There is no percussive impact — unlike a hammer drill or an SDS, the diamond grit grinds the material away rather than hammering it. The result is a tight-tolerance hole with no spalling around the edge, no shock to the surrounding structure, and a solid extracted core.

That makes it the standard choice as diamond drilling contractors get called in: when the hole has to be accurate, when the substrate is reinforced, and when vibration matters — live retail, occupied offices, hospitals, listed buildings, post-tensioned slabs, residential party walls. Diameters run from 12mm dowel-bar holes up to large-diameter risers and mass cores, drilled vertical, horizontal, overhead or angled, with hand-held and stand-mounted rigs to suit the job.

Typical use cases

• M&E penetrations — clean cores for ductwork, soil stacks, comms, electrical risers and HVAC runs through floors and walls.
• Ducts, pipes and cables — accurate holes sized to the service, sleeved where the spec calls for it.
• Drainage — through-wall cores for gullies, soil pipes, vents and condensate runs.
• Anchors and dowel bars — repeatable 12 – 52mm holes for structural connections, balustrade fixings and starter bars.
• Test cores and sample extraction — concrete cores for compressive testing, aggregate analysis and investigation work.
• Brick, stone and heritage fabric — cores for flues, vents and riser sleeves in solid and cavity masonry; low-vibration work on heritage facades, plinths and chimney heads.

Who it helps

Main contractors, M&E specialists and fit-out crews make up most of the diary — threading services through occupied buildings, opening up risers, and planning penetration runs around the rest of the programme. Refurbishment teams use us to open old slabs for new services and to pull sample cores. Facilities and site managers call for the one-off jobs: a missed sleeve, a new soil pipe through a party wall, an anchor hole that has to be right first time.

Whatever the route in, the pattern is the same: send the brief, get a price, book a slot, get a clean hole back.

What to send for a fast quote

• Site postcode and floor level / access route.
• Hole diameter (in mm) and how many.
• Substrate — concrete, brick, stone — and thickness if known.
• Orientation: vertical, horizontal, overhead or angled.
• Reinforcement notes: rebar density, post-tension, services nearby.
• Working hours, deadline or permit window.
• Drawings, sketches or phone photos — even a rough snap helps.

Half of that is enough to come back with a price; the rest tightens it up. Full quote checklist here.

Safety, dust and clean-work notes

Wet drilling is the default — water cools the diamond barrel, captures the slurry at source and keeps respirable silica out of the air. Slurry is contained with squeegees, sumps or vacuum extraction depending on access, then removed or bagged out as agreed up front. Where wet drilling is not an option — live retail, sensitive finishes, IT cabinets directly below — we run dry with M-class HEPA extraction at the barrel. RAMS, COSHH and any required permits are issued before the crew mobilises, and where scanning is needed it happens before the rig is set, not after.

Related services

• Core drilling — production runs: multi-core programmes, up to 60 cores per crew per day, depths to 3m.
• Concrete cutting — floor, wall and wire sawing when a cut beats a core.
• Service openings — M&E penetrations, sleeves, fire-stopping coordination.
• Stitch drilling — overlapping cores forming openings where saws can't reach.
• Specialist works — restricted access, working at height, controlled removal.
• Emergency & out-of-hours — when the slot is the constraint.