Screw Pile Foundations on Manitoulin Island
Brad Wright installs Postech screw piles out of Gore Bay. Manitoulin now has a certified installer based on the island, instead of a crew coming across the swing bridge.
He also runs 10th Line Lumber Co., a family sawmill going back four generations here. He mills the lumber that goes into cottages across the island, and he builds camps and outbuildings himself. The foundation was the one part he sent off-island. Now the piles land in the same yard as the lumber, at 138 Tenth Line.
The island is mostly rock
There is limestone under most of Manitoulin. What changes from lot to lot is what sits on top of it: sand, topsoil, hard clay in places, and often very little of any of it. Code puts a footing below the frost line, around six feet here, and plenty of lots do not have six feet of soil. It is why so much of what gets built on this island ends up on blocks, and ends up moving.
A screw pile is driven by machine down to solid bearing, whatever the depth of the cover above it. Nothing excavated, nothing poured. And on an island where every yard of concrete arrives over one bridge, the math is not the same.
What a job looks like
Most jobs are done in a day, with drawings for your permit and Postech's written lifetime warranty against frost heave.
Camps, cottages, decks, docks, additions, sheds, solar racking. Rock, sand, hard clay: every site on this island sits on something different. Call and describe yours.