With the increase of the thickness of rubble bed, and under the condition the explosive tamping method usually can’t be adopted because of environmental constraints, this paper recommends a renovation of the conventional heavy tamping compaction method, i.e. adopting super-heavy hammer and larger dividing thickness of the rubble bed. Firstly, the heavy-weight hammer is designed; Secondly, the resistance coefficient of surrounding flow and effective tamping energy is adopted by the finite element method; Thirdly, the effective reinforced depth of rubble bed is estimated with effective tamping energy. On this basis, the dividing thickness of rubble bed is increased to 4 meters. The construction results of Sonyu harbour in Xiamen showed that the improved process of heavy tamping compaction got a good result, as the average compacted rate reached as high as 14.85% and the efficiency increased significantly. It may serve as reference for similar engineering practices.