The pile, as an important foundation style, is being used in engineering practice. Defects of different types and damages of different degrees easily occur during the process of pile construction. So,dietecting defects of the pile is very important. As so far, there are some difficult problems in pile defect detection. Based on stress wave theory, some of these typical difficult problems were studied through model tests. The analyses of the test results are carried out and some significant results of the low-strain method are obtained, when a pile has a gradually-decreasing crosssection part, the amplitude of the reflective signal originating from the defect is dependent on the decreasing value of the rate of crosssection β. No apparent signal reflected from the necking appeares on the velocity response curve when the value of β is less than about 3.5 %.