One of the things we enjoy covering at The Driller is the ingenuity in the drilling industry. Passionate, trained engineers and homegrown tinkerers populate the industry, and help drive everything from high-tech innovations to the MacGyver fixes on site that push jobs to completion.

Scott Dalrymple falls into the former category. He’s the design engineer for MEDATech and product manager for their drilling division, Borterra, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We brought Dalrymple on episode 25 of Drilling In-Site to talk about a prototype rig his company built for dam remediation work in Alabama, United States. The rig brings together down-the-hole water hammer and sonic technologies, a mashup that allows the driller to switch methods as required to keep holes on target.

“They wanted to be able to do their own core sampling so they can do it on their own schedule and we're not stuck to the schedule of the contractor when he's available,” Dalrymple says of the client. “Then, as a further item on their list, they wanted to be able to record all their drilling data, so they could combine that with their core sampling and further enhance the 3D map of the rock structure that we're dealing with.”

Dalrymple goes on. “They went shopping and quickly found out that no one made such a versatile rig. In fact, they said that they really couldn't find any two rigs they could buy that would do everything they wanted.”

The result was the WS6000, a track-mounted rig that brings together high-pressure water hammer and sonic drilling technologies into one package. Dalrymple says operators switch between the two with the push of a button to head off deviations that might come from hitting voids.

This episode covers topics like:

• Dam remediate projects and their general goals.
• The pros and cons of drilling with water hammers.
• The pros and cons of drilling with sonic.
• How combining down-the-hole water hammer and sonic drilling technologies helped operators keep holes on target.
• Core recovery.
• Other uses for a drilling rig that combines sonic and DTH water hammer technologies.

Check out today’s episode to hear more. Watch the video here or listen to the audio version of our conversation at www.thedriller.com/insite-podcast. You can also find our show on Apple Podcasts. Search for Drilling In-Site, then hit Subscribe.

Resources

MEDATech on the web: www.medatech.ca