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Heavy Iron Being Built In Houston in 1975

johnoder

Diamond
Joined
Jul 16, 2004
Location
Houston, TX USA
This is heavy, and is USA, so I elected to put it in this section

Page two mentions folks - Ralph Stokley is Ken's (4GSR) dad. Charlie Elder founded Boring Specialties, that both Ken and I worked for briefly. Duane Wolfe and Harvey Benoit were Drilco folks that hired me in the fall of 1974. Roy Arledge worked for Charlie and then Charlie Jr for ages at Boring Specialties.

The awkwardly posed photo of Duane and I shows the 150 HP motor on that particular trepanner.
 

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Brings back fond memories! I was in in high school at this time in 1975. We as a family looked forward getting our copy of the Drilco "Heartbeat" in the mail, to read up on happenings at Drilco/Houston as well as things happening at other Drilco facilities at other places around the World.

John, Thanks for sharing!

Ken

BTW John, my last tenure at Smith in 2003, they still had one of the Heil-Mills left spiraling drill collars. It was retrofitted with a CNC controller. All the rest remained the same.
 
Thank you Gbent. There was lots of good luck along the way and this was one of those places. It was their idea to refer to this youngster only 6 years out the apprenticeship as the "E" word, but the only college work I ever did was a few semesters of AUTO BODY and that was twenty years later.:)

John, thanks for a look at another page in your impressive resume.
 
Another great ''true life'' thread, showing the sort of work the great majority of machinists will have never heard of let alone seen.

Thanks John.
 
My frist Drilco review December 1974

You are welcome Limy - thanks for kind comments.

Here is a piece of paper from those days (a few months short of forty years back) bumping me up to a little less than 8 dollars an hour. :D Seems to be legible if you click on it a few times to make as big as it will get.
 

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John, all snarky kidding aside - I make it a point to read your posts when I visit PM, but even aside from that, I very much enjoy when you post these snippets of your past. Wonderful stuff, really. Kepp on keepin' on.
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:)
 
So is that great big trepanner still making drill collars today?

On Edit; Never-mind, just saw that Ken already answered that.
 
So is that great big trepanner still making drill collars today?

On Edit; Never-mind, just saw that Ken already answered that.

Matt,

I missed putting a comment in my post about the trepanners. Sad to say, all but two LeBlond trepanners were left out of the the nearly 15 plus trepanners they had back in the early 1980's. Including the one that John worked on.
 
John,

Thanks for sharing. I didn't know that Duane was from Oklahoma. He must have been one of the several people Drilco hired and moved to Houston when American Iron Works closed down in Oklahoma City back in the late 1960's.

Ken
 
Yes American Iron, and apparently (?) the father of high speed trepanning as we know it. Here is his 1959 patent:

There is also an Induction Head patent, which I thought this was.

Patent US2869405 - Trepanning head - Google Patents



John,

Thanks for sharing. I didn't know that Duane was from Oklahoma. He must have been one of the several people Drilco hired and moved to Houston when American Iron Works closed down in Oklahoma City back in the late 1960's.

Ken
 
Wow! I remember someone mentioning him and another person introduced trepanning to America as we know it today. I didn't realize he had a patent on the trepan head pretty much as the one we use today.

Ken
 
One of my Drilco projects never photographed to my knowledge was the pair of huge (and long) Seneca Falls Lo Swing lathes dedicated to the "Hevi wate"(?) product line - sort of a section of drill string with an integral "cat head" or steady rest band in the middle

The deal was to produce this feature from the solid - which involved turning down the bulk of each end to some smaller diameter - all at once using the pair of carriages.

I got to figure out how to install early versions of SMW's hydraulically operated steady rests which if I recall correctly were used as follow rests

The lathes were more equipment left over from WW2 ordnance production. I seem to recall each lathe had 75 HP
 
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That huge motor on that gearbox resembles a freight train. That's work history to be proud of. Is that a gear reduction or just the bearing housing for the drive
 
The big ribbed casting split on the center line is just a head stock containing large bore spindle and its quite large Timken bearings. I think we used a big timing belt. The big motor is just a DC controlled - in those days - by a SCR, so no gearing needed. Not a large range of speed was needed since there is not a large range of diameters in the trepanning - regardless of how big the OD.

The large power was needed because this was a double end trepanner - working from both ends of maybe 32 feet of 11" bar at the same time.

The high pressure coolant pumps on each end also aggregated 150 HP. There must be no failure in getting the chips out like right now

As far as exactly remembering details, this was all going on 45 years ago:D



That huge motor on that gearbox resembles a freight train. That's work history to be proud of. Is that a gear reduction or just the bearing housing for the drive
 
John,

You maybe aware of Timken shutting down The Old Boring Specialities facility You and I worked at back in the late 1970's. Every thing was auctioned off back in July of this year. The little Lehmann hollow spindle lathe I used to operate was auctioned off along with one that had a 16" hole in the spindle with 38 foot bed, too. Another chapter of heavy iron closed in our books.
The old Drilco/Smith facility up on Hardy road I believe was pretty much shut down and sold off to several other entities in the Houston area by Schlumberger this past year, too. I cannot confirm exact details just third hand information. Ken
 
Thanks Ken - looks like all passing away.. We were lucky to have been in the industry.

John,

You maybe aware of Timken shutting down The Old Boring Specialities facility You and I worked at back in the late 1970's. Every thing was auctioned off back in July of this year. The little Lehmann hollow spindle lathe I used to operate was auctioned off along with one that had a 16" hole in the spindle with 38 foot bed, too. Another chapter of heavy iron closed in our books.
The old Drilco/Smith facility up on Hardy road I believe was pretty much shut down and sold off to several other entities in the Houston area by Schlumberger this past year, too. I cannot confirm exact details just third hand information. Ken
 
Thank you for sharing all this. I spent a few years with drill collars, and I always wondered exactly how those were made.
 








 
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