PCannon
Plastic
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2019
- Location
- Alberta, Canada
First time poster, but a heavy reader in my down time.
A bit of my back story, I am one of the owners of a small deep hole drilling shop in Alberta. Owning a shop of my own has been a dream since I was about 16 and its finally coming to fruition. Currently we have 4 drilling machines, with an offer just accepted on a 5th and we should see that set up and operational sometime just after Christmas. We are busy right now, busiest we have been since we opened 5 years ago but looking to the future I want us to diversify. 95% of our customers are oil and gas - specifically down hole tooling and it has treated it well, but like everything with a heavy boom and bust cycle the time will come again when the floor is empty. So I want to start working on diversification now while times are good but talking with our clients and others in our industry has not yielded a lot of ideas of what industry to diversify into given our equipment set ups. Or current capacity is able to drill from 1/4" ID x 60" OAL all the way up to 7" x 120" with that increasing to 10" ID x 160" with the arrival of our new machine. We have tossed around a ton of ideas on buying new machines and equipment, but I feel we need to find an industry to cater to before we look at any new equipment.
I was hoping to get some ideas of other industries where drilling is used, my experience in machining as a whole is very limited to drilling for oil tooling and field boring, and so is my network. I have explored medical manufacturing and aerospace, which have very small industries in Alberta with limited success. We have one client that has started working on rail car components which occasionally need drilling on cast components, but again a very small industry. Open surface mining and the associated manufacturing, upstream/downstream/midstream and their associated manufacturing (pumps, vessels, valves etc) and drilling are the majority of our industry here that I am aware of but I don't know of anywhere they use drilling besides down hole tooling. So, Practical Machinist community - any ideas?
-Paul
A bit of my back story, I am one of the owners of a small deep hole drilling shop in Alberta. Owning a shop of my own has been a dream since I was about 16 and its finally coming to fruition. Currently we have 4 drilling machines, with an offer just accepted on a 5th and we should see that set up and operational sometime just after Christmas. We are busy right now, busiest we have been since we opened 5 years ago but looking to the future I want us to diversify. 95% of our customers are oil and gas - specifically down hole tooling and it has treated it well, but like everything with a heavy boom and bust cycle the time will come again when the floor is empty. So I want to start working on diversification now while times are good but talking with our clients and others in our industry has not yielded a lot of ideas of what industry to diversify into given our equipment set ups. Or current capacity is able to drill from 1/4" ID x 60" OAL all the way up to 7" x 120" with that increasing to 10" ID x 160" with the arrival of our new machine. We have tossed around a ton of ideas on buying new machines and equipment, but I feel we need to find an industry to cater to before we look at any new equipment.
I was hoping to get some ideas of other industries where drilling is used, my experience in machining as a whole is very limited to drilling for oil tooling and field boring, and so is my network. I have explored medical manufacturing and aerospace, which have very small industries in Alberta with limited success. We have one client that has started working on rail car components which occasionally need drilling on cast components, but again a very small industry. Open surface mining and the associated manufacturing, upstream/downstream/midstream and their associated manufacturing (pumps, vessels, valves etc) and drilling are the majority of our industry here that I am aware of but I don't know of anywhere they use drilling besides down hole tooling. So, Practical Machinist community - any ideas?
-Paul