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I work in the fiber optic network industry, and previously worked in the gas utility industry. We used to joke that you should always carry a length of fiber optic cable with you in case you get stuck on a deserted island. Just bury the cable and when the guy with the backhoe comes out to cut it you can just ride back with him.
@@longridgearchery love these jokes. I promise a lot of us do try not to disturb markers but mistakes do happen and I do apologize for the ones I've accidentally knocked down.
Thanks Grady! This answered so many questions that I didn’t even know I had. We had one of these drill right through the water supply to our house. They were like, “there isn’t a pipe here” and I was like, “well, there’s no water going into our house anymore so…” They had it all patched up in a couple days.
@@simontay4851 I might take you a couple days to understand, but grammar isnt as strict as some people might like it to be. we make the rules. As we write, and as we talk.
Agreed I locate gas and water lines for a city in my area so my crews can install new gas main and services to houses I'm responsible for the gas and water owned by the city as well as all private utilities a good day is a day where none of my crews hit utilities especially any buried gas lines
@@williamdavis3128 I also locate gas as well as electric. It’s a demanding job but satisfying knowing that my hard work is paying off by allowing others to work safely and go home to their families everyday.
Heh, can't tell you how many times I've seen locates on things in the wrong spot here. That 1 meter accuracy tends to be more than a meter for the people here lol.
Yep. Had underground primary 3 phase drilled into yesterday actually lol, locating is tough because contractors are always going to try and pin the blame on the locator.
@@boostaddict_ A lot of people don't understand that there are a lot of variables that can impact the accuracy. Certain soils and rocks for example can. As can interference from other utilities. That is why dig laws require the contractor to pothole before excavating. The only sure way to locate a utility is to put eyes on it.
I used to work for a UK drilling company as a tracker. We drilled under railway lines with mm tolerances on the tracks. Under woods that had preservation orders and under lots of domestic properties. We drilled under a river aiming for a range rod that the client had stuck in the ground. I will never forget the look on his face when we emerged from the ground and knocked the rod over. We used to say " any fool can still down. Coming back up and arriving where you want to be takes skill.
@@amadkhan1201 When drilling under buildings or rivers where the depth was not guaranteed, we set up further back and drilled deep but further. A sharper angle would strain the putting end of the pipe being pulled through the hole. It was always a very slow pull after a weekend away because sometimes the hole would reduce in size.... The drill head for steering was important, but so was the reamer. After the hole of small diameter it would need to be enlarged. This was done by pulling a larger reamer back to the rig. Behind the reamer was another string of drill rods and other a larger reamer. Once the hole was made oversize a tube was pulled through to finish the job. The ground would settle around the pipe and job was finished.
@@kingmichaeln1 I've never drilled but I used to work around drillers and would spot utilities for them at my old job and from what I could tell no you don't need to be a math wiz to do it
@@kingmichaeln1 if you want to be very accurate as well as fast and efficient as the drill locator/tracker you do need to be able to do simple addition and subtraction in your head on the fly. But lets be honest, that could be taught to a 10 year old very easily.
Drill bits are about a foot long on average, one component to a drill string. The bottom part is called the BHA (bottom hole assembly) the steerable part, and the part behind it is the drill pipe, the flexible part you are talking about. Old drill strings from the sixties and seventies were made up of drill collars for weight and stiffness, stabilisers, which were placed for a specific effect, build and drop or rotate ahead as straight as possible, jars to free you if you got stuck, reamers and hole openers and so on, more complex than you can imagine
That was simply mind blowing. It made me sit with jaw open "how easy is that". OFC drilling in real life is much more involved, but the principle is so amazingly simple.
Here in Germany that drilling method did become more known to the public when the company "FlowTex" was sued for the (back then) most expensive large-scale fraud in Germany. The damage was roughly 4.2 billion USD. The company had 270 machines but those were sold multiple times (3142 machines had been sold). When they had investors visiting they drove to one drilling site, then had lunch and then drove to a different drilling site. During the lunch brake they moved the drills from site 1 to site 2 creating the illusion of a bigger pool of machines. (see my correction) *Correction* The scam worked more like that they changed the serial number plates on existing machines with new created serial number plates.
Germany is home of alot of biggest corporate fraud. wirecard was a recent one, every few years 5bil gets scammed away over there. just imagine the kind of fraud cash flow the banks do facilitate
@@dispatch-indirect9206 You have to catch and prosecute the "brass balls" who pull off scams like that. Admiring them just encourages them to do more damage.
used to work on a directional drilling crew. very cool. we were a small company and one day we hit a big set of fiberoptic lines. poor company went bankrupt after paying for repairs on that fiber.
Good lord. You wouldn't happen to ever install bright orange posts for locating the line? Someone tried to say a salesperson lied to us about installing fiber optic on a ton mile stretch of our road. Obviously they plan to install it because we literally already have high speed internet it's just severely limited by the line. I assume whenever that gets put in we'll have like maximum speeds to our plain line. Because they're fusing the two systems just like when I converted my car speakers to regular electricity from having the signal come from a fiber optic line into self powered devices
Ouch! I was an inspector for drilling crews for years. I have seen them hit and destroy a lot of things, but thankfully no electrical and no fiber optic lines.
I worked installing fiber optic cable when I was in high school, horizontal drilling 4’ underground in residential areas. I was the guy who used a hydrovac to expose existing utilities before drilling so you didn’t hit them with the bit. I then got a degree in petroleum engineering and work in the oil and gas industry drilling horizontal wells. The concept is identical and many technologies are shared , only difference is you start going horizontal at 10,000’ instead of 4’!!
@@Blox117 a hydro vac will cause less damage than a backhoe as far as incidental objects are concerned. It uses pressurized water to cut and liquefy the soil before vacuuming it out
@@Blox117 nah usually you dont dig where that stuff is known to be and if you find it you *should* report it But trust me, some construction sites rather just pretend they didnt just see a bone and yeet it rather than getting the project stopped for some expert to come and dig up the stuff for history purposes Have seen that happen a few times where they stumbled upon an old village but that was when they laid a gas pipeline that was like a half a meter across and required a fuckton of digging 😅
I work at an Engineering firm and have designed multiple directional drills across intercoastal waterways. I now use this video to introduce new engineers to the basics of directional drill. Thanks for putting this together. Also, I see you used to work for Freese, we are partnered with them on a project. I'm a Kimley-Horn guy.
Having recently experienced fiberoptic cable installation in my neighborhood, I can confidently say the lack of trenching was both noted and appreciated
My gas connection was installed in a similar manner. Meant they dug two tiny holes a D didn't have to close off the entire road and destroy my entire driveway. Job was done in a day, filled in the two tiny holes the day after, was cheap too
I'm a HDD rig operator and I tell you, I never managed to explain to angry people that it's better to have the rig on a portion of the road for 2 days rather than having a trench dug on the whole road. So I'm happy to see some people actually do realise that.
4:50 bentonite needs hours of mixing to shear so it creates the shear-thinning fluid it needs to be able able to suspend cutting while pump is off. Posting this comment while my drilling bit is drilling at 14,000 ft below ground. I always liked the way u demonstrate concept and really liked how u showed how mud supports well walls.. one more thing is also when water infiltrate in permeable sand leaving solids on wells wall which supports it which we call filter cake. Ty for ur quality content and good presentation. Glad i found something to relate to in ur channel.
@@snifrbelin New words unlocked: Thixotropic: Decrease of viscosity over time under shear strain. [Yogurt / Threadlocker] Rheopecty: Increase of viscosity over time under shear strain. [Mashed potatoes / Car LSD] Pseudoplastic: Distinct from Thixotropic, since it's not time dependent. [Ketchup / Whipped cream / Modern paint / Nail polish] Dilatant Fluid: Distinct from Rheopecty, since it's not time dependent. [Quicksand / Cornstarch mix / SillyPutty]
They use pulsed mud systems sometimes for locational information. We used to do maintenance on downhole tools, and one we had was a probe that was powered by a turbine spun by the mud going down the drillshaft. it sent information back to the headunit by limiting the mudflow, causing pressure pulses upstream. More useful than radio when you're 20kft or more deep. Measured all kinds of information. Radiation, vibrations, temperatures, gyro orientation, magnetic fields. All useful for figuring out where and what you're drilling through when you can't see it. Oh also tangentially related (no pun intended), the drill bits on the end, are also powered by that same mudflow. It's quite ingenious use of an already required aspect of drilling to add a power transfer through the lubrication medium. It's like if the coolant pump on your CNC mill actually powered the computer and the spindle at the same time.
Lemme name-drop some other science-channel or learn-channel, cause i like sharing Fun and thats all the reason i need: Sci Man Dan, Sci Show, UpisnotJump, Plaanrwalk, Second Thought, Hbomberguy, Joe Scott.
they actually don't use mud pulsing tools for HDD. We use wireline or telemetry. Mud pulsing tools are relatively slow for the process. Wireline is real time. Also mud pulsing would only allow for DC tracking while other system will allow for AC tracking.
Your talent for making state-of-the-art engineering understandable is incredible. Absolutely love and appreciate your work making these concepts that are often literally buried underground and in mathematics visible for us lay-folk :)
Great video, as usual. I splice fiber for a living. My work depends on HDD crews followed by pedestal/hand hole installer crews to get their jobs done before the fiber blowing crews can put the fiber cable in. Something not mentioned here (which I think is very important for the public to know) is the importance of "call before you dig". Our HDD crews have to put in locate service requests 72 hrs before they start. Any company with utilities/pipes/fiber/gas has 72 hours to mark the requested route with spray paint or flags. If they DO NOT MARK IT, the repair cost is their burden when it gets hit. There is a huge misconception that HDD crews are always careless when they are drilling. Many times, other companies have not properly grounded their systems, used tracer wire in non-conductive pipes, or adequately documented where their pipes are... their buried utilities can't be definitively located. One job just up the road from me has broken the water main so many times because the city claims they don't have the equipment, manpower, or budget to do the locate requests and mark where the water main goes... Even though the primary contractor offered to give them the equipment and pay an overtime rate for all city employees needed to complete the task. In the end, they hit the water main 3 times a week and they are portrayed as the bad guys. For those wondering... hitting a 288 fiber cable and damaging a 1000' section can run well over $15,000 in fiber splicing cost alone. I don't know the HDD costs or any of the other expenses needed to replace the cable... But it is very expensive to break a fiber cable.
Most of the guys doing fiber are payed by the meter so basically if your not drilling your losing money. But I would say just at a minimum you would be $500/hour in cost. The worst part is no matter who hit it or why gossip travels and it hurts your company reputation.
also, accidents do happen on both ends. a guy I worked with years ago was on a bore project at an airport, and the rig operator was going for speed over precision when his bit came up through the runway surface. other side of the coin, a trenching crew cut a 125 pair copper phone bundle when the country grader graded the road in between the underground locate service marking it and the trenching crew trenching it.
Apparently HD drillers have had it relying on the utility maps for locating other existing pipe and lines. The various detection equipment business are taking off.
@@kenbrown2808 Sounds like nobody wants to go down through bedrock actually drill, where there is plenty of room. Instead, everybody just wants to ram though the soil, and it’s getting crowded.
I assisted an HDD on Mariner East 2, ME2. We had an inadvertent return so bad we built a pit around it and simply used it as a recirculation pit. There was a lot of effort to mitigate damage professional geologists at each drill and field techs/engineers walking the surface to look for IR's. Amazing tech
Some of the HDD companies that I've worked with potholed every 75-100 feet along the return with a vac truck and removed the mud before they had IRs. It works pretty well but our geology is mostly clay so that's easy, the bore depths were also pretty shallow at around 8-10 feet.
Must have been really out of hand most pipeline companies just hire labour to walk around checking for releases and the big guys only show up if they find something.
@@andrewv5104 We were deep, around 60 feet to be below a stream and stay in rock. We spent several weeks there. We had two rigs drilling. We missed each other once and spent two days drilling to intercept again. Solid rock. What was on our side is that a line had previously been drilled and our IR's hit the same spot.
@@collinscody57 The ME was issue prone so it was written into their permits they would have a PG and environmental techs/field engineer/inspector from a third party. It was expensive but helped get issues resolved quickly and give the DEP a piece of mind.
@@cmdr1911 peace of mind* And thanks for bringing your story and experience with this, especially as part of the mentioned pipeline in the video. Very interesting stuff.
ok, you mentioned the coding train. i came across your channel by chance, as I was looking into HDD, but to see you are referencing another of my fav channels is awesome.
I studied geology and worked with directionally drillers at a utility contractor. Their biggest challenge the drilling foreman told me was hitting hard rock at glancing angles. The problem project that eventually had to be trenched was at the foot of the Wasatch mountains and they hit a high quartz content sedimentary layer less than 30 degrees from parallel to it and it just skipped along the outside edge of that fold and came out where they didn't want it to. They had drilled right through it at more square angles where the bit would be forced to go ahead and chew through that harder to cut rock.
My hone region of ohio is known as "DD paradise" because there are 50 or so directional drilling companies based in a 20 Sq mile area. Also 4 years ago, TC Energy did a reconstruction project on the east buckeye express 36in diameter natural gas pipeline which travels underneath 3 major waterways in my region. My favorite way to kill time was to go out and watch the semi sized drilling rigs boring and pulling up to 3 miles of pre-bent thick wall pipeline on the ROW.
I do a lot of flagging and restoration for a few company's here in Ohio that are putting in natural gas lines it is a fascinating thing to watch especially how they weld the plastic lines together all in all it's fun to watch and ask questions about
In the Oil industry drilling, the underground motor can partially close and open valves to make pressure pulses in the fluid line. Those pulses work as a digital communication system that can be used to determine the position, orientation etc. It is slow, but since the drilling process is very slow too, it is good enough. Usually, the energy to operate the system is also extracted form the fluid movement.
It isnt the motor that creats the pulses in Oil well drilling. Its the MWD/LWD tools that do that + mud motor drilling is steadily declining with RSS systems being prefered.
All day every day buddy! Drilling one now! This particular location has been the biggest challenge of my career and even RSS is giving us trouble. On losses so the pulses on lesser tools don't work. We had to get SLB out there with a slimhole tool that works.
I drove by these crews in Broward for months and didn’t get what they were up to and why it was taking so long. It is so easy to get frustrated with the delays they kept causing 😅, thanks for helping me understand the complexity of what was going on.
@@ThomasBomb45 And how long does it take again? Going to work 10 miles away, on a bike vs a car? Extra difficult (often impossible) if you carry some things with you, need to pick someone up or to stop by the groceries on your way home. Not to mention stinking of sweat all day at work, or where ever you're going.
I once wrote a guidance program for a pneumatic directional drill head. It allowed for horizontal and vertical profiles, and I had to invent a method for aligning two vectors in space using at most 2 curves with a minimum radius of curvature (it involves normal vectors to planes and an iterative approach). The drill head was one of a kind, with no mud required and an average speed of 1 foot a minute. The contract fell apart though, due to various factors. It's still one of my proudest achievements.
I work for a water/sewer district and because of our topography, we use a gravity sewer system. This means that all our sewer lines must be perfectly straight and at precise angles. Because of this trenching is preferable as directional drilling is not perfectly straight and this creates low and high spots in the line which will require continual flushing and maintenance. We do occasionally use boring to lay water pipe underground though as it is not requisite that water pipe be perfectly straight.
@@VicScott in the video itself, he said that directional drilling isn’t straight. It’s continually curving. Also we have no control over the contractors we use. We have to put projects out to bid and are legally required to choose the lowest bid. The lowest bidder often subcontracts out the work. Using open trenching, we get perfectly straight lines, GPS shots of the pipe in situ for mapping purposes, and we use lasers and other means to keep an exact grade.
I live a few miles from an area that was affected by the Mariner issue and it was downplayed and covered up more than you could imagine. They struck old mine shafts here which leaked blood red water into the river for weeks. There was coal ash making its way into the river. Cutting fluid which they were caught using something other than what they were supposed to be. It's been a while but now I'm going to look into it more again.
Keep complaining. Pretty soon, there will be so much red tape, life will cease to exist as you know it. No more electricity. No more gas. No more running water. No more indoor plumbing.
that's super interesting its also similar to how the apollo capsules were steered on reentry. The mass was off center so by rotating the capsule it could change pitch or yaw
Also how surgeons use a guide wire to steer a coronary catheter through the circulatory system for things like installing stents and performing angiography
What would the kinetic energy be of that capsule, falling from the moon, reaching 11 km/s at reentry? What was the kinetic energy be of that capsule at reentry?
There was recently an interesting project near where i live. A city wanted to create an underpass without closing the road above. They did it by pushing a concrete underpass tunnel prefab through the soil using hydraulics. Then, later, excavated the internal part of the underpass and voila...all done without any road closures.
They have done that many times here in Florida of all places. Pretty neat to watch. It is called box jacking. Some have put underpass for cars and others were for trains to go under roadways.
Can you build such a machine on paper? NO, because you still don't know how it works. you only know the theory, no practical comprehension regarding the drill manipulation or function. How do a bit steer if it needs to continuously turn to drill? You don't know. I don't know.
@@alltheusernameswastaken8936 Well of course I couldn't build one of these machine based on a 12 minute TH-cam video....It's a demonstration of a principle, not a PhD on how to design, build and operate these devices so for those of us who started out knowing nothing about it at least I get the idea and can drill down into the subject further if I want to know more (forgive the pun).
@@alltheusernameswastaken8936 um the video answers your second question. Either the asymmetrical bit at the end stays in place and fluid pushes out the soil or there's a spinning bit at the end which spins on an axis almost perpendicular to the bore so it's asymmetrical.
I worked at a shop where we machined the drill bits for these. I never knew exactly how they worked, we just machined them and sent them off. They weren’t the motorized type but the dirt digger style that relied on the shaft rotation to cut holes. It looked like a normal bit but with half of the front end chopped off at angle. Anyways, thanks for making this video so I understand how the technology works a lot better.
I love those coding challenges, he does it in a very human way, we witness every mistake and head scratcher, then he explains the solution, fix and the entire thought process with each step. It’s weirdly exciting to see the project succeed
I've seen those rigs around for *years*, and never knew how they worked; thanks for the concise explanation of this really-slick construction technique!
I didn’t even know these machines existed before I started working in civil construction. I have been on the drill crew and I think Grady gives an excellent overview of how these machines work. They are great when the goings good but when things break or if they hit utilities it’s very costly. We use traffic control to keep things safe for the crew and the public especially in residential areas.
Great stuff, as usual Grady. I worked on a remediation project in VA a few years back. We needed to connect some ground water remediation wells to a small water treatment plant we built. Those wells were on the opposite side of the Shenandoah River from the treatment plant. We hired a contractor and I was lucky enough to be the oversight rep for this contractor so I got to watch the process first hand. About 3/4 of a mile long and 40’ under the river bed thru mostly solid rock. Remarkable technology.
Grady does it again! This is yet another thing I've often wondered about when I see them working on the side of the road. Thanks for demystifying these processes for me. Love your channel.
Fun fact; direction drilling first appeared in underground coal mines for sampling coal ahead in seams and for tunneling ahead to make it easier to mine a face (its easier to poke a hole in something and enlargen it than trying to dig into or pick apart a flat ish face/surface)
And this is in 70's or 80's coal mines (maybe even earlier, i'd have to ask my 88 yo neighbor who ran boxflat and a few other mines in my area in queensland) and the early machines were honking huge behemoths being grandaddys to modern day decendents.
Found your channel a couple of months ago and I have to say, Grady - I really love your videos. The way you explain things professionally, the editing, production quality and the details you go into really make for top quality content! I was a civil engineer in the UK for 8 years and I'm still learning a lot from you! Thank you 😁
I've always wondered about this. On a much more amateur level, when I was a landscape contractor, I often had to run pipes under sidewalks and driveways. I had this similar device, although there was no directional ability. A simple blade head mounted on the end of 1" black pipe. At the other end, a T fitting that accommodated a garden hose and a 1/2 drill adapter. We would dig down a foot and as horizontal as possible, and other trench on the other side. Worked great. Never a problem although my contract had a disclaimer about unforeseeable circumstances under their pavement.
The drill bit knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the drill bit from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is.
It is for the birds. When I operated heavy equipment one cattle egret came to recognize me and would follow me around in the morning until I finally started tearing up the ground. (Others would appear then, but that one bird would greet me every morning when I parked my car.) I could almost hear his sweet, gentle morning greeting: "HEY! WHERE'S MY BREAKFAST?"
@@mastershooter64 Birds are smart as heck! In fact, most animals are much more intelligent than we give them credit for. If you've ever had a pet, you'll have experienced this first-hand.
Yes, I have 2 starlings that have an alarm call specifically for me, because I have given their nest building an eviction notice twice now, evicting them without compensation, and they are still around the area, and still angry with me. They can nest elsewhere, but not inside the building like they wanted to. The chicks with them recognise me, but do not call the alarm, only the parents.
@@Zappygunshot Lol yeah animals are smarter than we give them credit for, if my cat wanted to go out, it would sit next to me and meow at me and when I looked at it, it would walk to the door and meow at the door telling me to open it
@@SeanBZA Silly question, but have you ever considered trying to provide some sort of constructed bird shelter for them? No guarantee they'd actually use it, of course, but sometimes when there's little disputes like these such methods can be surprisingly effective at keeping the "peace", or at least in providing some of the warm-n-fuzzies you can get from being a pal to wildlife.
As a retired geologist I've been around a lot of "conventional" vertical drill rigs. I've been fascinated by the directional drilling but never been around it. Excellent explanations. This technology is critical. In thin, oil bearing strata thousands of feet below the surface having the drill hole remain within those thin horizons allows more oil to be recovered. Its incredible potential is why crude oil future prices actually fell below $0/barrel a few years ago but that was before... well, we all know. Great Stuff here. Should be required viewing.
I appreciate the way you explain things extremely fluidly, with a wise yet friendly tone. Makes me want to go get a civil engineering degree. Thank you Grady
I've been drilling wells and geotech drilling for 27+ years. Thankfully with the same company. I've always wondered how this type of drilling was done. Now I have a basic understanding of what is happening. Thank you for your time making this video. Keep it up. Your videos are great and informative to watch.
The Coding Train on Practical Engineering was the last crossover I would ever expect, and also the best crossover I could ever ask for. Both such amazing channels!
The plugging of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill back in 2010 was accomplished by directional drilling. They hit the well's 8 inch (?) bore from over a mile away then pumped concrete into it. If memory serves is was more than a mile down to the seabed before the drilling started, pretty amazing.
great video but I just wanted to add something on the drilling mud preventing collapse. When drilling at deeper formations (oil drilling) what prevents the well bore from collapsing is the pressure that the fluid itself exerts on the ground formation
Hey Grady just wanted to say that your channel is great. Inspired me to start to look at my options to go back to school for engineering. And be able to do work I really love for a living. Thanks Grady. Have a good one. Jay
I've seen plenty of these being used in my area lately! Installing fiber optics everywhere, mostly under the roadways. I had no idea so much went into just drilling the holes for them, thanks for the fascinating insight!
15 or so yrs ago before I retired from consulting we used this to install two 48inch steel pipes across the Platte river. Each about 2700 feet long. When they drilled the pilot holes for the two bores the drill head came up with in two feet of the target stake. Pretty impressive. The soil conditions were basically sand. We designed it to go 70 feet below the river at the low point. We evaluated this against open cutting and this way promised to be a much better option. It allowed us to go under wetlands and not worry about potential high river flows during construction. At the time 48 inch was on the upper level of experience contractors had. Michels out of Wisconsin did the work with very little problems. The whole operation was very complex including welding 2700 ft of the pipe which came in 20 ft sections and which was coated on both interior and exterior, repairing the coating damaged at the joints by welding and laying out the whole length of pipe on rollers to aid in installation following final reaming of the borehole to final size.
Very informative and enjoyable to watch! I love learning about how things like this are done. I’ve been in construction for 20 years, dug my fair share of trenches but never knew how HDD was done. Thank you, you have made me a subscriber to your channel.
I'm training to be a hdd drill locator using a 2011 vermeer 24x40 drill. My operator has operated this particular drill since new and has been drilling for 28 years (his words). The whole process is pretty cool aside from the digging to spot the household utilities 😅 the way to steer the drill is a clock pattern. Haven't done any waterway crossings yet but the residential stuff is pretty tricky snaking between all the services. Great job and wouldn't change it for a long time
I've been doing telecommunications drilling in urban areas for ~9 years now. I watch your channel all the time so was super excited to see your break-down on the industry. It's not an easy concept to explain to people so I have bookmarked this video to send to people when I get confused looks while attempting to explain how it works!! I love my job and what I do and was impressed how accurate your explanations were. The wire bending through the gel was a brilliant demonstration and really simplifies the process. Cheers from Ontario, Canada.
Thanks, I always wondered how the directional drilling happened. A few years back a 14" high pressure natural gas line built through a few miles from my home. It traveled a route that mostly avoided any developed areas, but it do have to go through a town a few miles away. Along side the highway they just did cut and cover, but they used directional drilling to run it about 1.5 miles horizontally under the town. It was pretty cool to see the whole process of drilling and then pulling in the pipeline. I was really blown away by the pull in process they ended up using. They laid out, welded up and pressure tested the 1.5 miles of pipe. The issue they had is they didn't have 1.5 miles of land in line with the pull. So they rented farmland perpendicular to the highway and pull pit. When they went to pull in the pipe in, it was bent 90° before being pulled in. They used 4 giant sheaves and attached each sheave to a different D9 bulldozer as an anchor. They were laid out so the bend had about 100 yards of radius to curve the pipe around. The pipeline had quite thick walls, and I'm sure the forces involve were massive.
Actually thicker walls may decrease pullback forces because pipeline weight counteracts buoyancy forces. My guess is that if pipeline wasn't ballasted (filled with water during pullback process) then thick wall was designed to achieve neutral bouyancy. If buoyancy controll is cafefully planned and borehole quality is good, pullback forces may be really low. According to calculations final pullback force could be as low as 25 tonnes, however due to significant distance it could be much closer to 50-75 tonnes. And I really mean that distance is impressive. The longest crossing I attended was 1180 m (or 3870 ft) long for 1000 mm (40 inch) steel gas pipelines. Final force was 110 tonnes by the way. Planning for over 2 km project would be a real challenge and I'm looking forward for that.
Pipelines offshore are laid flooded or dry, depending on wall thickness and diameter (hence overall weight), to mediate "floating" factors. Often the larger diameter lines (>12") are laid coated with a concrete jacket of around 2" thickness or more to add weight so that they still can be laid dry without floating. In depths of less than 200 feet they are subsequently buried (jetted down) to provide some protection from anchoring vessels or from vessels dragging nets for fishing.
I run a Ditch Witch Rock drill in Central Oregon. I drill through solid rock and install Fiber lines. I've only ever hit unlocated lines due to no knowledge of them being there. It's amazing to see what kind of technology we have nowadays and what's in store in the future
Not that relevant to the video, but it's probably the best opportunity I'll get to share this for a many years: When a few years ago the 100+ year old sever pipe on my street has decided that it got too old and sediment-ridden, the city set out to dig out a honest-to-god underground tunnel just to replace the pipe with a new one. With a shovel and three guys. Took them about one and a half months, but the guys did it. After the tunnel was finished it only took one workday to completely change out the pipe for the new one. I do kinda understand why they chose tunnel over digging out a trench, but it was still quite surprising to see them actually spending so much time and effort on this.
10:32 I work on trucks and I saw this “reamer” in a customers truck bed. My boss and I were really hung up on it’s alien look. I told my boss it looked like something used in drilling underground. Now here I am days later watching some practical engineering videos and I know about horizontal directional drilling. Funny how life works.
I have struggled to understand directional drilling for a long time. I had accepted "the pipes are flexible" as the answer. You explain it so much better with the bent drill head and the agar demonstration. Fantastic video, many thanks.
Hey Grady, great video! I've been a utility engineer for about 5 years now, and I'd say you got it right on the money. I would love to see you talk about Microtrench technology as well, since a lot of low voltage lines are switching to that cheaper alternative to boring!
me too. For directing it, I had thought each revolution would require the cutting teeth to be spread wider or smaller on one side. Although engineering questions remain for details, I am satisfied with this video about changing directions.
We currently have fiber optical Internet being installed in our rural community. We saw one of these units, and my wife asked how they work. I said I didn't know, but I'm sure one of my engineering guys can tell us. Thanks for the video. I'm grateful you help all of understand the process of so many things.
This channel makes me a better engineer by giving me a basic understanding of certain technologies and engineering sciences within other disciplines. This aids in the communication process on interdisciplinary teams and benefits the design process. Thanks!
Hey Grady- I'm not quite sure if this topic would fit your niche, but something I've always wondered is- Do construction vehicles and equipment (generators) really need to be as loud as they are? Big fan of your work btw. You're my go-to for explaining infrastructure to my daughter.
They're building a booster station and transmission line near my neighborhood and using directional drilling. It was pretty amazing to see the giant machinery, ramp, and bits. It was also insanely loud. I didn't really understand any of it but this video was extremely timely. Now I just need to understand what a booster station and transmission line is.
A "booster station" is where the Sheeple will go once a month to get their beloved "booster shot" of mRNA gene therapy. The "transmission line" is the device they use to post "feel good" pictures of themselves, proudly displaying their Sheeple Mask on their face encouraging others to become Sheeple and "get boosted" to "flatten the curve".
This is a question I've always wanted answered but didn't know it. It was fascinating. Thanks. I wish the city engineers where I live would watch it. I'm pretty sure they have never heard of directional drilling. They always open trench and block traffic.
DD is more expensive than open trenches for large diameters, so the city will tend to use the cheaper method, reserving DD for doing under roads and such, for small diameter lines, and open trenches for large diameter ones.
I asked myself this question as they were running fiber near my house a few weeks ago. I’m happy you made a video on this, because I could not think of a better person to explain it!
Your examples are fantastic: the animation followed by the wire with the bent end "drilling" through the agar, then the return to the animation to show the next steps. I've worked on projects with HDD, but I've never seen how it works. Thanks you. Love from Liz and Ginger (pic left) in Australia.
I've been curious about how these things work for a couple of years now, since I first saw one on the side of the road routing network cables. I figured out what it was doing as evident by materials at the site but didn't know how they steered the hole. Thank you Grady for making this video, it is fascinating how this technology works!
Last year I had a 500' water line installed, the drill head was steered by a guy with a remote control walking over the desired path of the drill. We had an "inadvertent return", luckily it was in the yard, and was engulfed in grass in a few weeks.
I work in power utilities and I would have loved a video like this when I first started. I remember underground work being a mystery and having no idea how it works. Well actually it’s still a bit of a mystery. Nobody knows exactly where anything is. We just sorta guess knowing the crew will do whatever they want anyways
Last time I was down in Florida, I was in Melbourne and they were drilling next to the causeways to run pipes and electrical lines out to Melbourne Beach, so they won’t be damaged from the hurricanes anymore.
This is fascinating and I've always been curious as to how these work and the demonstration at 8:30 with the bent tip makes perfect sense, so simple, yet had no idea. These are all so well done.
I've been around construction for many years and I've always been curious how horizontal directional boring was accomplished. I simply dismissed it as "magic". It's still magic to me but now I know it's a "card force".
I remember seeing my grandparents using one to install a electric cable. The main company which supplies them calls them Ditch Witches. Pretty fitting name.
I think the Ditch Witch brand does have some directional drilling equipment, but it also does trenching. Are residential cables installed using directional drilling nowadays?
Ditch Witch is a manufacturer. the original product was a cable plow that would lay a flexible cable through a slot it cut in the ground without ever having an open trench.
@@wfemp_4730 final connections are almost never put in with directional drilling, as far as I know. it's mostly a case of restoring the surface after trenching being more cost effective than setting up a directional bore; when done at that small scale.
I was hoping some day you would make a video on HDD and man you did a spectacular job! Loved the wire demo and all of your attention to detail. Selfishly I wish you highlighted the locating system, there’s some cool science that goes into that side of the industry and I’m bias because that’s our main gig! My dad and his partner got into the locator business in ‘91 after his partner spent time at FlowMole designing the first HDD rig. We are now into our second generation and still family owned and operated. We are a humble bunch but I have to toot our horn - our products are sold into 100+ countries and are critical in installing every day utilities in developed and developing countries. Little do most people know but these rigs, locating systems, and drillers are behind the scene of many things we take for granted. Water, sewer, gas, fiber, electricity, etc. Thank you for highlighting our industry. Many don’t realize the opportunity HDD offers for work without a college degree nor the impact it has on every day needs for communities around the world. Cheers! C
Love your work Grady Currently about 3/4 of the way through the engineering degree and your work has been incredibly helpful towards that end Indirectly in non-civil engineering units too (I'm doing biomedical so I only have a few civil units sadly) but especially with the fluid dynamics I'd love to see your take on explaining the Navier-Stokes equations; they get less painful to model with repeated practice right?.... right?
You can also cover the cousin, trenchless pipe replacement, used to replace old asbestos fibre cement lines here with HDPE pipe in situ, using a rig that travelled down the old pipe, expanding and fracturing the old century plus asbestos fibre cement water mains, and then pulling in a new HDPE pipe along this channel, with them only having to trench down from the tap off points on the pipe by each consumer, to strap on a tap in connection to the pipe. Minimal asbestos to remove, it all stayed in the ground except by the taps, and as a bonus all the old no longer used tap off points that are a source of leaks (metro admits 53% of all bulk water is lost to leaks and illegal connections) are also gone. The alternative method is to replace sections of pipe if there is a break, and they did have to dig up a city block of pipe to finally get to a joint, where the old pipe collar did not fracture when they attempted to disconnect it. That was because it was a flange, around a century and a bit old, where there is an equally old shut off valve, that they were able to use. Still put the same fibre cement pipe back in, just asbestos free this time. Around 100 tons of contaminated soil to dispose of, and in the hole you could see history, where the old tram track still had the bed there a half metre down, and the nearly half metre of layered asphalt that constituted the road bed after decades of relaying. Saw some samples where the asphalt was over a metre thick, layers of patches put in to fill in sinkholes from leaks that eroded out the underlay, with quick fix after quick fix. Wanted some old tram rail, but they found none of it there, though it is still common as crash barriers all over the city, still fine after a century of no paint on it.
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Thanks for the opportunity to collaborate! This was so fun to do!
i see these ads all the time. and i don´t mind since it seems like a good deal and great content, so a good sponsor. and i was actually about to sign up but they only accept credit cards. come on guys if you wanna be taken seriously you can´t just offer a single stone age payment method and leave it at that. you´re leaving plenty of money on the table.
thats cool and all but i haven't watched a ad for 5 years now
@@marsfreelander5969 wow O.O don´t tell me you´re actually one of the very few chosen few who posses the gargantuan, unfathomable intellect to actually use an adblocker. i didn´t dream it possible
it´s literally IN the video mate, if you haven´te watched a sponsored message by a youtuber for 5 years, you haven´te been watching youtube in 5 years
Love me some Coding Train!!!
I work in the fiber optic network industry, and previously worked in the gas utility industry. We used to joke that you should always carry a length of fiber optic cable with you in case you get stuck on a deserted island. Just bury the cable and when the guy with the backhoe comes out to cut it you can just ride back with him.
I just laughed out loud at this.
Good joke but it's hard not to blame the guy that put it there using only the sod to cover it.
In surveying we had a similar joke. If lost set a survey marker and someone on a piece of excavating equipment will be by shortly to tear it out.
@@longridgearchery love these jokes. I promise a lot of us do try not to disturb markers but mistakes do happen and I do apologize for the ones I've accidentally knocked down.
As much as that terribly destructive invasive species, the North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe, is a pain in the backside, it can come in handy! :-D
Thanks Grady! This answered so many questions that I didn’t even know I had. We had one of these drill right through the water supply to our house. They were like, “there isn’t a pipe here” and I was like, “well, there’s no water going into our house anymore so…”
They had it all patched up in a couple days.
in a couple OF days.
@@simontay4851 both options are fine
@@simontay4851
In a couple o' days
In a coupla days
Hi, Hank!
Could do a scishow video on this stuff. Im sure there are many extreme examples of this type of work, and you could even feature your anecdote.
@@simontay4851 I might take you a couple days to understand, but grammar isnt as strict as some people might like it to be.
we make the rules.
As we write, and as we talk.
As a utility locator, The talk about the potential impacting of other underground utilities was greatly appreciated. Always call before you dig!
Agreed I locate gas and water lines for a city in my area so my crews can install new gas main and services to houses I'm responsible for the gas and water owned by the city as well as all private utilities a good day is a day where none of my crews hit utilities especially any buried gas lines
@@williamdavis3128 I also locate gas as well as electric. It’s a demanding job but satisfying knowing that my hard work is paying off by allowing others to work safely and go home to their families everyday.
Heh, can't tell you how many times I've seen locates on things in the wrong spot here. That 1 meter accuracy tends to be more than a meter for the people here lol.
Yep. Had underground primary 3 phase drilled into yesterday actually lol, locating is tough because contractors are always going to try and pin the blame on the locator.
@@boostaddict_ A lot of people don't understand that there are a lot of variables that can impact the accuracy. Certain soils and rocks for example can. As can interference from other utilities. That is why dig laws require the contractor to pothole before excavating. The only sure way to locate a utility is to put eyes on it.
I used to work for a UK drilling company as a tracker. We drilled under railway lines with mm tolerances on the tracks. Under woods that had preservation orders and under lots of domestic properties. We drilled under a river aiming for a range rod that the client had stuck in the ground. I will never forget the look on his face when we emerged from the ground and knocked the rod over.
We used to say " any fool can still down. Coming back up and arriving where you want to be takes skill.
How deep hese have to br by regs when drilling under residentials and what if someone has basement or bunker
@@amadkhan1201 When drilling under buildings or rivers where the depth was not guaranteed, we set up further back and drilled deep but further. A sharper angle would strain the putting end of the pipe being pulled through the hole. It was always a very slow pull after a weekend away because sometimes the hole would reduce in size....
The drill head for steering was important, but so was the reamer. After the hole of small diameter it would need to be enlarged. This was done by pulling a larger reamer back to the rig. Behind the reamer was another string of drill rods and other a larger reamer. Once the hole was made oversize a tube was pulled through to finish the job. The ground would settle around the pipe and job was finished.
@@uk_steve do you have to be good at math to be a driller?
@@kingmichaeln1 I've never drilled but I used to work around drillers and would spot utilities for them at my old job and from what I could tell no you don't need to be a math wiz to do it
@@kingmichaeln1 if you want to be very accurate as well as fast and efficient as the drill locator/tracker you do need to be able to do simple addition and subtraction in your head on the fly. But lets be honest, that could be taught to a 10 year old very easily.
I could never have imagined how you can steer a long, flexible drill bit. After you explained it, it seems so obvious.
Drill bits are about a foot long on average, one component to a drill string. The bottom part is called the BHA (bottom hole assembly) the steerable part, and the part behind it is the drill pipe, the flexible part you are talking about. Old drill strings from the sixties and seventies were made up of drill collars for weight and stiffness, stabilisers, which were placed for a specific effect, build and drop or rotate ahead as straight as possible, jars to free you if you got stuck, reamers and hole openers and so on, more complex than you can imagine
ok
@@tamthuong4048 thanks for adding that to the convo.
Honestly this was the best and simplest demonstration of how it works I’ve yet seen.
That string in the gel demo was awesome and gave such a simple and precise explanation of a problem that I always wondered about. Beautiful!
Yes. Simple in principle, more complex in performance.
Oddly Satisfying
-String- > *Wire* Important distinction here since you can't push a rope/string.
It was perfect
That was simply mind blowing. It made me sit with jaw open "how easy is that". OFC drilling in real life is much more involved, but the principle is so amazingly simple.
Here in Germany that drilling method did become more known to the public when the company "FlowTex" was sued for the (back then) most expensive large-scale fraud in Germany. The damage was roughly 4.2 billion USD.
The company had 270 machines but those were sold multiple times (3142 machines had been sold).
When they had investors visiting they drove to one drilling site, then had lunch and then drove to a different drilling site. During the lunch brake they moved the drills from site 1 to site 2 creating the illusion of a bigger pool of machines. (see my correction)
*Correction*
The scam worked more like that they changed the serial number plates on existing machines with new created serial number plates.
Germany is home of alot of biggest corporate fraud. wirecard was a recent one, every few years 5bil gets scammed away over there. just imagine the kind of fraud cash flow the banks do facilitate
That's fantastic, what a dumb way to use your intelligence.
@@dispatch-indirect9206 You have to catch and prosecute the "brass balls" who pull off scams like that. Admiring them just encourages them to do more damage.
@@sincerelyyours7538 ok boomer
@@mustafam1792 They're right though
used to work on a directional drilling crew. very cool. we were a small company and one day we hit a big set of fiberoptic lines. poor company went bankrupt after paying for repairs on that fiber.
The company didn't carry insurance for incident like that?
Good lord. You wouldn't happen to ever install bright orange posts for locating the line? Someone tried to say a salesperson lied to us about installing fiber optic on a ton mile stretch of our road. Obviously they plan to install it because we literally already have high speed internet it's just severely limited by the line. I assume whenever that gets put in we'll have like maximum speeds to our plain line. Because they're fusing the two systems just like when I converted my car speakers to regular electricity from having the signal come from a fiber optic line into self powered devices
@@skuzlebut82 damaging fiber optic lines can cost millions in repairs.
Ouch! I was an inspector for drilling crews for years. I have seen them hit and destroy a lot of things, but thankfully no electrical and no fiber optic lines.
@@Bootysmoothie “converted to regular electricity”
as opposed to what other kind of electricity?
I worked installing fiber optic cable when I was in high school, horizontal drilling 4’ underground in residential areas. I was the guy who used a hydrovac to expose existing utilities before drilling so you didn’t hit them with the bit.
I then got a degree in petroleum engineering and work in the oil and gas industry drilling horizontal wells. The concept is identical and many technologies are shared , only difference is you start going horizontal at 10,000’ instead of 4’!!
That's epic! If only the dudes that dug up all our utilities used this method XD
but wouldnt this drilling destroy artifacts, skeletons, ancient buildings/burials, or fossils?
because you never see what you are drilling into
@@Blox117 a hydro vac will cause less damage than a backhoe as far as incidental objects are concerned. It uses pressurized water to cut and liquefy the soil before vacuuming it out
@@Blox117 nah usually you dont dig where that stuff is known to be and if you find it you *should* report it
But trust me, some construction sites rather just pretend they didnt just see a bone and yeet it rather than getting the project stopped for some expert to come and dig up the stuff for history purposes
Have seen that happen a few times where they stumbled upon an old village but that was when they laid a gas pipeline that was like a half a meter across and required a fuckton of digging 😅
I work at an Engineering firm and have designed multiple directional drills across intercoastal waterways. I now use this video to introduce new engineers to the basics of directional drill. Thanks for putting this together. Also, I see you used to work for Freese, we are partnered with them on a project. I'm a Kimley-Horn guy.
Having recently experienced fiberoptic cable installation in my neighborhood, I can confidently say the lack of trenching was both noted and appreciated
Very much yes. Some sewage pipes and Spectrum cables were cut, but the city remained open
Trench me, daddy~
My gas connection was installed in a similar manner. Meant they dug two tiny holes a D didn't have to close off the entire road and destroy my entire driveway. Job was done in a day, filled in the two tiny holes the day after, was cheap too
I'm a HDD rig operator and I tell you, I never managed to explain to angry people that it's better to have the rig on a portion of the road for 2 days rather than having a trench dug on the whole road. So I'm happy to see some people actually do realise that.
@@Stettafire I'd like to steer my drill inside your gas connection if you catch my drift
4:50 bentonite needs hours of mixing to shear so it creates the shear-thinning fluid it needs to be able able to suspend cutting while pump is off. Posting this comment while my drilling bit is drilling at 14,000 ft below ground. I always liked the way u demonstrate concept and really liked how u showed how mud supports well walls.. one more thing is also when water infiltrate in permeable sand leaving solids on wells wall which supports it which we call filter cake. Ty for ur quality content and good presentation. Glad i found something to relate to in ur channel.
Drilling fluid and its thixotropic behavior would a good subject for another video.
@@snifrbelin New words unlocked:
Thixotropic: Decrease of viscosity over time under shear strain. [Yogurt / Threadlocker]
Rheopecty: Increase of viscosity over time under shear strain. [Mashed potatoes / Car LSD]
Pseudoplastic: Distinct from Thixotropic, since it's not time dependent. [Ketchup / Whipped cream / Modern paint / Nail polish]
Dilatant Fluid: Distinct from Rheopecty, since it's not time dependent. [Quicksand / Cornstarch mix / SillyPutty]
You da MANNN!!!!!
@@0Rookie0 I 💖 You
@@0Rookie0 is cyanoacrylate thixotropic?
They use pulsed mud systems sometimes for locational information. We used to do maintenance on downhole tools, and one we had was a probe that was powered by a turbine spun by the mud going down the drillshaft. it sent information back to the headunit by limiting the mudflow, causing pressure pulses upstream.
More useful than radio when you're 20kft or more deep. Measured all kinds of information. Radiation, vibrations, temperatures, gyro orientation, magnetic fields. All useful for figuring out where and what you're drilling through when you can't see it.
Oh also tangentially related (no pun intended), the drill bits on the end, are also powered by that same mudflow. It's quite ingenious use of an already required aspect of drilling to add a power transfer through the lubrication medium. It's like if the coolant pump on your CNC mill actually powered the computer and the spindle at the same time.
Lemme name-drop some other science-channel or learn-channel, cause i like sharing Fun and thats all the reason i need: Sci Man Dan, Sci Show, UpisnotJump, Plaanrwalk, Second Thought, Hbomberguy, Joe Scott.
"pulsed mud" is unexpected tech, right along with "coal pipeline".
they actually don't use mud pulsing tools for HDD. We use wireline or telemetry. Mud pulsing tools are relatively slow for the process. Wireline is real time.
Also mud pulsing would only allow for DC tracking while other system will allow for AC tracking.
The underground steering example is really fun and helpful, impressive work!
ok
Your talent for making state-of-the-art engineering understandable is incredible. Absolutely love and appreciate your work making these concepts that are often literally buried underground and in mathematics visible for us lay-folk :)
Great video, as usual. I splice fiber for a living. My work depends on HDD crews followed by pedestal/hand hole installer crews to get their jobs done before the fiber blowing crews can put the fiber cable in.
Something not mentioned here (which I think is very important for the public to know) is the importance of "call before you dig". Our HDD crews have to put in locate service requests 72 hrs before they start. Any company with utilities/pipes/fiber/gas has 72 hours to mark the requested route with spray paint or flags. If they DO NOT MARK IT, the repair cost is their burden when it gets hit.
There is a huge misconception that HDD crews are always careless when they are drilling. Many times, other companies have not properly grounded their systems, used tracer wire in non-conductive pipes, or adequately documented where their pipes are... their buried utilities can't be definitively located.
One job just up the road from me has broken the water main so many times because the city claims they don't have the equipment, manpower, or budget to do the locate requests and mark where the water main goes... Even though the primary contractor offered to give them the equipment and pay an overtime rate for all city employees needed to complete the task. In the end, they hit the water main 3 times a week and they are portrayed as the bad guys.
For those wondering... hitting a 288 fiber cable and damaging a 1000' section can run well over $15,000 in fiber splicing cost alone. I don't know the HDD costs or any of the other expenses needed to replace the cable... But it is very expensive to break a fiber cable.
Most of the guys doing fiber are payed by the meter so basically if your not drilling your losing money. But I would say just at a minimum you would be $500/hour in cost. The worst part is no matter who hit it or why gossip travels and it hurts your company reputation.
also, accidents do happen on both ends. a guy I worked with years ago was on a bore project at an airport, and the rig operator was going for speed over precision when his bit came up through the runway surface. other side of the coin, a trenching crew cut a 125 pair copper phone bundle when the country grader graded the road in between the underground locate service marking it and the trenching crew trenching it.
@@kenbrown2808 that sucks, but so true. Some other company on a jobsite can screw up vital info needed for the HDD crews.
Apparently HD drillers have had it relying on the utility maps for locating other existing pipe and lines. The various detection equipment business are taking off.
@@kenbrown2808 Sounds like nobody wants to go down through bedrock actually drill, where there is plenty of room. Instead, everybody just wants to ram though the soil, and it’s getting crowded.
“Like laparoscopic surgery for the earth”. Probably the single most brilliant analogy I’ve ever heard in my life. Well done sir, well done.
Likewise pulling back the guide wire !! Lots of similarity to medical interventional techniques.
I assisted an HDD on Mariner East 2, ME2. We had an inadvertent return so bad we built a pit around it and simply used it as a recirculation pit. There was a lot of effort to mitigate damage professional geologists at each drill and field techs/engineers walking the surface to look for IR's. Amazing tech
Some of the HDD companies that I've worked with potholed every 75-100 feet along the return with a vac truck and removed the mud before they had IRs. It works pretty well but our geology is mostly clay so that's easy, the bore depths were also pretty shallow at around 8-10 feet.
Must have been really out of hand most pipeline companies just hire labour to walk around checking for releases and the big guys only show up if they find something.
@@andrewv5104 We were deep, around 60 feet to be below a stream and stay in rock. We spent several weeks there. We had two rigs drilling. We missed each other once and spent two days drilling to intercept again. Solid rock. What was on our side is that a line had previously been drilled and our IR's hit the same spot.
@@collinscody57 The ME was issue prone so it was written into their permits they would have a PG and environmental techs/field engineer/inspector from a third party. It was expensive but helped get issues resolved quickly and give the DEP a piece of mind.
@@cmdr1911 peace of mind*
And thanks for bringing your story and experience with this, especially as part of the mentioned pipeline in the video. Very interesting stuff.
ok, you mentioned the coding train. i came across your channel by chance, as I was looking into HDD, but to see you are referencing another of my fav channels is awesome.
I studied geology and worked with directionally drillers at a utility contractor. Their biggest challenge the drilling foreman told me was hitting hard rock at glancing angles. The problem project that eventually had to be trenched was at the foot of the Wasatch mountains and they hit a high quartz content sedimentary layer less than 30 degrees from parallel to it and it just skipped along the outside edge of that fold and came out where they didn't want it to. They had drilled right through it at more square angles where the bit would be forced to go ahead and chew through that harder to cut rock.
My hone region of ohio is known as "DD paradise" because there are 50 or so directional drilling companies based in a 20 Sq mile area. Also 4 years ago, TC Energy did a reconstruction project on the east buckeye express 36in diameter natural gas pipeline which travels underneath 3 major waterways in my region. My favorite way to kill time was to go out and watch the semi sized drilling rigs boring and pulling up to 3 miles of pre-bent thick wall pipeline on the ROW.
I do a lot of flagging and restoration for a few company's here in Ohio that are putting in natural gas lines it is a fascinating thing to watch especially how they weld the plastic lines together all in all it's fun to watch and ask questions about
Double D Paradise? Count me in!
I would think that would be a good name for a strip club!
What a boring way to kill time
@@LKLM138 🤣
In the Oil industry drilling, the underground motor can partially close and open valves to make pressure pulses in the fluid line. Those pulses work as a digital communication system that can be used to determine the position, orientation etc. It is slow, but since the drilling process is very slow too, it is good enough.
Usually, the energy to operate the system is also extracted form the fluid movement.
That is sooo coooollllll!!!!
It isnt the motor that creats the pulses in Oil well drilling. Its the MWD/LWD tools that do that + mud motor drilling is steadily declining with RSS systems being prefered.
How is that powered? Does it just use a small dynamo?
All day every day buddy! Drilling one now! This particular location has been the biggest challenge of my career and even RSS is giving us trouble. On losses so the pulses on lesser tools don't work. We had to get SLB out there with a slimhole tool that works.
Slow!?! We are drilling and casing off 20,000’ wells in less than 14 days. The tools pulse and communicate instantaneously.
I drove by these crews in Broward for months and didn’t get what they were up to and why it was taking so long.
It is so easy to get frustrated with the delays they kept causing 😅, thanks for helping me understand the complexity of what was going on.
Did they cause the delays, or did car centric infrastructure cause the delays? 🤔 You can fit a lot more people in limited space on bikes and buses
@@ThomasBomb45 "car centric infrastructure" 🤓🤓🤓🤓
@@ThomasBomb45 And how long does it take again? Going to work 10 miles away, on a bike vs a car?
Extra difficult (often impossible) if you carry some things with you, need to pick someone up or to stop by the groceries on your way home.
Not to mention stinking of sweat all day at work, or where ever you're going.
@@ThomasBomb45 try telling builders to put their tools on pushbikes 😅
ok
I once wrote a guidance program for a pneumatic directional drill head. It allowed for horizontal and vertical profiles, and I had to invent a method for aligning two vectors in space using at most 2 curves with a minimum radius of curvature (it involves normal vectors to planes and an iterative approach). The drill head was one of a kind, with no mud required and an average speed of 1 foot a minute. The contract fell apart though, due to various factors. It's still one of my proudest achievements.
As a locator, that would be cool to use
impressive programming
That offset drill bit is such a simple, elegant solution. I always wondered how those worked.
I work for a water/sewer district and because of our topography, we use a gravity sewer system. This means that all our sewer lines must be perfectly straight and at precise angles. Because of this trenching is preferable as directional drilling is not perfectly straight and this creates low and high spots in the line which will require continual flushing and maintenance. We do occasionally use boring to lay water pipe underground though as it is not requisite that water pipe be perfectly straight.
I work for a telecom company and HDD is a godsend sometimes for laying optic cables 💪 Literally zero downsides, except for cost 😅
I would look in to wire line and/or better drillers if you are facing those issues.
Yep, microtunneling is king for gravity pipes
@@VicScott in the video itself, he said that directional drilling isn’t straight. It’s continually curving. Also we have no control over the contractors we use. We have to put projects out to bid and are legally required to choose the lowest bid. The lowest bidder often subcontracts out the work. Using open trenching, we get perfectly straight lines, GPS shots of the pipe in situ for mapping purposes, and we use lasers and other means to keep an exact grade.
I work for our water department as well and all our sewer lines are all gravity, we don't have a single lift station
I live a few miles from an area that was affected by the Mariner issue and it was downplayed and covered up more than you could imagine. They struck old mine shafts here which leaked blood red water into the river for weeks. There was coal ash making its way into the river. Cutting fluid which they were caught using something other than what they were supposed to be. It's been a while but now I'm going to look into it more again.
Give ‘em hell, Mr Walker Texas Ranger.
Uh oh. Coal ash? That stuff is radioactive.
@@jjbarajas5341 Mildly so. The bigger danger is when it gets airborne and into your lungs
You know you messed up when chuck norris is on the case
Keep complaining. Pretty soon, there will be so much red tape, life will cease to exist as you know it. No more electricity. No more gas. No more running water. No more indoor plumbing.
The Coding Train is such a great channel, didn't expect this crossover but very fun to see him here
I stopped watching as soon as I saw him
@@windowsxseven weird flex but ok
Your content flows as smoothly as a "hand-crafted artisanal batch of drilling mud." Outstanding, enjoy every one of these productions.
I'm a Civil Engineer and I have to commend you on a truly excellent video. Really, really, really good.
that's super interesting its also similar to how the apollo capsules were steered on reentry. The mass was off center so by rotating the capsule it could change pitch or yaw
Several type of missiles are steered in the same manner, hence why some spiral.
Also how surgeons use a guide wire to steer a coronary catheter through the circulatory system for things like installing stents and performing angiography
The Apollos story is just a BIG fairytale. Watch _American Moon (English Version) by Massimo Mazzucco_ th-cam.com/video/KpuKu3F0BvY/w-d-xo.html
What would the kinetic energy be of that capsule, falling from the moon, reaching 11 km/s at reentry? What was the kinetic energy be of that capsule at reentry?
@@elbuggo the module was 5557 kg. At 11 km/s its energy would be 336 Gigajouls or 93 Megawatts hours.
There was recently an interesting project near where i live. A city wanted to create an underpass without closing the road above. They did it by pushing a concrete underpass tunnel prefab through the soil using hydraulics. Then, later, excavated the internal part of the underpass and voila...all done without any road closures.
They have done that many times here in Florida of all places. Pretty neat to watch. It is called box jacking. Some have put underpass for cars and others were for trains to go under roadways.
Best Vid yet, I always wondered how they did that and now I know. The demos of an asymmetric bit steering the drill string are excellent.
Can you build such a machine on paper? NO, because you still don't know how it works. you only know the theory, no practical comprehension regarding the drill manipulation or function. How do a bit steer if it needs to continuously turn to drill? You don't know. I don't know.
@@alltheusernameswastaken8936 Well of course I couldn't build one of these machine based on a 12 minute TH-cam video....It's a demonstration of a principle, not a PhD on how to design, build and operate these devices so for those of us who started out knowing nothing about it at least I get the idea and can drill down into the subject further if I want to know more (forgive the pun).
@@alltheusernameswastaken8936 um the video answers your second question. Either the asymmetrical bit at the end stays in place and fluid pushes out the soil or there's a spinning bit at the end which spins on an axis almost perpendicular to the bore so it's asymmetrical.
I worked at a shop where we machined the drill bits for these. I never knew exactly how they worked, we just machined them and sent them off. They weren’t the motorized type but the dirt digger style that relied on the shaft rotation to cut holes. It looked like a normal bit but with half of the front end chopped off at angle. Anyways, thanks for making this video so I understand how the technology works a lot better.
I turned a lot of parts used in oil drilling, pretty cool stuff, long cycle times so easy money once you got it programmed right
I love those coding challenges, he does it in a very human way, we witness every mistake and head scratcher, then he explains the solution, fix and the entire thought process with each step. It’s weirdly exciting to see the project succeed
I've seen those rigs around for *years*, and never knew how they worked; thanks for the concise explanation of this really-slick construction technique!
Thank you for showing how underground directional drilling works! I've never seen a demonstration like this before!
Gotta admit, that little wire gel demo was spot on for showing how it works.
7:37 this whole demonstration is so effective at showing how this method works, my jaw dropped.
Lol it's alot more complicated than that.
I didn’t even know these machines existed before I started working in civil construction. I have been on the drill crew and I think Grady gives an excellent overview of how these machines work. They are great when the goings good but when things break or if they hit utilities it’s very costly. We use traffic control to keep things safe for the crew and the public especially in residential areas.
Great stuff, as usual Grady. I worked on a remediation project in VA a few years back. We needed to connect some ground water remediation wells to a small water treatment plant we built. Those wells were on the opposite side of the Shenandoah River from the treatment plant. We hired a contractor and I was lucky enough to be the oversight rep for this contractor so I got to watch the process first hand. About 3/4 of a mile long and 40’ under the river bed thru mostly solid rock. Remarkable technology.
That wire demo was an eye opener. Love the detail your models always show!
I'm a geotech engineer with 10 yrs experience and I learn something from everyone of your videos. Thanks for the quality content!
Grady does it again! This is yet another thing I've often wondered about when I see them working on the side of the road. Thanks for demystifying these processes for me. Love your channel.
Fun fact; direction drilling first appeared in underground coal mines for sampling coal ahead in seams and for tunneling ahead to make it easier to mine a face (its easier to poke a hole in something and enlargen it than trying to dig into or pick apart a flat ish face/surface)
And this is in 70's or 80's coal mines (maybe even earlier, i'd have to ask my 88 yo neighbor who ran boxflat and a few other mines in my area in queensland) and the early machines were honking huge behemoths being grandaddys to modern day decendents.
Found your channel a couple of months ago and I have to say, Grady - I really love your videos. The way you explain things professionally, the editing, production quality and the details you go into really make for top quality content!
I was a civil engineer in the UK for 8 years and I'm still learning a lot from you!
Thank you 😁
ok
I've always wondered about this.
On a much more amateur level, when I was a landscape contractor, I often had to run pipes under sidewalks and driveways. I had this similar device, although there was no directional ability. A simple blade head mounted on the end of 1" black pipe. At the other end, a T fitting that accommodated a garden hose and a 1/2 drill adapter. We would dig down a foot and as horizontal as possible, and other trench on the other side.
Worked great. Never a problem although my contract had a disclaimer about unforeseeable circumstances under their pavement.
The drill bit knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the drill bit from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is.
Whatever you said I don't think it knows where it is or where it's at or where it's been
I almost forgot that existed. Thank you for reminding me :D That video and the Rockwell Encabulator are some of my all time favorites haha
@@jokekelleey2071 its the "the missile knows where it is" copypasta but edited to be about drilling instead
Thank goodness you said what obviously needed to be stated.
Nothing you said is reasonable in any way. Go away please. Forever. The drill bit is not sentient.
It is for the birds. When I operated heavy equipment one cattle egret came to recognize me and would follow me around in the morning until I finally started tearing up the ground. (Others would appear then, but that one bird would greet me every morning when I parked my car.) I could almost hear his sweet, gentle morning greeting: "HEY! WHERE'S MY BREAKFAST?"
Lmao what?? fr??
@@mastershooter64 Birds are smart as heck! In fact, most animals are much more intelligent than we give them credit for. If you've ever had a pet, you'll have experienced this first-hand.
Yes, I have 2 starlings that have an alarm call specifically for me, because I have given their nest building an eviction notice twice now, evicting them without compensation, and they are still around the area, and still angry with me. They can nest elsewhere, but not inside the building like they wanted to. The chicks with them recognise me, but do not call the alarm, only the parents.
@@Zappygunshot Lol yeah animals are smarter than we give them credit for, if my cat wanted to go out, it would sit next to me and meow at me and when I looked at it, it would walk to the door and meow at the door telling me to open it
@@SeanBZA Silly question, but have you ever considered trying to provide some sort of constructed bird shelter for them? No guarantee they'd actually use it, of course, but sometimes when there's little disputes like these such methods can be surprisingly effective at keeping the "peace", or at least in providing some of the warm-n-fuzzies you can get from being a pal to wildlife.
Thanks for all your efforts! I'm learning something new every time.
2:22 I work for a major endoscopy manufacturer, and when you compared HDD to laparoscopic surgery you were reading my mind!
I would never expect "The Coding Train" to be featured here! That channel is gold! :D
As a retired geologist I've been around a lot of "conventional" vertical drill rigs. I've been fascinated by the directional drilling but never been around it. Excellent explanations. This technology is critical. In thin, oil bearing strata thousands of feet below the surface having the drill hole remain within those thin horizons allows more oil to be recovered. Its incredible potential is why crude oil future prices actually fell below $0/barrel a few years ago but that was before... well, we all know. Great Stuff here. Should be required viewing.
I appreciate the way you explain things extremely fluidly, with a wise yet friendly tone. Makes me want to go get a civil engineering degree. Thank you Grady
I've been drilling wells and geotech drilling for 27+ years. Thankfully with the same company. I've always wondered how this type of drilling was done. Now I have a basic understanding of what is happening. Thank you for your time making this video. Keep it up. Your videos are great and informative to watch.
Watched 100s of Fracking videos trying to figure out how the turn a drill 90° degrees and you just explained it. Thanks 👍 Subscribed!
The Coding Train on Practical Engineering was the last crossover I would ever expect, and also the best crossover I could ever ask for. Both such amazing channels!
As a utility locator, I deal with bore machines everyday, there are many things that they guys have to look out for and I give them massive credit.
The plugging of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill back in 2010 was accomplished by directional drilling. They hit the well's 8 inch (?) bore from over a mile away then pumped concrete into it. If memory serves is was more than a mile down to the seabed before the drilling started, pretty amazing.
great video but I just wanted to add something on the drilling mud preventing collapse. When drilling at deeper formations (oil drilling) what prevents the well bore from collapsing is the pressure that the fluid itself exerts on the ground formation
Hey Grady just wanted to say that your channel is great. Inspired me to start to look at my options to go back to school for engineering. And be able to do work I really love for a living. Thanks Grady. Have a good one.
Jay
Brilliant explanation, again Grady!
And I think your use of home made props to explain these concepts make your videos even more enjoyable.
The demo was mind-blowing. Excellent work!
I've seen plenty of these being used in my area lately! Installing fiber optics everywhere, mostly under the roadways. I had no idea so much went into just drilling the holes for them, thanks for the fascinating insight!
15 or so yrs ago before I retired from consulting we used this to install two 48inch steel pipes across the Platte river. Each about 2700 feet long. When they drilled the pilot holes for the two bores the drill head came up with in two feet of the target stake. Pretty impressive. The soil conditions were basically sand. We designed it to go 70 feet below the river at the low point. We evaluated this against open cutting and this way promised to be a much better option. It allowed us to go under wetlands and not worry about potential high river flows during construction. At the time 48 inch was on the upper level of experience contractors had. Michels out of Wisconsin did the work with very little problems. The whole operation was very complex including welding 2700 ft of the pipe which came in 20 ft sections and which was coated on both interior and exterior, repairing the coating damaged at the joints by welding and laying out the whole length of pipe on rollers to aid in installation following final reaming of the borehole to final size.
👍big job
Very informative and enjoyable to watch! I love learning about how things like this are done. I’ve been in construction for 20 years, dug my fair share of trenches but never knew how HDD was done. Thank you, you have made me a subscriber to your channel.
This was one of your best demonstrations yet! Seeing the wire wind through the agar was a lightbulb moment for me!
I'm training to be a hdd drill locator using a 2011 vermeer 24x40 drill. My operator has operated this particular drill since new and has been drilling for 28 years (his words). The whole process is pretty cool aside from the digging to spot the household utilities 😅 the way to steer the drill is a clock pattern. Haven't done any waterway crossings yet but the residential stuff is pretty tricky snaking between all the services. Great job and wouldn't change it for a long time
I work for DCI, keep at it
I've been doing telecommunications drilling in urban areas for ~9 years now. I watch your channel all the time so was super excited to see your break-down on the industry. It's not an easy concept to explain to people so I have bookmarked this video to send to people when I get confused looks while attempting to explain how it works!! I love my job and what I do and was impressed how accurate your explanations were. The wire bending through the gel was a brilliant demonstration and really simplifies the process. Cheers from Ontario, Canada.
I’ve been a driller for a long time and this is by far the best video on the internet explaining the process
Thanks, I always wondered how the directional drilling happened.
A few years back a 14" high pressure natural gas line built through a few miles from my home. It traveled a route that mostly avoided any developed areas, but it do have to go through a town a few miles away. Along side the highway they just did cut and cover, but they used directional drilling to run it about 1.5 miles horizontally under the town. It was pretty cool to see the whole process of drilling and then pulling in the pipeline.
I was really blown away by the pull in process they ended up using. They laid out, welded up and pressure tested the 1.5 miles of pipe. The issue they had is they didn't have 1.5 miles of land in line with the pull. So they rented farmland perpendicular to the highway and pull pit. When they went to pull in the pipe in, it was bent 90° before being pulled in. They used 4 giant sheaves and attached each sheave to a different D9 bulldozer as an anchor. They were laid out so the bend had about 100 yards of radius to curve the pipe around. The pipeline had quite thick walls, and I'm sure the forces involve were massive.
Actually thicker walls may decrease pullback forces because pipeline weight counteracts buoyancy forces. My guess is that if pipeline wasn't ballasted (filled with water during pullback process) then thick wall was designed to achieve neutral bouyancy. If buoyancy controll is cafefully planned and borehole quality is good, pullback forces may be really low. According to calculations final pullback force could be as low as 25 tonnes, however due to significant distance it could be much closer to 50-75 tonnes. And I really mean that distance is impressive. The longest crossing I attended was 1180 m (or 3870 ft) long for 1000 mm (40 inch) steel gas pipelines. Final force was 110 tonnes by the way. Planning for over 2 km project would be a real challenge and I'm looking forward for that.
Pipelines offshore are laid flooded or dry, depending on wall thickness and diameter (hence overall weight), to mediate "floating" factors. Often the larger diameter lines (>12") are laid coated with a concrete jacket of around 2" thickness or more to add weight so that they still can be laid dry without floating. In depths of less than 200 feet they are subsequently buried (jetted down) to provide some protection from anchoring vessels or from vessels dragging nets for fishing.
I run a Ditch Witch Rock drill in Central Oregon. I drill through solid rock and install Fiber lines. I've only ever hit unlocated lines due to no knowledge of them being there. It's amazing to see what kind of technology we have nowadays and what's in store in the future
Not that relevant to the video, but it's probably the best opportunity I'll get to share this for a many years: When a few years ago the 100+ year old sever pipe on my street has decided that it got too old and sediment-ridden, the city set out to dig out a honest-to-god underground tunnel just to replace the pipe with a new one. With a shovel and three guys. Took them about one and a half months, but the guys did it. After the tunnel was finished it only took one workday to completely change out the pipe for the new one. I do kinda understand why they chose tunnel over digging out a trench, but it was still quite surprising to see them actually spending so much time and effort on this.
10:32 I work on trucks and I saw this “reamer” in a customers truck bed. My boss and I were really hung up on it’s alien look. I told my boss it looked like something used in drilling underground. Now here I am days later watching some practical engineering videos and I know about horizontal directional drilling. Funny how life works.
I have struggled to understand directional drilling for a long time. I had accepted "the pipes are flexible" as the answer.
You explain it so much better with the bent drill head and the agar demonstration. Fantastic video, many thanks.
Hey Grady, great video! I've been a utility engineer for about 5 years now, and I'd say you got it right on the money. I would love to see you talk about Microtrench technology as well, since a lot of low voltage lines are switching to that cheaper alternative to boring!
*That was informative and it was one of the questions I always had at the back of my mind sometimes*
shut up likefarming verified channel
I, too always thought about this sometimes
me too. For directing it, I had thought each revolution would require the cutting teeth to be spread wider or smaller on one side. Although engineering questions remain for details, I am satisfied with this video about changing directions.
I love this channel. Thank you so much for making it and keeping it going!
Always wondered how this worked. Thanks for the lesson.
We currently have fiber optical Internet being installed in our rural community. We saw one of these units, and my wife asked how they work. I said I didn't know, but I'm sure one of my engineering guys can tell us. Thanks for the video. I'm grateful you help all of understand the process of so many things.
This channel makes me a better engineer by giving me a basic understanding of certain technologies and engineering sciences within other disciplines. This aids in the communication process on interdisciplinary teams and benefits the design process. Thanks!
Hey Grady- I'm not quite sure if this topic would fit your niche, but something I've always wondered is- Do construction vehicles and equipment (generators) really need to be as loud as they are?
Big fan of your work btw. You're my go-to for explaining infrastructure to my daughter.
Yeah I’ve never understood how we can make a v10 so quiet and a little Honda gx 160 so loud
At a guess, quiet=expensive. That's certainly true of the hydraulic units we have at work
They're building a booster station and transmission line near my neighborhood and using directional drilling. It was pretty amazing to see the giant machinery, ramp, and bits. It was also insanely loud. I didn't really understand any of it but this video was extremely timely. Now I just need to understand what a booster station and transmission line is.
A "booster station" is where the Sheeple will go once a month to get their beloved "booster shot" of mRNA gene therapy. The "transmission line" is the device they use to post "feel good" pictures of themselves, proudly displaying their Sheeple Mask on their face encouraging others to become Sheeple and "get boosted" to "flatten the curve".
This is a question I've always wanted answered but didn't know it. It was fascinating. Thanks.
I wish the city engineers where I live would watch it. I'm pretty sure they have never heard of directional drilling. They always open trench and block traffic.
DD is more expensive than open trenches for large diameters, so the city will tend to use the cheaper method, reserving DD for doing under roads and such, for small diameter lines, and open trenches for large diameter ones.
I wonder if it's truly a matter of ignorance vs other factors, namely cost.
I asked myself this question as they were running fiber near my house a few weeks ago. I’m happy you made a video on this, because I could not think of a better person to explain it!
Your examples are fantastic: the animation followed by the wire with the bent end "drilling" through the agar, then the return to the animation to show the next steps. I've worked on projects with HDD, but I've never seen how it works. Thanks you. Love from Liz and Ginger (pic left) in Australia.
I've been curious about how these things work for a couple of years now, since I first saw one on the side of the road routing network cables. I figured out what it was doing as evident by materials at the site but didn't know how they steered the hole. Thank you Grady for making this video, it is fascinating how this technology works!
Last year I had a 500' water line installed, the drill head was steered by a guy with a remote control walking over the desired path of the drill. We had an "inadvertent return", luckily it was in the yard, and was engulfed in grass in a few weeks.
I work in power utilities and I would have loved a video like this when I first started. I remember underground work being a mystery and having no idea how it works. Well actually it’s still a bit of a mystery. Nobody knows exactly where anything is. We just sorta guess knowing the crew will do whatever they want anyways
Last time I was down in Florida, I was in Melbourne and they were drilling next to the causeways to run pipes and electrical lines out to Melbourne Beach, so they won’t be damaged from the hurricanes anymore.
This is fascinating and I've always been curious as to how these work and the demonstration at 8:30 with the bent tip makes perfect sense, so simple, yet had no idea. These are all so well done.
AT&T has been in my neighborhood installing fiber-optic line. I wondered how they successfully drilled from hole to hole. Thank you, TH-cam!
I've been around construction for many years and I've always been curious how horizontal directional boring was accomplished. I simply dismissed it as "magic". It's still magic to me but now I know it's a "card force".
I remember seeing my grandparents using one to install a electric cable. The main company which supplies them calls them Ditch Witches. Pretty fitting name.
Ditch Witch is just a brand name like Ford or chevy
I think the Ditch Witch brand does have some directional drilling equipment, but it also does trenching. Are residential cables installed using directional drilling nowadays?
Ditch Witch is a manufacturer. the original product was a cable plow that would lay a flexible cable through a slot it cut in the ground without ever having an open trench.
@@wfemp_4730 final connections are almost never put in with directional drilling, as far as I know. it's mostly a case of restoring the surface after trenching being more cost effective than setting up a directional bore; when done at that small scale.
@@kenbrown2808 A very narrow trench.
I was hoping some day you would make a video on HDD and man you did a spectacular job! Loved the wire demo and all of your attention to detail. Selfishly I wish you highlighted the locating system, there’s some cool science that goes into that side of the industry and I’m bias because that’s our main gig! My dad and his partner got into the locator business in ‘91 after his partner spent time at FlowMole designing the first HDD rig. We are now into our second generation and still family owned and operated. We are a humble bunch but I have to toot our horn - our products are sold into 100+ countries and are critical in installing every day utilities in developed and developing countries. Little do most people know but these rigs, locating systems, and drillers are behind the scene of many things we take for granted. Water, sewer, gas, fiber, electricity, etc. Thank you for highlighting our industry. Many don’t realize the opportunity HDD offers for work without a college degree nor the impact it has on every day needs for communities around the world. Cheers! C
This is a question I have had for years. This was a great video.
Love your work Grady
Currently about 3/4 of the way through the engineering degree and your work has been incredibly helpful towards that end
Indirectly in non-civil engineering units too (I'm doing biomedical so I only have a few civil units sadly) but especially with the fluid dynamics
I'd love to see your take on explaining the Navier-Stokes equations; they get less painful to model with repeated practice right?.... right?
Thank you! Im actually curious about this
You can also cover the cousin, trenchless pipe replacement, used to replace old asbestos fibre cement lines here with HDPE pipe in situ, using a rig that travelled down the old pipe, expanding and fracturing the old century plus asbestos fibre cement water mains, and then pulling in a new HDPE pipe along this channel, with them only having to trench down from the tap off points on the pipe by each consumer, to strap on a tap in connection to the pipe. Minimal asbestos to remove, it all stayed in the ground except by the taps, and as a bonus all the old no longer used tap off points that are a source of leaks (metro admits 53% of all bulk water is lost to leaks and illegal connections) are also gone.
The alternative method is to replace sections of pipe if there is a break, and they did have to dig up a city block of pipe to finally get to a joint, where the old pipe collar did not fracture when they attempted to disconnect it. That was because it was a flange, around a century and a bit old, where there is an equally old shut off valve, that they were able to use. Still put the same fibre cement pipe back in, just asbestos free this time. Around 100 tons of contaminated soil to dispose of, and in the hole you could see history, where the old tram track still had the bed there a half metre down, and the nearly half metre of layered asphalt that constituted the road bed after decades of relaying. Saw some samples where the asphalt was over a metre thick, layers of patches put in to fill in sinkholes from leaks that eroded out the underlay, with quick fix after quick fix. Wanted some old tram rail, but they found none of it there, though it is still common as crash barriers all over the city, still fine after a century of no paint on it.
no, the actual alternative is called blown cured in place pipe relining.
I work at a company that builds these in all shapes and sizes i was really excited to see you covering this topic!