To the best of my knowledge

HDD: 20 years, 20 Stories
Columnist Rich Maxwell says that "to the best of my knowledge" the HDD
business has been around for about the same length of time asNational
Driller-- 20 years. Our wonderful publicationNational Drilleris celebrating, as well they should, their 20th anniversary In the spirit of things, today I want to reflect back on the past 20 years in the horizontal directional drilling industry which is really the history of HDD as the concept is not much older than that. I don't claim to be completely historically accurate, but "to the best of my knowledge" the HDD business has been around for about the same length of time asNational Driller. The HDD industry actually began on several fronts,
contractors trying to find away to solve problems. Martin Cherrington is recognized as one of the inventors of the technology. You might remember my column around three years ago when I talked about Martin
Cherrington as "the granddaddy of directional drilling."
Martin gave me a tour of his yard where I saw one of his first chain-driven "slant rigs" which pushed drill pipe into the ground with a wedge-shape bit on the end. "When you rotate the drill pipe it bores straight ahead" Martin explained. "When you stop rotating and push on the drill rod it redirects the drill path according to the position of the wedge" That's how it all works.
On the first attempts all Cherrington wanted to do was get the drill head to come upon the other side of the road, which it did to the excitement of Pacific Gas & Electric and the Cherrington crew. So began directional drilling from a Sacramento, CA perspective. After perfecting the technique, Cherrington went the large-rig route, partnered with pipeline companies in Houston to build rigs using E to E diameter drill pipe.
Down the coast another contractor, Fred Melsheimer, started out using small (E) diameter drill rod with a wedge-shaped bit. The Melsheimer family, now Melfred Borzall, Inc. of Santa Marie, CA has similar stories of trial and error. Melsheimer coined the term "slurry boring" as he used drill tube and drilled with low- pressure water to lubricate and slurry the drilling process.
One other significant starting point was in Washington State with a company that specialized in water jetting techniques - Flow Mole. Flow Mole designs precision tooling that will cut hard material such as steel using water. In the early s the Electric Power Research Institute had earmarked millions of dollars to develop away to follow existing pipe with larger pipe for installation of new parallel lines. This project did not get off the ground but in the process jetting was considered, Flow Mole entered the picture and "guided drilling" was perfected in the electric power construction industry.
April 9, 2001
Rich Maxwell