Sunday, May 5, 2013

Dryland fishing 3 .. The Fish

So how to get ahold  of  the mess we have down bore ?  I remembered from my oil patch days a tool called a " wall hook "  that they would run into the hole to pull broken drill stem to the center of the bore so they could get ahold of it .  This basic tool idea is what i modified  to not only pull my string to the center but * hopefully* to grab it at the same time .  I wanted the tool to be fairly rugged so I designed it to go onto 2" steel pipe for both rigidity and strength.






 I also beveled the inside of the bottom nearly to an axe edge level of sharp  so that the tool wouldn't " hang " on the shoulder of the T .


From running the cam down the bore we knew that the top of the T was right at 42' below the top of the casing . Steel pipe is supposed to be ( but this can vary ) 21' per joint  and we were working about 5' above the top of the well case ( it sets in a well pit ) .   So we started down the bore  and assembled 3 joints of pipe .  right where we should we made contact with the top of the dropped string , and a bit of slack in the wench line  coupled with a turn of the 2" via pipe wrench  locked us on .  I gotta say it worked like a charm .


We started putting pull on the pipe .. and it just sat there .. a bit more pull .. same result , by this time the 1/2 inch steel cable was starting to sing , and putting your hand on the 2" pipe you could feel it vibrate or quiver  under the strain . A bit more pull and slowly the pipe began to rise , it was apparent from the weight that we had most if not all of the dropped string attached .
All went well until the last joint , it started looking like spaghetti  as it came up
Not hard to spot the " problem "  joint is it ?

A bit closer look at the tears we made as we pulled it through the " die "  of the bottom of the casing straighting it out enough to come up

The other problem is shown here ..  That end is what is left of the check valve ( that keeps water from just draining back into the well )  that is on the top of the pump .. notice there is no pump in evidence .

Here is a pic of what * should * have been attached there , about 4' and 40 lbs  of  pump . Ahh well when we ran back in with new pvc pipe and a new pump everything is working fine so  that damned thing can just lay where we pulled it off the string i guess .


Anyway , thats dryland fishing  and I count it as a successful catch because a bit of time and thinking  got a " bad drop "  out  that likely would not have came with conventional fishing techniques  and that saved about $30,000 for a new well . 


3 comments:

Christina RN LMT said...

That's genius, right there. I especially like your Redneck Wellcam!

So, it's okay to leave the old pump down there? No chance it's going to cause any more problems in the future?

Farm.Dad said...

Its not likely to be a problem . I would prefer to have it out of the hole , but am not at all concerned about it laying in the bottom .

Old NFO said...

Oh well, you got the 'big' pieces back, and it's back working, so chalk up an win!