Dryland Fishing 2 The redneck well cam

Last post I left us with  a dropped pump , fowled by cable  and somewhat explained the issues this created .  Now Traditionally the experienced well guy at this point gets drunk because it saves time to start early .  Really what happens is that you hook up whatever tool you have dreamed up and made  to run down the bore and attempt to entangle the cable on top of  the pipe enough that you can either pull it in two  or lift the pipe string ( hopefully ) to the top with it .   Normally what happens is that  the cable breaks off at some unknown point , a wad comes to the top on your tool , and you are not really sure if there is more fowling the top of your pipe string or not .
Modern Technology has been on top of this for some years ,  they make down bore cameras . Really nice almost indestructible  down bore cameras  that will give many years of service under the harshest conditions and stream live video  to the surface to be viewed then or recorded and studied at leisure  from the comfort of the front seat of an air conditioned / heated  pickup .  Dammed things  cost about as much as that fancy pickup too .  No problem ..  we will just call the guy who has one , have him come over and shoot the hole right ?    Yea ..   possibly in your world since * that * guy  wants about $100 an hour that seems to start the instant he answers his phone , mileage both ways , and oh yea .. he can get to you sometime next week . Or if not possibly the week after .  You see he has a well rig too and is kinda pissed that you had your guy pull it rather than help him pay for his fancy toys , not that we are going to discuss what he charges  LOL .
This not being my first " fishing trip "  and since I have had some experience with the issues involved I really wanted a good look at just what was down hole on my well .  I put a bit of thought into it  and decided to experiment a bit with gross mis-use of off the shelf technology  .

Enter the Redneck Well Cam ... some assembly required ..

The local Alco store had a little Vivitar  camcorder priced at $19 and change , hmm takes standard sd card , and AA batterys ... Perfect !!   Dammed if it didn't ring up for $12 at checkout .. Bonus !  I am sure you can see where this is going .

Now here for a cost of roughly $20 we have the seeds of revolution LOL .
Upon assembly  it became apparent  that there was going to be a learning curve involved here .  The camera wasn't at all stable , and the light  seemed weak  but possibly this was more about the camera and light not being stable  when i think about it .  None the less  after a few trips down the hole we wound up with v2

I put on a streamlight pt2aa flashlight that is rated at 150 lumins  and it worked great , stuffing the entire assembly into the plastic juce jug  seemed to do a lot to stabilize it side to side  though it still " twirls "  this isn't really a big problem for my usage .

This pretty much shows it as i sent it down hole .






It took amazing video considering the investment involved .  The lack of real time video and steer-ability of view could well be a drawback but for what I needed  it was no big thing .
The first video  is more or less a proof of concept video  that also shows some of the trash that winds up on top of things ,  note that this isnt the first video i took  but was about 3 times into the process of have a look , run a light tool down on paracord to knock loose trash obstructing the bore , and look again .



 The second video is after we had snagged the cable and brought it to the top ( in this case it pulled the wires out of the pump )  to get a look at just what we had to deal with ontop of the pipe string .



By tying a knot in the string with the camera resting on " bottom " I established a rough depth  to " fish " for both the cable and pipe .

It was apparent that the union had not broken off and then fell down the bore  so we knew that a typical " flapper " fishing bit  ( a piece of pipe or casing smaller than the well case  with a flap pointing up that wont pivot  past center so it grabs pipe or a coupler when the bit slips over it. )  wasn't going to work well in this instance so something was going to have to be made for the job  .