The Fordia technical team spends a lot of time visiting drill sites where they answer questions, fix problems and suggest equipment. I love when I hear that a customer was happy with a recommendation and got good results. That’s what happened with Foundex, a Canadian, employee-owned company headquartered in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
Pumps are an essential piece of equipment on a diamond drilling site. They are responsible for getting water to the site and for lubricating the bore hole and flushing drill cuttings. For efficient operations, you will need a pump that will produce the same flow at a given speed, so drillers choose positive displacement pumps. Your pump also needs to be reliable so that operations do not stop. When you need to get a new pump, there are several important questions you need to ask yourself.
Topics: How to choose equipment
Oftentimes, while I am visiting a customer, I will see a new helper struggling to carry some of the heavy loads that are common on the drill site. Additive pails, core boxes filled with core – they all weigh a lot. This happens to young guys who are fit and train often at the gym and they are annoyed and puzzled by how hard it is to carry heavy things.
The launch of a new product for diamond drilling can be an interesting time. Along with logistics and marketing efforts, the technical team is eager to have customers try a new product. We do a lot testing before a launch but as we all know, drilling conditions can vary enormously from one drill site to another. So we are really happy and a little bit relieved when we suggest a new product to a customer and they get great results.
Topics: Drilling mud, fluids and additives, Basic drilling information
The launch of the DiscovOre system generated a lot of buzz in the drilling world. Drilling companies are all happy to hear about a new product that claimed to improve safety at the same time as productivity. Companies committed to improving worksite safety were eager to try a core barrel that eliminated or improved safety issues while at the same time improving efficiency.
It’s moustache season. November is Movember time, when we are all asked to grow a moustache to raise funds and awareness of men’s health issues, such as prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men's suicide.
When we wrote a blog a little while ago comparing RC drilling to diamond drilling, one of the things that we didn’t mention was that there is little standardization in RC drilling. Unlike diamond drilling, most of the parts that make up a drill string are not compatible with parts from other manufacturers. This means that configuring, or choosing the types of equipment you need, can be complex and difficult.
Picking the right diamond tool for your drilling project is a topic we’ve covered before in a lot of detail. We’ve written blogs and guides on how to choose the right core bit and the right configuration for that core bit. Oftentimes, our guides include a matrix selection chart to help drillers choose the right core bit depending on the hardness of the ground on Mohs scale.
Subscribers who have been reading this blog for a while know that I am a big fan of drilling additives. When you are drilling in difficult conditions, drilling fluid additives can really help improve drilling performance. There are additives that are great for most conditions and other that were developed for specific ground conditions like sand or clay.
We did a blog not long ago on reverse circulation drilling compared to diamond drilling, examining the ways in which they differ and are similar. One area where they are similar is the challenge that drillers face when equipment becomes stuck in a hole. Equipment that is stuck is always bad news as it stalls operations and lower productivity. We’ve done a few blogs on stuck equipment in diamond drilling, so let’s look at the world of RC drilling.
Topics: Basic drilling information