[AT] Antique well, but maybe not antique technique?

[Gene Dotson]

    Grant;

    That brings back a lot of childhood memories. As a youngster, we had a 
minister who lived at the end of our road. His sideline business was 
rejuvinating water wells in the neighborhood. His tactic was a quarter stick 
of dynamite taped to a rock which was lowered to the bottom of the well and 
detonated. Most of the wells in the area were approximately 100 + or- feet 
deep and bored to porous limestone. This technique worked very well and 
saved a lot of wells in the area. Water was usually cleared up in 2 or 3 
days.

    These were mostly 4 or 5 inch wells as very little irrigation is done in 
out part of the country.

                    Gene



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Grant Brians" <sales at heirloom-organic.com>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2011 8:35 PM
Subject: [AT] Antique well, but maybe not antique technique?


> Today we had excitement at the new leases. I asked the semi-local well 
> video
> specialist to come out again to try one last technique on the irrigation
> well that has not been cooperating. This 10" diameter irrigation well is 
> an
> artesian well, but it was only receiving about 50 gallons per minute into
> the bore throught the casing perforations. In our area this is TERRIBLE as
> it should have been receiving at least 800-1000GPM of infiltration if all
> was proper. The problem is that the iron bacteria plugged up the torch cut
> perforations. The well was probably drilled in the 1950s as far as we can
> determine and it was not pumped for over 20 years.
>     This situation has been completely frustrating because we tried two
> techniques to solve the water flow issue. The first technique was called
> brushing. This involves placing giant steel "brushes" made out of steel
> cable stranded out into something like a bottlebrush and scrubbing up and
> down repeatedly (in this case for almost 100' of the casing). 
> Unfortunately
> this did not increase the 50gpm that was flowing into the well. Then we 
> made
> a tool out of pipe, an old used and then cutdown cutdown disk harrow blade
> and some braces, which I attached to 200' of firehose. We connected this 
> to
> the PTO pump and proceeded to use it to apply 85-90PSI water blasting to 
> the
> sides of the casing. Think shooting a garden hose into the center of a wok
> and the water then shooting out from the circumference of the wok. We then
> proceeded to drop the hose into the well and blast the inner walls of the
> casing. This was partly successful. The flow from the well increased from
> the 50GPM to maybe about 200GPM. But that was insufficient to be able to
> operate my irrigation pump that requires a minimum of 600gpm to operate
> efficiently and to allow irrigating the about 35 acres of sandy loam that
> needs to be growing vegetables.
>     So after further consultation with my pump contractor and re-viewing 
> of
> the well video, we get to today's activities. The Video specialist came 
> out
> with his fan and set blasting caps with fuse line in the well. The first
> explosion was electrically ignited and we felt it through the ground and
> heard a modest BOOM. It then stirred up the sediment in the bottom of the
> well, and lo and behold the artesian water flow all of a sudden started
> roiling out of the well into the pond surrounding the well and we had a 
> lot
> of water up out of the top of the well, increasing slightly during the 
> first
> two or three minutes after the explosion. Hmm, looks like 500 gallons a
> minute coming up! Does Grant want to have a second explosive detonated in
> the well in the other 40-50 feet of perforations? Yup, you bet!!!
>     Then they set the second charge to apply force to the rest of the
> perforated area in the casing. Another modest BOOM with a jolt through the
> ground and then Eureka! The water started flowing up at easily twice the
> rate it had just seconds before and it was obvious from the color and 
> makeup
> of the water that no damage had been done to the casing of the well! Hot 
> dog
> that made us feel terrific unlike the old Wanda Jackson song lyric - hot 
> dog
> that made me mad! Yippee! Now to make completely sure. I dropped the 
> suction
> into the well while it was flowing this large amount of water out of the
> well thanks to the artesian water pressure. Then I primed the Berkeley PTO
> centrifugal pump, since after all they nearly always need it even if the
> total distance to water was less than 1 foot, and fired up the tractor. 
> Sure
> enough, nearly 900gpm and no drop in the level of the water.
>     So if I had done what made sense to me immediately, then we would have
> had water much sooner and at less expense. Now we need to start madly
> irrigating and plow the ground to plant post haste for a crop there before
> the mid-winter floods on those fields. But it sure feels good having 
> enough
> water available finally there to grow our next crop.
>               Grant Brians
>               Hollister, California vegetable, nuts and fruit farmer
> p.s. Today or tomorrow I need to go pick up the two "new" plows I agreed 
> to
> buy yesterday. They are 1960's models probably, one is an Allis-Chalmers
> model 800 rollover plow with 4 bottoms and the other is an International
> rollover plow also with 4 bottoms. Of course when I say 4 bottoms I mean 4
> bottoms go in the soil at one time, the actual numbre of plowshares in 
> each
> unit is 8!
>
> _______________________________________________
> AT mailing list
> http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at