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

Charlie V 1cdevill at gmail.com
Fri Sep 23 18:59:51 PDT 2011


Interesting combination, a Minister and dynamite.  I am guessing that
a quarter stick out in the West church yard would be about the right
dose to bring the congregation back to attention around half way
through the sermon.

Did I really have that thought??  Must have been too many old Western
movies when I was a kid

.Charlie V.



On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 9:17 PM, Gene Dotson <gdotsly at watchtv.net> wrote:
>    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!
>>
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