February 26 was a pretty uneventful day as far as the drilling went, everything went very smoothly and nothing went kaput on the truck, we drilled pretty well from right after breakfast till around 7 PM.
Wednesday, February 27, Ivan started up the truck after breakfast and problems began in earnest, number one, they had pulled out 3 rods the night before, each rod is 20 feet just in case of the well caving in, well even with that it did cave in higher up towards the surface, besides that the bit on the end plugged up, that means even if the bit wasn't plugged the water and air couldn't be blown up out of the hole anyway because of the collapsed part, it took a number of hours to get everything pulled out and cleaned, when all was said and done a seal on the main winch that pulls and pushes the drill head up and down broke and we were loosing about 5 gallons of oil in 15 minutes, it was to strenuous to keep 3 people working at catching the oil and filtering it and reusing it, so we just shut everything down and took the winch apart. Parts were located and a few possibilities arose to get the parts here by Friday afternoon, but with all the clever minds that come around here from time to time................... Brother Stephen Hege, came up with the idea that he could make a seal, and they found a five gallon pail and within an hour they had cut out a seal and put the winch together again, by 4 o clock the machine was up and running, without a drop of oil leaking from the winch. Again, I would like to stress that it was a miracle from God, He loves blessing His children.
We hit water at about 140 feet and we kept going and by about 8:30 pm we were at 200 feet, lots more water was coming up out of the well then we were pushing down.
It took about one hour to lift all the rods out and then right away we started putting casing down and at about 45 feet the hole collapsed and we had to lift the casing back out.
This morning as we speak Ivan is drilling and cleaning out the hole, and we are praying that once that mission is accomplished we will be able to slide the casing down without any collapsing happening again.
David Ringler has also leveled out a spot where the next well will be drilled, also we set up a tank and started hauling water down from a hole that was dug in the river bed. This well is about a quarter of a mile up the trail towards the church and school buildings, this well will be for the community.
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| This is the broken seal! |
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| This is the new one, simply amazing. And we even made a spare. |
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