What I Do...Well Used To

Working in the oil field on drilling rigs I have a lot of people ask me what I do out there, and even when I describe it to them they still don't understand. Roughneckin is like no other job on earth. It's not like most jobs where there are some relateable aspects of it, you're not on an assembly line building car parts, or a car. Or in a restaurant serving tea and coffee. In most jobs, the drinks or parts may be different, but you're still doing basically the same job. Not in the oil field, there is no other job where you're doing anything like tripping pipe, or making a connection, burning a flare, you don't have blowouts in energy plants, you don't mix drilling mud while building a house, and that's the closest to anything outside the rigs. And, the only resemblance in mixin mud and mixin cement is that you're chemicals come in fifty to a hundred pound bags, and you have to keep to the right recipe to make it work right. So I've taken the time to find some videos on youtube to show ya what I did when I worked on the rigs. I've worked every position on the rig it's self. From worms corner to driller, my favorite was working derricks. Which is the first video I've put up.

This is what the derrickhand does while tripping pipe in the hole.


This is a connection, you add another length of drill pipe usually 30 - 32 ft long. The driller is the one on the right in the background.


Now, I'm not in any of these videos, but they do show the main part of what we did out there. You make connections daily, sometimes many a day, sometimes only one, depending on depth and penetration rate. You trip pipe about once a week, sometimes every three or four day depending on the drill bit you have down hole. I've seen a diamond PDC type bit last upwards of two hundred hours. I couldn't find any videos of the other stuff we do out there, but it's mostly cleaning, rig repair and preventative maintenance. I love the work, and wish I could still do it.