What roughnecks do when things are slow

If you aren’t familiar with what a roughneck challenge is, check out my post roughneck strength test. This video is an example of harmless fun while things are going pretty slow. It probably looks like we are slacking off on the job but on this particular day we were drilling and when you are drilling things can slow right down.

To give you some idea, a piece of drill pipe is somewhere around 9 metres long and if you hit hard ground there are times where the drilling rate slows to over an hour per metre. So although there are always things you can do around the rig to prepare for the next part of the job, when you are drilling your main job is to be ready for a connection each time you need to add a new bit of pipe to the drill string. Some days you get as little as 15-20 minutes between connections but on this day there was only one connection in a whole 12 hour shift. So this video shows you what we got up to in order to amuse ourselves.

Of course, it’s about 3 am at the time which means the big boss is sound asleep. The idea of this challenge is pretty simple, spin the drill pipe as fast as you can and hold on as long as you can!

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