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This is Art Beatty. I’d like to talk about a gentleman I knew in my early years of drilling. He owned a company I was working for, a very small company. I imagine his age was some- where between 65 and 70, and this conversa- tion I had with him took place in early 1949. This man stands out in my memory as kind of a pioneer for drilling. He was the kind of a man who went out like the early settlers in the u.S. who did for themselves and made everything work for them. He was quite a guy, just like the early pioneers in the mining business who had nothing to work with but their hands, but they got the job done. I went by his home early one evening to pick up my paycheck and he asked me if I was busy or in a hurry. I told him no, I wasn’t in a hurry. He said for me to come on in and talk awhile. So we went into the kitchen and he opened up a couple of beers and started telling me how he did when he first started in the area. He had migrated from Sweden, and his name was Johnny Johnson. When he migrated here, he got himself a little drilling rig - it was one he could disassemble and carry on burrows because there weren’t many roads where he was drilling. Sometimes it was quite a distance from the nearest road. So that’s how they got everything on location. It might have taken hours, or it might have taken days. He would set up his tent for him and his people, so they could cook for themselves. They just worked one shift, by the way. He would assemble the rig and get on with the drilling. Everything they did had to be hauled in by burrows. He had about six or eight burrows; they hauled the rig and even water. It is a little bit difficult when hauling water when you lose your circulation, and the formation they were drilling in was a very fractured sandstone. It was kind of difficult to get it back, and he said, “You would just have to get it back.” So that’s how he managed to survive. And the thing that stuck in my mind the most was he fabricated his own diamond bits. (Now that’s something for younger people to think about.) Of course, the holes were shallow and, to get everything in line, they would drill with the EX or AX conventional drill pipe. The EX weighed somewhere around 30 pounds per 10 feet; and around 40-45 pounds for the AX. So you see, the pipe wasn’t very heavy and the holes weren’t very deep - 150 to 200 feet was about as deep as they would drill. This gives you kind of an idea what he was up against. He would have the bit blank machined at a shop, then he would set the diamonds in by hand. He would use a small hand drill to make a little hole the outside diameter he needed, then pushed the diamond into it. It had to be a good, snug fit. He would then peen around it with a center punch light hammer and set each stone in that way. I asked him how he kept up with the different size diamonds and keep everything so he could get them in there right. He said it was a little bit difficult, but he would grade the stones first to get the sizes all about the same. Sometimes when they lost a diamond in the hole, they would go in and try to fish it out, which he had several methods of doing that too. So you see, it was quite an ordeal in those days. There weren’t any computers, not even any communication. To commu- nicate, you had to get to the nearest little town and use the public telephone. Any- way, this was the type of guy he was. I wonder how some of our people, who haven’t been in the drilling business very long and do everything on computers, would manage under those conditions. It was really a tough job. He said he set some of the diamonds in the bits right on the job, but he liked to do it at home because he had more to work with and it was a little easier. Johnny Johnson was aman who stuck in my memory all these years, and I was really pleased to be acquainted with the old gentleman. Art Art Beatty may be contacted via e-mail to michele@ worldwidedrillingresource.com Publisher’s Note: Art Beatty is a personal friend and we appriciate him sharing with us. More Memories and Experiences by Art Beatty Antofagasta, Chile 12 MARCH 2016 WorldWide Drilling Resource ®