Eric Hajek is the President of Terra Testing Inc. and explained the company’s story. ‘We heard about Sonic about three years ago, I’d say. Our expertise is in geotechnical drilling, environmental drilling, direct push (DP) drilling, sonic drilling, and air excavations. We started talking with Royal Eijkelkamp last April and moved on from there, discussing the different sizes of sonic and looking at the sonics we had.'
'After communicating with Royal Eijkelkamp, their sales team set us up with the right drill for us. They took the time to make sure we had the right information, the right tooling package when we purchased it, the right size head, and all the functions that would make our job easier.’
‘We have set 4-inch wells with 2-inch monitoring wells. We’ve been everywhere from depths to the shallows, i.e. 180 feet to 30 feet. We used it for rock coring for geotech, as it has a dual head, so we were able to drill a whole 642 feet, all WireLine, and with few coring runs. So, it worked out fantastic on the geotech end. What’s more, we’ve been using it to just south of Morgantown, Pennsylvania, which has a site that’s all boulder backfill. There are also areas that are 120 feet deep, but we were able to go in with sonic, sonic through the boulders, giving SPTs the whole way down. We took SPT samples every five feet.’
The ManipAll rod handler technology is amazing.
‘This was so far very safe – I think safer than other machines. Because everyone’s paying attention, we should be able to bring the number of back injuries and finger pinch points down to zero. We like how this drill has kill switches, and the safety shutdown switches are all where they should be.'
‘One of the things we did that really helped, and which we didn’t know about before, was to run air with sonic. We can run the outer casing as well as the inner casing once we hit rock. So, basically, we run air and set up a flow tee inside our vice because we had the 3-tier clamp. We therefore set a tee on the bottom floating clamp and had a discharge hose, so we could run our 6-inch casing down on top of a CoreBarrel and not have to run water. We did that for depths of 80 feet. Once we hit bedrock, we used our CoreBarrel and cored with air down until 140 feet.'
‘Our sonic rig has a pretty nice setup now that we’ve got the rod loader, but I think we’re going to take the next step soon and start using the ManipAll rod handler as well. We’re eliminating the chances of someone injuring themselves by picking up tooling and other things. This has now become our standard practice, and it’s improving all the time. The technology is amazing. The more people see it, the more good things we can do with it.’
Terra Testing Inc. (TTI), located in Washington, Pennsylvania, is a privately owned corporation that has specialized in geotechnical and environmental drilling since 1972. TTI has successfully completed thousands of projects for the private sector as well as state and industrial owners.
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