OIL LINGO: Do you know what a sand smeller is? How about a lazy
bench? Or a go devil?
We’ll give you a hint: They are all terms for items once used
around the early oil drilling rigs, with some of them still in use
today.
Bob Slike Jr. sent us the list of these terms to generate some
interest in the upcoming “Oil 150” celebration.
“Most of these (terms) I learned from my late father and from
being around the oil field and oil field workers,” Bob writes.
“When we were young kids, our summers were mostly spent hanging out
around the South Penn Oil Co. oil leases and powers behind our home
and visiting the drilling rigs and other oil-field activity like
the boiler house, the bandwheel powers, well-pulling operations,
etc. Crawler tractors and drilling rigs were our first love.”
He also sent us a list of tools every rig builder once had in
his tool box taken from the pages of an Oilwell Supply Co.
publication titled “The Handy Book” No. 44, copyright 1923.
Some of these “must-haves” included double-bit axes, a crow bar,
a wooden mallet, iron wedges, shovels, a combination wrench, 3 feet
of octagon steel, 370 feet of rope in different thicknesses, a
plumb bob, saws, hatchets, knives, augers and bastard files
(explanations welcome on that last one!).
Bob continues: “In the early days, there were crews called ‘rig
builders’ who did nothing but build and tear down the wooden
drilling rigs. The fellow who cut out and built and supervised the
building of the first wood standard rig in 1971 at Custer City was
Red Seagren.
“Red is gone, now. We watched him cut out the pieces on saw
horses right on the derrick floor, drill the holes for the rig
irons and send them up to the crew on the staging to bolt to the
next section. Some of the earlier standard rigs were nailed
together and called ‘Spiked Rigs.’ Red still had his tools and cut
out the derrick parts from memory. A rig builder did not need to
refer to blueprints.”
Bob also send along a diagram from the above-named book that
shows the side elevation and ground plans of a standard oil
rig.
Tomorrow, we’ll tell you what a sand smeller is … and give you
more from Bob’s list.
