Howdy from Texas where Spring has Sprung here in early February. Oh, we may get another freeze or two, but the highs are already in the upper 60's and 70's. Trees are already blooming.
Daniel and I attended the AFS Texas Troubleshooters event a couple of weeks ago where we learne all about green sand. Bentonite is a critical component of the green sand mixture. Bentonite provides the clay to a green sand mixture which holds the mold together. SEE:
FOUNDRY FACTS-LEARNING LINKS
Back in my early college days, I had the opportunity to make a lot of money during the summer breaks working on seismic survey field crews for Chevron GeoSciences Party #6 and Party #8 . I worked from the Atchafalay swamp basin in Louisiana to the banks of the Mississippi to the heavily wooded forests of East Texas to the bentonite mountains of the Big Horn basin in Wyoming. When working the Atchafalay swap, I wore the same clothes each morning for about four weeks. It didn't do any good to wash them because by 7am each morning I was waste deep in swamp water and muck. We worked 3-4 weeks on and had a week off. At the end of a rotation I just tossed the clothes and the boots. This was hard and dangerous work. I was lucky as I always got assigned to the survey crew as the rodman. Oh, I did my share of hustling jugs, but normally I was the one that walked the swamp or the bentonite hills with my rod in hand. Of course, the survey operator picked a dry or high spot where he could keep shooting the line w/o having to get his feet wet or climbing a mountain. It was not unusual to do a mile long turn w/o the surveyor having to move.
In Wyoming, long before I knew what bentontie was being used for, I climbed many a mountain. Here are some pictures of these travails. These pictures were taken in the Worland and TenSleep areas of Wyoming.
Until next time, see you on down the road in Milwaukee for the upcoming
AFS Wisconsin Regional.
Yep, that's a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake that one of the juggies picked up - yep, it's alive too. Idiot. We were probably 2-3 hours from the nearest hospital, had marginal radio communications., and this was long before the advent of cell phones. Fortunately, he didn't get bit.
Someone thought it would be funny to setup the men working signs on the seismic line, mind you, we were on BLM land a long ways from any highway.
A mountain of bentonite. Yep, I had to climb down and climb up that carrying my surveyors rod. Poor jug line crew had to sling equipment all over the place. Being "trapped" in that part of Wyoming in the summer, it was blazing hot. For whatever reason, the head surveyor wouldn't let us take ice water into the field. We had to have air temperature water. I think he was just tight money wise and didn't want to spring for ice.
A view of the vast expanse of Wyoming.
The proprietors of the Pawneee Motel in Worland Wyoming. Paul and Ardith and Tinker too - Tinker was the name of the poodle. That's my old Jeep Scrambler CJ-8. Stayed at that hotel for four months. During the four month stay in Worland, we only got 4 days off. The rest of it was working 7 days a week - 12-13 hours a day. Good overtime money for a college student. Four of us college students all crammed into a single room to save money. Played a lot of poker that summer. Plus, in addition to our wages we got something like $25 a day for expenses and hotel. Mind you, this was about 1982.
Seismic survey line out in the middle of absolutely no where. I planted those flags,
Seismic survey dog-house. This was the NORAD of the operation, where all of the cables came into for processing and recording. The earth would be shaken by giant vibrasizers or dynamite and the resultant seismic waves would be picked up and recorded on magnetic tape. We had a state of the art TI-990 TRANSPORT system in the dog house. One always wanted to try and hang out at the dog house as they had a proper toilet and also air conditioning.
Another picture of some poor hot and tired juggie slinging equipment around in the bentonite mountains. Yep, I had to carry my survey rod down there and up the other side. Of course, the survey operator was standing behind me and would "shoot" me at the bottom and then again at the top, then he would hop in his pickup and shoot me from the other side. It might take an hour or more between "shots", so the surveyor always got a lot of naps in. I remember one time I had climbed over to the other side and the surveyor was asleep and wouldn't answer his radio. After a couple of hours he finally woke up and we finished the day. I wasn't about to go trekking back to wake him up!
The Congo line of vibrasizers from Western Atlas. Massive machines with a large "foot pad" that would shake to make the seismic waves. All of the vehicles were hooked up to generate power at the same time. Of course, the cabins of these units were air conditioned.
Thank you for allowing me to share some old memories with you.
.JPG)
.jpg)
