Spring Grove Services Puts its New Vermeer Drill to Work

New Equipment Crucial to Branch Out from Fibre Work 

Spring Grove Services recently completed a horizontal directional drilling project that even a couple of years ago it never would have touched. 

It’s not that the company was wary of this kind of project, it’s that its bread-and-butter work is in smaller diameter fibre installations. This project definitely was not one of those, but it does serve as a calling card that the company is looking to branch out into other utility installations. 

Spring Grove Services is a family-owned and operated utility contractor that was formed in 2003 with a focus on hydro excavation work. The company works in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and East but will travel across Ontario for the right project. In 2016, it added horizontal directional drilling (HDD) as a complementary offering to its vacuum excavation work. 

As noted before, the crux of its HDD work since 2016 has been fibre installations requiring smaller drills. Its drilling fleet includes a Vermeer D7x11, three D23x30s, a DR23X30 for drilling in harder rock situations and a newly acquired D36x50. The latter is part of what made this latest project possible. 

 “We’ve been busy with the fibre optic side of things, but in the last year or so, the telecommunications companies haven’t been building as fast, so we’ve had to branch into other utilities,” says Keegan Ward, field operations director for Spring Grove Utilities. 

We Need a Bigger Rig

To make this branching out possible, Spring Grove worked with Russell Black and Jeremy Snow at Boring Solutions Inc. (BSI) to acquire a pre-owned Vermeer D36X50. This allowed the company to branch into sewer, water, hydro and electric projects. 

“The Vermeer 36X50 is quite a bit bigger than what we run, but we saw the industry changing and decided to purchase it,” says Zach Grove, co-owner of Spring Grove Services. “We’ve probably done 12 jobs with the rig, and these would have been jobs that we would have passed on if we didn’t have this drill.”

Leveraging its own depth of experience, coupled with the experience of BSI and other industry partners, Spring Grove put the D36X50 through its paces on a recently completed project. 

“We planned and planned and planned. There were hiccups along the way, but we overcame,” says Black, co-owner of BSI, an Ontario-based distributor of HDD tooling and accessories.

Spring Grove Services Puts the Rig to the Test 

According to Grove, he was approached by Westmore Poleline & Electric Inc., a company Spring Grove Services works frequently with especially on the hydrovac side because they needed several drill shots completed for an electric project in the Town of Bowmanville, Ontario. 

“They presented us with this project late last year and it included a couple of drill shots and there was a 30-in. section. At the time we were a little reluctant to take it on,” says Grove. “Once we started to talk with the guys at BSI and Keegan and all his connections, we decided to take it on as a chance to grow with the changing market.”

The 30-in. high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe serves as carrier pipe for 4-in. conduits and is being installed as part of future development in the area.  Installing a 30-in. pipe was a first for Spring Grove and was quite a bit larger than what they were used to in terms of diameter, overall length and weight of the pipe. 

Planning = Success

“We had to wrap our heads around it and plan as much as possible, make sure we had our numbers right,” Grove says.  

That planning included acquiring two new Melfred Borzall reamers – a 30-in. and a 40-in. – from BSI, as well as some further consultation with the BSI team to make sure the rig could handle the drill. 

“We had Brent Clark from ProAction fluids complete a full mud plan for us, and I used the DCI TeraTrak R1 to create a full bore plan and we completed all of the pullback calculations, and data logged the shot for them,” says Black.

The BSI team also ran the numbers to calculate how much the fused pipe would weigh and what kind of pull and drag was going to be on the pipe during pullback. “It turned out that our drill had enough power to complete the pullback, as long as we did everything the proper way,” says Grove. 

And that’s what the team did. Based on BSI’s calculations, they weighed the fused pipe with 9,5000 gallons of water to help create neutral buoyancy in the hole, which creates less drag on the pipe. They also had to figure out how much and what kind of mud to pump and incorporated the use of a mud reclaimer — a first for any of its HDD projects. 

For the mud, DiCorp Tru-Bore and ProAction Provis XP were used and for the reclaimer, Spring Grove rented a MudPuppy from Hole Products. 

To ensure that they were getting the most out of their reclaimer and to reduce costs and time due to trucking, Spring Grove setup a pump on the exit side to transfer the drilling fluid back to the reclaimer

With everything in place, the crew was ready to drill. The project site was off the side of Bowmanville Avenue in a storm drainage ditch to drill 20 ft under a pedestrian walkway that runs under the avenue. The depth, Ward says, is necessary due to new sewer infrastructure that is slated to be installed in the area in the near future. 

 “With the DCI TeraTrak we were able to plan out the bore and we only went about 5 per cent of steer in 15 ft to put the least amount of bend on that HDPE carrier pipe,” Ward says. “It would have been difficult to complete this bore without the TeraTrak.”

Though there were some hiccups in the field, like two days of downpours that required some work to maintain the precise mud mixture and some tooling adaptations that were required in the field, the project was successfully completed. 

“The project went close to plan because we planned like crazy. We planned for every scenario we could think of,” says Black. “So, when plans started getting off, we adjusted and kept on going. We put so much pen to paper before dropping a machine off, we pretty much knew how this would go.”

“Without Keegan and BCI this is not something I would have taken on. Keegan has been in the industry for a long time, and he has friends in the industry that he can bounce ideas and questions off of and then BCI with the experienced and expertise they for sure gave us the confidence we could do this,” Grove says.

He adds that it took the entire Spring Grove Services team to make this possible. “We had 80 per cent if not more of our employees on this project at one point or the other. They gave us confidence that we could do this job. Without the right people this project would not have happened, and I am happy to have a good team around us.”

Mike Kezdi is managing editor of Trenchless Technology Canada.