COPYING AND DISTRIBUTING ARE PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER

June 2020 Vol. 75 No. 6 (/magazine/2020/june-2020-vol-75-no-6)

FEATURES (/MAGAZINE/2020/JUNE-2020-VOL-75-NO-6#FEATURES)

Pioneers of HDD Reflect on Hall of

Fame Careers
Inaugural Inductees Melsheimer, Cherrington Inexorably Linked in
HDD History
By Jeff Awalt, Executive Editor

It would be impossible to describe the advances in horizontal directional drilling during its early
development in the 1960s and ’70s without addressing the pioneering work of Richard (Dick) Melsheimer
and Martin Cherrington.

From a distance, the leapfrogging accomplishments of the two Californians may appear so closely
intertwined as to suggest a carefully choreographed script, as each built upon the engineering feats of the
other. Yet, a closer look reveals that nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, Cherrington and Melsheimer spent most of their careers on opposite ends of the Golden State with
unique professional paths, distinct personalities and entirely separate engineering agendas. When their
accomplishments are viewed together, however, they tell a story of two maverick inventors who collectively
laid out a path for an entire industry.

DICK MELSHEIMER
Compact Concepts Lay Groundwork for Modern HDD

Dick Melsheimer’s initial concept and experimentation with small directional equipment in Los Angeles
paved the way for explosive growth in the small-rig market, powering the first telecom construction boom
and laying the foundation for much of the today’s urban HDD activity.

The Los Angeles native was born into the underground construction business, following in the footsteps of
his father, Fred, another industry pioneer who founded Melfred Borzall in 1946. Fred is credited with
developing the slurry boring process. Dick built on his legacy of innovation after graduating from Cal Poly
San Luis Obispo as a mechanical engineer.

After joining the family business in 1961, Dick and his brother, Ted, developed hydraulic-powered drill rigs
and patented a self-propelled boring machine known as the Dynamole, which could bore and pull in more
than 2,000 feet of polyethylene pipe per day. It marked a significant step forward in HDD development and
a big improvement over the air motor-driven cut and bore method.

The air motor cut and bore process developed by Fred Melsheimer, while a definite leap forward when it
came into use during the 1950s, was a labor-intensive and treacherous process, Dick recalled during an
HDD Pioneers panel discussion at the 2020 Underground Technology Conference.

“That was the first power source for HD drilling, but we didn’t call it that in those days. We just called it
 (/media/2825/pioneers_melsheimerart2.jpg)
Dick Melsheimer was honored at the HDD Reunion at UCT.

horizontal boring,” Melsheimer said, describing a handheld, 3-horsepower motor that required two
operators to power 20-foot lengths of drill rod.

“It was a dangerous tool,” he said. “You had a little fish-tailed bit that you’d use for drilling a 2-inch pipe
hole, and if that sucker hit a rock or a root, the torque would go over, and if they weren’t holding onto the
motor one guy could get a smashed jaw or a broken shoulder.”

Crews would dig a series of potholes in order to sight the drill rod and steer it along its path. “In those days
we never knew of such a thing as a frack-out, because you had a pothole every 30 to 50 feet, and that’s
where all the fluid went,” Melsheimer recalled. Laborers would dig the holes by hand, starting about an
hour before the crew began drilling, “and they would just chase each other down the street.”

(/media/2824/pioneers_melsheimerart1.jpg)
Dick Melsheimer conducting hydraulic drill track testing.

Melsheimer started putting in steel distribution lines for natural gas utilities in the Los Angeles area, but
when Dupont introduced its Aldyl “A” polyethene pipe the 1960s, that lighter material set the stage for his
next big advancement in HDD.

“Up to that time, when you had steel pipe and a handheld air motor, you could not physically pull the pipe
back through. You pulled a cable through the hole and hooked that onto a winch to the trucks, and they’d
pull the pipe back through the hole,” Melsheimer said. “When polyethylene came out, we came up with the
idea of putting the swivel behind the reamer and pulling the pipe back at the same time.”
That meant stepping up from the 3-hp air motor to the 30-hp, diesel-powered hydraulic Dynamole
machine, which made it possible to ream and pull the lighter PE pipe back through the hole at the same
time, launching a new phase for the HDD industry.

The use of drilling fluids was rare in those early days, Melsheimer said, estimating that 95 percent of
contractors working in the Los Angeles area used only water.

“We just went up to the homeowners and gave them five dollars or something, and we’d hook onto their
water with a hose that ran out to the machine. If you got into clay, you’d squirt some dish soap in your drill
rod and put the water on,” he said. “Years later, we made a portable bentonite mixing machine. You’d end
up with half of a tank left of mud, and you’d just take it down to the corner where the storm drain was.”

As the city expanded, Melsheimer’s crews stayed busy running 1-inch conduit for street lighting. While the
basic approach stayed the same, tractors with augers replaced hand-digging of potholes, and a two-man
crew made fast work of it. From there, equipment kept getting more powerful, and HDD capabilities
continued to improve.

“We were one of the first ones out there with Ditch Witch … and we had the first electric-over-hydraulic
controls, where the guy didn’t actually hold onto the controls on the carriage, walking it up and down the
track,” instead standing 20 feet away with joysticks,” he said.

Melsheimer described an early river crossing in New Zealand using an RD300 Radiodetection locating
system as being “like the Model T era” compared with the “Tesla era” of today.

“It would normally give out an interrupted signal, and then when you stop at the 6 o’clock position, it would
give you a solid tone. And that’s all it would give you – period,” he said, adding that the system used on the
New Zealand project could locate down to 20 feet “after you cross your fingers and pray for it.

As crude as sighting was in the old days, Melsheimer said, the systems were accurate enough to drill about
a foot off of a live gas main.

“It was just amazing how accurately (operators) would hold that thing,” he said. “There was a lot of hope
and pray with this method because the rotation of it would normally cause it to climb and go to the right.
The good ones who’d do the sighting would know how to aim it left and down.”

“Again, it was the Model T era, but it worked, and we got millions of feet of that polyethylene put in the
ground in L.A.,” he said. “The beauty of it is that it only lasts 50 years. So, guess what has to be replaced.”

MARTIN CHERRINGTON
Big, Bold Projects Prove HDD’s Value in New Markets

While Dick Melsheimer’s work in L.A. focused primarily on compact applications, Martin Cherrington was
thinking big in Northern California with the development of large rigs and visions of environmentally
friendly river crossings.

Before pioneering the development of horizontal directional drilling in Sacramento and making headlines
with first-of-their-kind HDD river crossings, Martin Cherrington gained broad experience working on dams,
tunnels, pipelines, telephone and power cable projects with his father, a construction industry contractor.

Always looking for a better and faster way to get things done, Cherrington’s willingness to leap into new
technologies led to plenty of successes but didn’t always prove to be the best career move, as he told a
crowd that gathered to honor the HDD pioneer at the 2020 Underground Construction Technology
International Conference & Exhibition.

Cherrington was working as foreman of a project to lay telephone cables in Los Angeles the first time he
witnessed how effectively drilling technology could be used to place cables and conduits underground.

“I was already on my job, open-cutting with backhoes, and it was the biggest mess you’ve ever seen. Then
 y yj p g gg y

(/media/2821/pioneers_cherringtonart2.jpg)
Martin Cherrington was honored at the HDD Reunion at UCT.

across the street came in Irish Construction Company, and they were using this pothole drilling method,”
Cherrington said. “They came in a couple of weeks after me, and they left a couple of weeks before I did.”

It wasn’t just that the process was faster, but it also was less disruptive, allowing residents to come and go
from their driveways with no impact on work schedules. After finishing the L.A. project and returning to his
employer’s home base of Sacramento, Cherrington was so enamored with the new process that he went
out and charged a Chicago Pneumatic air motor to the company’s account.

“The one thing I forgot to do was to have a work order or an acquisition sheet. I didn’t tell the company, the
bookkeeper or anyone that I was going to spend $900 and this was back in the early ’60s. The first thing I
knew I had my pink slip,” he said. The short-term setback led to a groundbreaking future in HDD.

(/media/2820/pioneers_cherringtonart1.jpg)
Martin Cherrington (left) in 1971 standing with his crew at the pilot bit exit point on the historic Pajaro Crossing.

In 1964, Cherrington built his first drill rig and started Titan Contractors, specializing in utility road boring.
His fledgling company benefited from a growth spurt in Sacramento, the state capitol, as well as a national
beautification effort spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, who sought to rid
America’s neighborhoods of unsightly utility poles and cables. Sacramento County decreed that all utilities
be placed underground, and Titan had to build a fleet of rigs to keep up with demand after contracting with
the Sacramento Municipal Utility District to install underground cables throughout its service area.
Over the years, Cherrington amassed 27 patents related to horizontal directional drilling, drawing
widespread recognition and helping to gain acceptance of HDD with his first river crossing, a 500-foot
crossing under the Pajaro River of a 4-inch gas line for Pacific Gas & Electric. Despite the success of that
project, however, he found that many were not ready to make the leap to horizontal drilling.

“At the very beginning of the contracting when we were drilling under rivers, it was a long space between
getting jobs,” Cherrington said.

“Not everyone was interesting in doing this drilling. These pipeline owners and their engineers weren’t
going to jeopardize their pensions for some newfangled idea of putting a pipe under a river,” he said.

He also faced a steep learning curve during those early years, drawing on the expertise of oil industry
directional drillers while pioneering HDD methods “without any blueprints” for how to do any of it.

Northern California was a constant challenge of varying and unpredictable drilling conditions.

“We didn’t have the fine grain or orchard-type ground material or formations. We had hard pan that kind of
reminded you a little bit of limestone. You could see these layers, kind of like a layer of hotcakes out there.
And Sacramento was made up of that because it’s a flooded area, and it was coming down the mountains,
so some of it was very hard and some was very soft,” he said, describing sparks flying as crews drilled
through the layers.

Because of the conditions in the region, bentonite was in early use for HDD applications. Fortunately,
because of oil drilling in the area, bentonite was readily available.

Although each job benefited from the learning of the last, there were some rough spots along the way. For
instance, Cherrington recounted a story of an early attempt on that first river crossing after hiring an
oilfield driller who brought out a heavy drill motor and bit.

“The bottom hole assembly never did come up. It just went straight down,” he said. “That driller we
contracted who had all the tooling came to me and said, ‘Son, I think you’re drilling a dry hole here.’

“I thought that was just the end of the world,” Cherrington said. “But we finished the project with some of
the utility equipment that we had. Then, on the next project, we had some input from (Smith Tool division)
Dynadrill. That job was pretty successful using these tools.”

From that point on, Cherrington realized that much of the technological know-how that could be learned
and applied to HDD could be adapted from the deep experience of the oil and gas industry. One of his early
major successes was a 2,000-foot crossing under Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River of a 10-inch chemical line
for Union Carbide. It was an arduous process with a single-shot system that had been in use since 1929,
averaging 30 feet a day.

“The problem is, when you go out there 1,000 to 1,500 feet, it was hard to pump it,” he said describing the
old Dowell cementing pumps and Halliburton trucks at work before Sperry Sun came up with the steering
tool in the late 1970s that’s still in use today.

“Those pump trucks were really working, and the wire line was dragging down – and sometimes it wouldn’t
make it. Just remembering it now – horrible memories,” he said.

He described a gradually improving evolution of equipment through the 1980s–90s, with cable rigs of up
to 750,000 to 1 million pounds, followed by a series of rack-and-pinion rigs.

“Cable rigs had their place,” he said. “I’m glad those days are gone.” •
 (/media/2826/pioneers_melsheimerart3.jpg)
Members of Dick Melsheimer’s family journeyed to UCT at Fort Worth for the Pioneer of the HDD Hall of Fame ceremonies.

(/media/2822/pioneers_cherringtonart3.jpg)
Martin Cherrington’s wife Joy joined him at the Hall of Fame induction.

Related Articles
Vacuum Excavator Market Surges with Enhanced Capabilities (/magazine/2020/october-2020-vol-75-no-
10/features/vacuum-excavator-market-surges-with-enhanced-capabilities)
Fiber Project Pushes Through Difficult Ground Conditions, Environmental Challenges
(/magazine/2020/september-2020-vol-75-no-9/directional-drilling/fiber-project-pushes-through-difficult-
ground-conditions-environmental-challenges)
Unique Intersect Bore Features Surface Tie-In (/magazine/2020/june-2020-vol-75-no-6/features/unique-
intersect-bore-features-surface-tie-in)

HDD Hall of Fame Inducts Cherrington, Melsheimer as Inaugural Pioneers (/magazine/2020/march-2020-vol-

75-no-3/features/hdd-hall-of-fame-inducts-cherrington-melsheimer-as-inaugural-pioneers)
Complicated Cable Boring in Boston Harbor (/magazine/2020/january-2020-vol-75-no-
1/features/complicated-cable-boring-in-boston-harbor)
Sliplining with an HDD Twist (/magazine/2019/december-2019-vol-74-no-12/features/sliplining-with-an-
hdd-twist)

From Archive
ICE KING Launches new service to help with workforce hydration needs (/magazine/2018/november-2018-
no-73-vol-11/new-products/ice-king-launches-new-service-to-help-with-workforce-hydration-needs)
Hyundai Offers Wheel Loader Guarding Package, Improved Compact Excavator (/magazine/2018/november-
2018-no-73-vol-11/new-products/hyundai-offers-wheel-loader-guarding-package-improved-compact-
excavator)