building the packing crates

Here's the item I'm building the packing crates for- doesn't look like much, does it? In fact, these are components of a very important piece of oilfield equipment, and are all precisely machined and heat-treated stainless steel. It's all very heavy- and this isn't even the part that does the work! I'll explain what it is at the end of this post.

These pieces are sitting on my small cabinet maker's workbench, which I built from old military bunks picked up at auction, and a solid oak entry door, picked up from beside a dumpster ( it was *heavy*- I don't blame them for not actually putting it in the dumpster!)

Here, I've machined the blocks to hold the items- I used scrap wood to build a locating jig so that they would all be the same, and a forstner bit to get a clean, precise hole.

Here are three semi completed crates- they still need sides, ends, and a top. The long piece in front is marked with layout lines, so that I can just lay the pieces on top of it to get them all right, and don't have to fuss with doing layout on each piece. In the left top of the picture is an uncomplted post office box bank- still needs a base. It's made from the same white oak door I used in building my bench. Just beautiful wood- I'm proud to have saved it. I built that bench probably two years ago, and I've just now figured out what to do with the remaining wood- it was worth the wait!

Here's a piece of the plywood I picked up last week, waiting to be cut to size for making more crates. Even the short pieces will get used for something- no idea what, yet, but plywood always comes in handy sooner or later. It's keeping company with an old waterbed side that will probably get used in some of these crates, as well. Old waterbeds are a great source of reasonably good lumber, since they've gone out of style. In fact, I've just planed a couple of them down, and I'm planning to make a coat rack out of them for our new house.

The items pictured above are the body for an item called a "downhole clock", used in drilling holes that might be turned into oil wells. In use, all of the sections screw together, a special clock is inserted into a waterproof section of the body, and the whole assembly is lowered into the drill pipe, until it hits bottom- then tension is put on the line, and the crew waits for the clock to hit it's preset timer (this is kept track of by the driller (crew chief), with a stopwatch). When it is pulled up and dissassembled, the clock will have punched a hole in a special piece of paper, showing the angle at which the body was hanging- and thus if the hole is going crooked.
If this sounds like a lot of trouble, you're right- it is! But it has to be done- these are necessary equipment on every drilling rig. My brother repairs and sells these clocks for people in several states. Apparently he's one of the only competent person doing this, as he keeps quite busy.