In chapter one of this long, drawn out tale of the toughest job I’ve ever had, we had spudded a casing down on a vacant property where a house was going to be moved. We had driven the casing to refusal — at least for that rig — and in attempting to pull it had snapped it off below ground. We decided perhaps mud rotary was the way to go on this job, but a good friend who had such a rig got in a squabble with his partners and was unable to help us out. Thus begins chapter two.
Through the help of an officer of the Michigan Well Drillers Association we found another contractor some distance away who was willing to run a hole for us. At their request, we visited them and described what had taken place on this job up to that point. They asked about the geology on this site and we told them all we had found was fine sand, some wet and some dry. With this information they asked us to dig a couple of mud pits where we wanted to try a new hole. We got a backhoe and dug two 4-foot-deep pits in the ground about 4 feet-by-6 feet with an earthen wall between them. We had chosen a spot about 50 feet from where we had had our spudder disaster.