Rather like Donald Trump, Howard Hughes was not a self mad man. His fortune was built upon the development of the modern oil drilling bit by the family company.
ferocious oil drill bits
This is the real business end of $100 oil. An object that allowed Howard Hughes to become the richest man in the world by inheriting the patent on it.
They are the world’s most highly engineered pieces of metal. Steel, tungsten carbide or increasingly Polycrystalline Diamond Compact (PDC) toothed drill bits that, in their tri-cone, rotating head form, look like the monster spice eating Sandworms from Dune. Vote for your faves.
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The animals that tunneled for the most prized natural resource in David Lynchs version of Dune had a triple pronged mouth and crystalline, serrated teeth that were appropriately based upon modern oil drill bits.
Synthetic diamond disks are mounted at the fore of the bit to continuously scrape rock.
Baker hughes make both tri-cone and diamond headed bits. The ones shown here are specifically designed to change direction i.e. to be able to drill in a snake like fashion.
A ferocious looking, Freudian nightmare, drill bit collection from the museum at the Leduc 1 well in Edmonton, Canada.
The largest oil drill bit in the world is on display at the Petroleum Museum in Norway. It is three ft in diameter and weighs nearly 4000 lbs.
Like the name suggests, this massive drill bit is used more like a pile driver than a scraper.
Rather than having rotating cutters in the bit itself, here the entire drill tube rotates and diamond cutters, that look somewhat like a squids tentacles, slice through rock.
Isnt the web just great? it seems that you can buy this oil drilling bit directly over the web.
This shows a used drill bit from the Ealing-1 well on the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand
