Pounding a shallow well point

Does anyone know of an easy way to pound a well point, Did it many years back and was quite a job, had to go through a layer of hard clay. It took me and four other guys half a day and a lot of beer, I do not want to do it by hand this time, any suggestions?

try an electric jack hammer to drive on the cap. works well driving point down some 39 ft. alot easier than lift and pound.

I used to live in Adams County Wisconsin . I have done wells with a jack hammer and endloader , they go nice and easy. I have done wells with the rope around the wheel and tripod, If the weighted driver is heavy enough works nicer than the jackhammer. Did one in the basement of a house , five feet at a time . By hand , with a weighted slide hammer , that sucked ,was a lot of work . Doing them with the jackhammer was the quickest, and to clean the well afterword we hooked the big air compressor up to the well and blew it for 20 minutes. When we took the air hose off , we would get air and then water to blow out . The old timer I worked for would guess on how good the well was , by how high the water blew out . BUT WITH EACH SYSTEM WE HAD SOMEBODY TIGHTEN THE PIPE constantly ALL THE WAY IN. That is the most important part , keep the pipe tight, and use a pipe joint compound.

or a pogo stick...boing boing boing boing boing boing boing boing.

Or a tractor bucket, or a...jeez, little Yankee ingenuity.

In thinking about it, nik, I suppose a guy could set up a portable scaffold with platforms at several heights ............ ?? A jackhammer would sure speed up the process.

..............LF

As usual there is a lot of good information here. The way described using the tractor is how the driller's did it in the 40's. I helped my Dad as a teenager. We first dug down with an auger about 12 ft or so. A neighbor had a 4 inch pipe with lead and handles on it for driving. We had many false starts because of Buick size boulder's. We had soil that was made of Clay and fine sand. This sand would clog the point. At one point we hit a 4 foot vein of blue marl and we went thru that like a dream. At 18 feet or so we hit what the oldtimer's called hard pan. End of story, we never got water. Check that, there was water but we couldn't recover it.

On the other hand I knew a guy that had a well in a few hours.

Route 66

well sure it would. ya just gotta get out your 10' stilts and your set to pound'er down.

I've seen tent rental guys use a jackhammer to drive in their tent stakes. They had a special end to slide onto the stake. I'd be curious to see if it'd work on a well pipe.

All I have is hearsay on this method ....... I have not done it myself, but I have a friend who tells me that he's had great success using it to "drill" wells.

My friend calls it "washing a well", and basically you use a tripod apparatus similar to the one described by But Gills. The tripod holds a pipe, and into that pipe you feed a hose tipped with a special nozzle, and connected to a high-pressure water pump. The hose puts out a lot of pressure, and basically water-blasts itself and the pipe down into the ground. You water-blast the first 10' section of pipe down into the hole, then remove the hose, connect the next 10' section, re-insert the hose, then blast down another 10'.

Might be worth a computer search on the method.

..................LF

Thanks all that replied. I am going to try the wheel rim method, will let you know how it go's

I have done it before. We use 1 1/4 pipe and water is about 18 to 22 feet down. When you pound it down, you must turn the pipe every two licks of your driver. If you don't the well point will unscrew from the pipe. Fill the screen of the well point with Ivory soap. When you hit water, the soap will wash in and rise in the pipe.

it's called a Cathed (sp?)...that rope gets wet and/or frayed or you get one too many wraps- lookout!

used to run drill rigs that used a 12" dia cathed to lift/drop a 140# steel hammer (to drive testing/sampling devices)...rope got sticky from snow- sent that hammer to the top of a 27' mast in a blink and a half.

Now that is just ingenious.

On a neighbors farm, we built a tri-pod out of 2" pipe about 10' tall. We hung a 5" pulley from it. We then took the tire off of the rear rim of his 20hp lawn tractor. After the rear of the tractor was jacked up and anchored so that it could not move, we ran a 1-1/2" rope tied to a weight, ran through the pulley and wrapped once aroud the tractor rim..When the tractor is running and in gear, pull on the rope a little bit to raise the weight, then slack up and the weight will drop. Pull a little, and then drop. Once you get the hang of it, you can sit in a chair with the rope in 0ne hand and a beer in the other. Start out slow until you get the hang of it.

Other than a slide hammer and beer energy, can't think of an easier or cheaper method.