The Vibracore Drill: Overview and Instruction Manual Author:KristynSmith(2015)

Safety Equipment In order to efficiently run the drill, you will need the following:

Steel toed boots Field vest or safety vest Safety glasses (anti shatter; tinted safety glasses are extremely useful) Leather palmed work gloves (always have a backup pair) Hard hats (not very necessary, but good to have when you are doing work above

your head)

The drill consists of heavy steel pieces that have a tendency to get thrown around. Steel toe boots are highly recommended for this reason.

The drill heats up as it runs, and can get to over 200 °C – you can avoid burning yourself if you get good work gloves. Any hardware store has decent work gloves with double leather palms for ~$4-10. Do NOT get expensive gloves: due to the rough nature of the drilling and your inevitable proximity to copious amounts of wet sediments, the gloves will be trashed within about a week of drilling days. Buying extra gloves is a great idea.

Safety glasses: the best deal is at KMS Tools, ~$3 per pair. There is one in Coquitlam next to the IKEA.

The Vibracore Drill: Components The drill is a very simple system, as it is designed to be portable and manually operated. Be warned: it is a simple but finicky system. There are many small things that must be done to make your life much easier in the future.

The main components that make up the drill are the drill bit, the core catching basket, the drill rods, the drill tubes (referred to as tubes or plastic tubes), the O-rings, the drill head, the drive shaft, and the motor. Pictures of each can be seen below.

NOTE: the drill rods and bits tend to rust very easily. Don’t worry about this; you cannot prevent it, but it comes off easily with a wire brush and a rag.

Drill bits and core catching baskets. The regular sized bit and basket are on the left, and the oversized bit and basket are on the right.

The catching basket for the regular bit has a thinner metal band around the base than the oversized bit (see picture to the left).

Drill rods. Both the male and female ends must be kept clean using a wire brush and file. The threads on the rods will make or break your drilling days, so treat them with extreme care. You can file down any small irregularities, but anything large has to be taken back to the manufacturer for maintenance.

Drill tubes/ plastic tubes/ tubes. These are what your core will be collected in as you drill. These can be purchased from the manufacturer.

Drill head. This consists of the drive shaft adaptor end (has a removable cap to keep it clean),

the cooling fins (both sides),

the handles,

the hoisting cap, and

the rod adaptor.

The ‘female’ end of the drive shaft. It has a moveable threaded locking cap that locks it onto the drill head during drilling. It is greased and must be kept dirt free at all times.

The motor connects to the end of the drive shaft ‘male’ end – the pin in the connector must be pulled up so the drive shaft is secured properly. You will want some movement of the drive shaft within the connector, so check to see that it can slightly rotate. If not, lift the pin and pull it out slightly. It will tend to lock back into place so the rotation is not a big concern, just helps the drive shaft’s efficiency.

The ‘male’ end of the drive shaft. It fits into the adaptor on the motor. It is greased and must be dirt free at all times. This is where you will open up the drive shaft to service it with grease. More on this in the Flex Drive Shaft Maintenance section.

The hoisting cap. This is used mainly for retrieving the full drill rods from the ground, but is also fitted with an air valve for core removal in the lab. It is used mostly with the hoisting assembly, which will be covered later.

The motor. This is one of the most important pieces of the system, since your drill won’t function properly if you don’t have enough power to vibrate the drill head.

The drill needs ~1300 rpm to function; however, past experience has shown that you will want minimum ~1600 rpm.

Collecting core

The core you drill will collect inside the plastic tubes. Since the diameter of the plastic tubes is less than that of the drill rods, a tube must be cut so it slips around the collection tube.

You will end up with a tube (where the core will sit) and a liner (a sliced plastic tube) that sit inside the drill rod (see diagram below).

You must grease the tube, the liner, and the inside of the drill rod to make core retrieval as simple as possible. Recommended lubricants are margarine and canola oil; however, if you are concerned about carbon/ plant material contamination, you should use something like chainsaw grease (see note below). Margarine and canola oil seem to work the best – liberal amounts are put on all three of these components. Rubber gloves are recommended. If you do use something like chainsaw grease, be mindful of spills and containing the grease in the field.

VERYIMPORTANTNOTE: if you use an inorganic compound (ie. Chainsaw grease), they are typically hydrophobic and the tubes will SEIZE UP inside the rods when exposed to water. Your sediments will be saturated (proximity to water table) so try to use the margarine/ canola oil mix as much as possible to save yourself the stress of stuck core.

When you hoist the drill rods containing sediments out of the ground, you will want to get them horizontal as soon as possible in case they are saturated and are sloshing around.

Leaving the hoisting cap on until you get the rod horizontal causes enough suction to keep most sediments in the tube until you get caps on the tube.

Pulling the core tube out of the drill rod can be temperamental – this is why you want to grease everything up as much as possible. An assortment of pliers are needed to pull the core tubes out of the rods. Plastic tube caps are placed on the ends of the tubes, and can be taped on if needed.

NOTE: ALWAYS REMEMBER AND MAKE NOTE OF ‘UP’ DIRECTION (and write it on your collected core). A good rule of thumb: the male end of the drill rod is the down / deeper end with respect to the female end, which is up / shallower.

My core is stuck in the rod. Now what? Unfortunately, sometimes your tube filled with glorious core will get stuck in the drill rod. This is an occasional occurrence, and is usually due to using chainsaw grease/ inorganic lube instead of margarine and canola oil.

When this happens, and you cannot get the tubes out of the rod using pliers, you will have to take it back to the lab and use different methods of extraction.

Methods of extraction:

C-clamping the rod down to a table and pulling with the pliers. Maybe you’ll get lucky!

C-clamping the rod down, putting on the hoisting cap, and blowing air through the rod using the hose and air compressor in the hood fan in the lab. If you use this method, the core will either slowly slide out (and can be caught in a new tube), or will build up pressure and shoot out at slightly dangerous speeds (and you will lose the core). Be very cautious when doing this method. Cannonballs of sediment hurt when they hit one’s torso.

Worst case scenario: it is REALLY stuck, and you’ve used up all your swear words on this thing. You are probably going to lose the core, so get it out of there somehow and hopefully the tube and liner can be pulled out now. Otherwise, you have to use a pressure washer, pry bar, and plenty of muscle to get those things out. There is no tried and true way, you just have to do what you can. Good luck, and always use more canola oil to hopefully prevent this.

IN THE FIELD: A step by step list

Make sure you have: spare drill rods, enough tubes and liners, shop towels, all of the drilling gear and tools, safety gear, etc.

Grease the tubes, liners, and drill rods with margarine and canola oil

Check the threads on the drill rods for dirt/rust/scrapes or irregularities.

Thread a rod onto the drill head and tighten it with the wrenches. Insert a greased tube covered with a greased liner into the greased drill rod, and trim it to size flush against the drill rod end (see diagram below)

Check the drill bit for dirt/rust, insert the core catching basket, and attach it to the

male drill rod end with the wrenches.

Dig a small hole to get through small roots/grass cover at the drill spot.

MEASURE

Attach the drive shaft to the motor and to the drill head.

Drilling the first rod: the drill head must be held and manipulated so that the rod goes in straight. The drill head should be held until the rod is far enough in the ground that it holds itself up.

Start the motor and drill down until the drill head is ~1 ft above the ground surface. You need this length to break the pipe connection and add a new rod.

MEASURE

Remove the drill head from the rod in the ground.

Place an O ring in the female end of the rod in the ground.

Attach a clean drill rod to the drill head. Insert the liner and tube, and trim to size.

Carefully lift the drill head with the freshly prepped drill rod to attach to the rod in the ground. This is referred to as ‘adding a rod’, and can cause the most troubles with damages to the threads. Always guide the rods together by hand so they don’t crush together and get wrecked. Tighten the connection with wrenches and cheater bars.

Attach the drive shaft to the drill head and tighten. Drill down until about 1 ft from the ground surface.

Repeat until you have one or any combination of the following: - the depth of core you want - no more drill rods - a scary noise from the drill head or any other part of the system

When to use a Side Ejector and Oversized Bit

Let’s say you drill down almost 3 rods, and get about 2.75 rods of core recovered. You have a hole that is 2.75 rods deep, but want to collect 3 more rods of core so you can have 6 core segments total. How can you do it without losing core, or collecting sloughed material as core?

You will prep 3 rods with liners, just like normal. You will use the oversized bit, so that when tripping into the hole the rods won’t sink too fast, and so that when you collect core, it will have space to expand within the collection tube. The smaller drill bit lets you collect the new core without worrying if it will expand too much and push viable core out of the side ejector.

Tripping out of the drill hole

Tripping the rods and core out of the drill hole requires setting up the hoist system. Be forewarned, the deeper you go, the more difficult it will be to hoist everything out.

The hoist’s pulling power can be doubled by adding a pulley block (see diagram below for setup of this system).

How to use the winch The winch has two gears, a lock, and an ‘open’ position where it is neither in gear or locked. The following pictures show the different positions and gears of the winch.

The winch parts:

The shifter

The brake

The lock

The ‘fast and loose’ gear

The ‘low and slow’ gear

The cable

This shows the winch between gears, where it is loose enough to pull by hand to feed the cable out. Notice the gears on the handle rod are between the two main gears (red arrow).

This is the winch ‘out’ of gear.

To change gears, you push down on the gear shifter and slide the handle rod into the gear you want.

This picture shows the winch in ‘fast and loose’ gear (winches faster but is harder to rotate the handle).

This picture shows the winch in ‘low and slow’ gear (winches slower but is easier to rotate). Most of your winching will be done in this gear.

Important things to remember

If something sounds wrong, it probably is wrong. Use your judgement and always listen to the motor, drive shaft, and drill head when they are running.

This is the lock mechanism on the winch. In this picture, it is in the locked position – this means that you can winch in one direction and it will lock if it tries to go in the opposite direction. When you are winching, you need to have the lock in place for safety reasons. It hurts when you get smacked in the face with the winch handle.

This is the lock in its open position. You will manually put the lock into this open position so you can feed the winch cable out by hand.

Always tighten the connections between rods as much as physically possible. If a connection between rods is loose, and is 3 rods down in the ground, you have to hoist it all out to fix it. Loose connections make a distinct noise, and will damage the system if left unfixed.

O rings go between rods that are being connected and have tubes and liners inside them. The O rings prevent the tubes and liners from compacting into each other in the rods when they fill with core. If a ring gets bent out of shape, just gently bend it back with your hand or pliers.

OVERHEATINGTHEDRILLHEAD:

The drill head heats up to crazy temperatures. This is hard on the moving parts in the drill, and typically means that you have hit a difficult sediment layer/root/anything in the subsurface that would cause grief.

If the drill head starts to heat up so much that you can see heat waves coming off of it, turn off the drill and let it cool for atleast 5 minutes before drilling again.

The drill head will become hot from the friction on the drive shaft and the vibrational energy during drilling. It has oil inside the cooling fins to help lubricate the moving pieces during drilling, but the oil breaks down if the system overheats. If the foam handles look like they are melting, and the drill head is giving off crazy heat waves, you may have to perform an oil change on the head WHEN IT IS COMPLETELY COOLED DOWN. Do not do any maintenance on any part of the equipment unless it has completely cooled down.

Drill Head Maintenance

When the drill head is used for 2+ consecutive days of drilling, the oil inside the bearings and cooling fins will break down from running at such high temperatures. You can check the state of the oil in the lab by opening up the cooling fin where the drive shaft attaches with the hexagonal wrench.

After you loosen the cooling fin and unscrew it, you will pull it out and see the bearings of the drill and the rest of the guts of the drill. You can drain the oil out by tipping the drill head out into a small bucket or other receptacle.

If the oil is brownish/black/burnt looking, change it. It should look clear and golden, like the oil in a car. After the old oil drains out, pour a refill container’s worth of new oil into the

drill head, trying to get as much coverage as possible, and replace the cooling fin the way it came out.

NEW OIL: you have two options: getting oil from the manufacturer, or using racing motorcycle fully synthetic oil. They are essentially the same, but the motorcycle oil is cheaper.

Flexible Drive Shaft Maintenance

When the flexi-drive shaft makes a rattling noise, like a rattle snake noise, it typically indicates that it needs to be serviced with high temperature grease. A second indicator that it needs to be serviced is the state of the orange O-ring that is on the drill head where the flexi-shaft connects to it. This can be done in the lab by unthreading the motor-end of the drive shaft from the cable portion and pulling it out. You can then grease it by hand (don’t over grease the cable, just coat it; WEAR GLOVES) and push it back into the cable as it is greased. You want to try to keep it as clean as possible, because any dirt will only cause the drive shaft grief.

Something Broke. Now what?

Inevitably, a part will break. When this happens, take it to _________ just down Burnaby Mountain for repairs. Try to maintain the equipment daily during drilling to prevent damage to the drill parts, but keep in mind that sometimes stuff happens and things break.