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Posted
5 hours ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

you know we live in dumb times when the author thought it necessary to add "oil derrick" to make sure the intended audience would understand. 

Funny thing, though.  Although most of us of a certain age are used to seeing oil derricks, they mostly fell out of use after WWII.  

Unless you want to count the mast of a driling rig as a derrick.

Kind of wild when you think about erecting several tons and a couple hundred feet of steel to drill a well and just leaving it there when you're done.

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Posted
2 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Funny thing, though.  Although most of us of a certain age are used to seeing oil derricks, they mostly fell out of use after WWII.  

Unless you want to count the mast of a driling rig as a derrick.

Kind of wild when you think about erecting several tons and a couple hundred feet of steel to drill a well and just leaving it there when you're done.

Those are standard derricks and were often made of wood. I worked the A-frame derricks in the late 1970s which moved from site to site. They were big and made of iron.

Posted
7 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

Those are standard derricks and were often made of wood. I worked the A-frame derricks in the late 1970s which moved from site to site. They were big and made of iron.

The earliest were made of wood, yes.  But from about the 1920s to the war, they were mostly made of steel.

My parents grew up in South Arkansas, at the northern end of the Smackover Sands formation, where in the last six months of 1922, 1000 wells were drilled.  They built derricks of whatever came to hand.  I think the LA area oilfields were actually worse.

But those steel ones in Union and Ouachita Counties in Arkansas sat there until the 70s and 80s.  I climbed the one built in my Dad's back yard in the 20s in the 70s some time, about 40 years after my Dad did the same.  That was probably inadvisable.

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Posted
46 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

The earliest were made of wood, yes.  But from about the 1920s to the war, they were mostly made of steel.

My parents grew up in South Arkansas, at the northern end of the Smackover Sands formation, where in the last six months of 1922, 1000 wells were drilled.  They built derricks of whatever came to hand.  I think the LA area oilfields were actually worse.

But those steel ones in Union and Ouachita Counties in Arkansas sat there until the 70s and 80s.  I climbed the one built in my Dad's back yard in the 20s in the 70s some time, about 40 years after my Dad did the same.  That was probably inadvisable.

On the way to Lake Houston where we had a miserable houseboat (that I loved) back in the 60s, we'd pass a block of land with wooden derricks all crowded together. I suppose they were built before regulations were passed to spread them out. I believe crowding them lessens the overall yield. Glad I got a look at that. I'm sure they're long torn down now.



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