Left East Leake at 3pm (Monday 19th July), immediately got stuck in a traffic jam cause by an accident on the M1. I arrived home at 4pm was served dinner by my wonderful wife and left for Hull at 6pm. I arrived at 7:45pm checked in and drove onto "The Pride of Hull" sailing to Rotterdam at 9pm. I got a meal and went to sleep.
The tannoy woke me at 6:45am European time (one hour ahead of British Summer Time). Grabbed breakfast and waited to be unloaded. On arrival at the quayside, the rain started, and got worse the further east I drove until it had turned into thunderstorms by the time I reached Hanover. Half way through Holland I saw that the fuel gauge was reading low, but because I speak some German but no Dutch I decided to wait until I was in Germany before filling up. It worked; the engine stopped about 200 yards across the border. The nearest town was Bad Bentheim (please don't laugh, people live there) about 6km away.
I walked there in the rain and purchased two cans of diesel. Part of the way back, a nice lady, who spoke English and had satellite navigation, took pity on me and gave me a lift back to the van. The rest of the journey was uneventful if wet. Found the "Quality Hotel" in Peine (again, please don't laugh) into which Hubertus Kater, the manager of Computalog at Edemissen had booked me. I went straight to sleep.
Next morning I drove to the Computalog base. It and the associated Precision Drilling operations occupy most of what appears to be a World War II fighter base.
There are other companies there including Dynamit Nobel, whose presence might be of future use. I set up the SRS surface panels and computer with the help of Nicole; the female, Canadian openhole logging engineer, in quite a nice Peterbilt split drum logging unit of a similar size to our Internationals. This unit has no 240 or 220V supply it is entirely an American style 110V unit.
The Computalog logging system is Linux based and powered by the 110V supply. There is nothing we can use their computers for on a job.
If we need to run Compact Tools on this unit we will need a 110V to 220 or 240V transformer. We need a transformer for the SRS job as well. I obtained power from a wall socket in the workshop and was able to test the system without difficulty.
I then connected the tools through the Computalog cable (15/32", and about 4500m long) and found that I could not bring the discriminator into lock. Believing that it may be a problem related to cable length I doubled up the cores used. Pairing 1-4, 2-5 and 3-6. This halved the resistance to about 72 Ohms from 145 Ohms. It still did not work.
I then looked at the patch panel. It is strange in that each core has two outputs joined together. When the T-pieces joining these two outputs were removed and just the top set of outputs were used, the system came into lock in the normal position with the plateau centred at 7.8. It may be that pairing the cores was not necessary and that the patch panel was the entire problem, but pairing the cores gives us added security anyway so it is probably worth retaining.
The next job was to test the compressor and the air bottle charging circuit. On site there is 2000m cased test well with a water filled cellar which we could fire air guns in if it were deemed necessary. Over the well there is 100ft tall derrick which you could easily rig up a full lubricator in if required. There is also a decent motorised cable spooling kit on site. The compressor successfully pressurised the bottles but there is still oil leaking into the high-pressure side of the air system. I discussed back up systems with Hubertus and he is exploring the possibilities of using large Nitrogen bottles or finding a backup compressor in Slovenia. This finished my day. One of the Computalog operators by the name of Dirk Neuhaus (speaks good English) is an amateur football referee, he was refereeing that evening so I went along to watch. There was some quite good football played even though it finished 8-0, it was well attended with plenty of beer and bratwurst to hand.
The next day I intended to make our cable head (kabelkopf) onto a whiplash. The computalog rope socket is complete but our cable head does not fit. I am returning with the whiplash and cable head to see if a solution can be found at East Leake.
