Prime Downhole Manufacturing

The initial scope of this position was to designe new breakout and bucking units and reverse engineer the existing product line of break-out and bucking units that the company currently had. Breakout and bucking units used for torquing connections on large tubulars, particularly in the oil and gas industry.

The fist step was to create 3D CAD models and associated 2D manufacturing drawings using SOLIDWORKS. These were done in accordance to company standards that I established in accordance to ASME standards. Specifically ASME Y14.100-2017 for Engineering Drawings and ASME Y14.5-2018 for Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing.

Approximately 50% of the CAD models and 2D manufacturing drawings came from old drawings that the company had. However a lot of them were old versions (several different versions), drawings with inconsistencies, hand sketches, or a combination of all three. The other 50% of the CAD models and 2D manufacturing drawings had to be created from the reverse engineering of components, since there was no documentation of these parts. The establishment of company standards and subsequent creation of drawings to those standards allowed for a more streamlined process of documentation and manufacturing. There was no longer a need to rely on “institutional knowledge” held by the technicians and fabricators.

Once all individual components were created, it was necessary to create assembly drawings, assoicated bill of material (BOM), and necessary assembly and/or work instructions. Once created, it was my responsibility to maintain item and BOM information within the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system of choice and to maintain the drawing database within the product data management (PDM) system via an engineering change notice (ECN) process. Maintenance is crucial to ensure that there is documentation as to why something was added, removed, or changed so that the same mistakes are not repeated. This leads to a more efficient manufacturing process.

The second step was to create documentation for everything that was not a manufactured part. All current breakout and bucking units are hydraulically operated. This means that it is for each build there needs to be a list of hoses that go to the machine and a hydraulic schematic to go along with each unit. There also needed to be a manual containing all the necessary information for the customer to be able to maintain their machine and to be able to order spare parts.

Due to industry requirements, breakout and bucking units need to be calibrated on a yearly basis. This was part of Prime’s business offering and as such there needed to be an established procedure, rather than having to rely solely on the technicians past experience. This required me to create a calibration procedure that walked a technician through the calibration process and that also took into account the many different types of breakout and bucking units and logging systems in the industry.

With all of the previous lessons learned, it was then necessary to establish and implement company-wide design, manufacturing, and engineering documentation and control standards and protocols that reflected industry best practices and conformed, specifically, to the most recent versions of API Q1 9th Edition and ISO 9001:2015 standards.

Throughout all of this, there were still orders being placed for new units. It was my responsibility to manage each new build to ensure timely delivery, deal with any errors that came up, and take feedback for continuous improvement to incorporate into all into the previously established standards. The culmination of all of this was halved turn-around times from 6-9 months to 3-4 months. This in turn has resulted in increased profit margins from ~10% to ~50%.

Once the core company product offering was well established, I was then tasked with leading a team to develop a new design for use on bent tubulars with retrofit options for existing breakout and bucking units. This design is currently in the prototyping stage with a patent pending.

There are many more projects coming with updates following those.

*DISCLAIMER: Some of the content (images, trademarks, graphics, etc.) on this page is the property of Prime Downhole Manufacturing and is used with their approval.