Congratulations to John in Brandon, Mississippi for a successful well!
John’s well is 29 feet, six inches deep. He has a standing water level of 14 feet. Actually this is John’s second well. He dropped his pipe wrench down the first one after drilling down to 19 feet. Many of us are familiar with that problem!
As you can see below, John has attached a pitcher pump to his well. It certainly looks like it is producing great! He reports 3 GPM with his hand pump and says it would pump a lot more. He is using a 1.25 inch wellscreen point that is 36 inches long.
John said he was into some talcum powder consistency grey sand, then some pearl white sand at 20 feet. Then he went through some river gray sand. Near the 25 foot level drilling became extremely easy and he was able to go two or three feet in only five minutes. This (when you are drilling below the standing water level) is indicitative of water bearing sand so he quit and set his well screen.
I asked John for some specifics when I was preparing this page. He wrote:
A buddy and I have been studying your site for several months.We teamed up and I decided to try first, we went with the “Drive a well point down system first”
I ordered all the stuff well point, pump, drive couplings, 1.25″ galvanized pipe.
We attached the well point to the first 6’ section of pipe and we drove it about 15 inches in the ground in about 45 minutes and 300 strikes with a modified tee post driver (heavy) .
We came to the conclusion that “This won’t work in Mississippi soil”, at least not in my section of the State.
Within 30 minutes of basically giving up on the idea a friend from work called to see how I was doing. I explained where I was on the project, he referred me to a mutual friend of ours that had followed your site and hit water at 14ft about 5 miles from my house.As I said we had studied your site for months, but went with what we thought would be quicker (driving down a well point).
We drove to the man’s house I had been referred to and checked out his well.
He let us borrow the water head for the hoses to hook to, some 2″ pipe, some 3″ pipe, and how to make the drill bit as per your site in PVC.We started again the next weekend, we went 10ft in about 4 hours.
Much, much better than driving down a well point.
I being a Machine Shop teacher decided to make that drill bit out of carbide inserts like we use to machine metal in the shop. Started with it the next day and went to 19ft, I had the bright idea of hooking a pipe wrench to hold the drill rig up about 6ft so I could take a lunch break, and I dropped the pipe wrench down the hole, it went past the bit to the bottom.
It was covered in sediment I was sure, and I quit for the day.
Next morning my buddy came back over and we started a new well instead of working on getting the pipe wrench out.Finished mine that day at 28ft.Did my buddy’s the next weekend at his house to a depth of 43ft, we both have good producing wells, and the man that let us borrow the original equipment has a good one too, we all are in 6 miles of each other.John
[As information, driven points work great in sandy soil. They are hard, sometimes impossible, to drive in clay.]
John made his own drill bits in a unique way. They are posted on the metal and mud pump drill bits pages. They also appear below.
Mean looking drill bit, huh?
Many thanks to John in Brandon, Mississippi for his report on his well and his friend’s!