Big machines: Drill part II

In theory it takes five hours for two workers to pressure clean a drill. The reality is that the time spent depends entirely upon what it has been digging into, and how long since it had it's last bath. If the thing has been drilling clay, and hasn't had a bath for a month, it'll take more like ten hours of blasting to get all the shit off it. If it's a coal drill it will all blast away really easily, even though it looks filthy. You're guaranteed to wear it from head to toe. Ears, nostrils, cleavage. Even my arse crack copped a bit last time I did a coal drill.



The ones I clean usually get parked on a washpad for us at night so they can have a bath before getting serviced at 7am the next day. This means all the chunky crap that could potentially fall on somebody, or impede them from reaching something has to blasted to smithereens. Any grease that could be a hazard to the work has to be removed, also by blasting and coating in degreaser. When we've finished climbing all over the mast - that big bit hanging off the end with the number on it - we get the thing raised up so that we can get into all the crap in underneath it. By that time it's usually somewhere near dawn. Then it looks like this:



Then we climb all over the motors and blast the crap off them. We try not to hit the little red wires snaking around the motor that will, if hit with a pressure blast, set off ten grand worth of fire system. We hose out all the crap from the radiators with low pressure hoses. We make the operator's cab (the bit with the windows) look pretty and if I have time I'll even blast out the crap from the boot brush so the operator can keep his boots clean. It's the creature comforts that count, after all.