LeRoi Motor-Generator Set

LeRoi Motor-Generator Set. E.J. Longyear Coring Drilling Rig. Portable power to keep the lights on and the rigs drilling... , When oil was discovered here in 1922, there was no electricity or roads and Panhandle was the closest town - almost 30 miles away. Fuel, materials and equipment used for drilling and oil production had to be shipped by rail to Amarillo, almost 50 miles distant or to the railhead in Panhandle - then trucked to Borger on dirt roads which were often impassable due to mud. The difficult, equipment-intensive job of prospecting for oil was made worse because electrical power was also many miles away. Until the power grid was extended to reach the new oil fields, generators such as the example shown here, supplied power for lighting and equipment that allowed around-the-clock drilling operations - which made the process far more efficient and profitable for wildcatters and the workers "making hole"., The LeRoi company began as the Milwaukee Machine Tool Company in 1913 and was sold to Waukesha Motor Company in 1958, which discontinued this series in 1974., Captions , Upper Left: This generator was restored and donated by SERCO, INC., a local industrial contractor., E.J. Longyear Coring Drilling Rig , In 1888, Edmund J. Longyear, a mining engineer, drilled the first diamond-core hole in the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota. Early drills were powered mainly by steam engines, which were later replaced by internal combustion engines such as this one, which was developed in the 1920s. From 1912 to 1916, Longyear drilled for copper in Cuba, the company's first international project. In 1914, Longyear began setting up diamond core rigs for Phelps Dodge Corp. to explore for copper in Arizona. During the 1930's, the company drilled core samples for the proposed Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Coring drilling rigs such as this one were used not only to identify geologic formations but also to create holes for extraction of oil or natural gas from those reservoirs. In land-based oil and gas fields, once a well was drilled, the drilling rig would then be moved off the well and a service rig that was purpose-built for completions would be moved to the well site to complete the well. That freed up the drilling rig to drill another hole and streamlined the operation as well as allowing other services to take place. Boart Longyear is still in operation today providing drilling services and equipment. , Captions , Lower Left: Before and after restoration by D.E. Rice Co., a local industrial contractor.