Christine Young

uiet Industry Achievers
DiNNY GRiMwOOD
– by Christine Young
The Grimwood name is
unmistakably etched in Western
Australia’s modern drilling
history. Dinny Grimwood has
been part of the industry, on and
off, for 57 years. In that time, he
has headed up three companies
and drilled for most resources all
over the state and beyond.
Dinny was born and bred in mining
country and spent his formative years
in Westonia, then Kalgoorlie. It was the
right time and place for a young bloke
who loved the freedom of working and
travelling in the bush.
“I’ve always liked travelling in the bush and
drilling certainly keeps you on the move.
You see a lot of country and you come
across a lot of characters. It’s just one of
those things you take to. I never got into
the drilling industry to make a fortune. I
just liked the industry, the people, being in
the bush and the mobility, I guess”.
Dinny left school at 14 and started out
as a station hand at Mount Welds Station
in Laverton. At the same time, he worked
with drillers on the current Sunrise Dam
mine site where he had his first experience
looking for water. There were two other
workers on this job with Dinny and the
drilling method involved using a small
jumper bar attached to a wire rope. The
rope went through a pulley on a tripod and
was threaded through a Mulga stick locked
in place by a tapped punch.
An old WABCO water boring rig in the 1950s
“So there we were: two
of us mugs would pull
the Mulga stick down and
release it for a 40 minute
stretch. At the end of it,
one came off and the
other re-string went on for
40 minutes. At 45 feet, we
hit salt water so that was
it. Thank God it was salt or
we ‘d have had to sink a
well on it”. It had already
taken a week. If they’d hit
fresh water, they would
have got the contract to
sink a bore which meant
more intense labour.
Four year later, Dinny was an offsider on a
Wabco No.2 cable tool rig for a few months
and had clearly caught the drilling bug.
From there, he worked with diamond driller
Lionel Honey who later became one of the
first iron ore drillers in the Pilbara.
“I was very fortunate actually because
Lionel usually employed older people in
their thirties and forties. But he was stuck at
one point and I was lucky enough to get a
start with him”.
Dinny also learnt the ropes from a pair of
water borers called Arnold and Alrick who
would contract around the north eastern
Goldfields for six months of the year and
then return to Esperance for the other six
months. “Their holes were as straight as a
gun barrel and they were super efficient at
their job. They were great guys and gave
me a lot of clues on how it all worked. They
were some of the real people in the industry
at that time doing water bores”.
RAB rig working in the Pilbara
In 1966, Dinny purchased an old cable tool
rig with his friend Leo Bonnie and they
carried out numerous repairs to prepare
it for work. Despite their best efforts, the
trailer-mounted rig didn’t make it to their
first job. The pin in the draw bar broke,
causing the rig to roll over, shedding bits
and pieces everywhere.
“At this point, we heard Old Mac from
Mount Welds Station coming. Leo
suggested selling the rig to him. Old Mac
pulled up: ‘You’ve got a bit of trouble
boys?’ And Leo said ‘Yeah’. Mac, of course,
said ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘We’ll sell
you the rig mate’, Leo replied. Old Mac
agreed. ‘Yeah, put it back together and train
one of my blokes and I’ll buy it off you’. So
we got out of that. We got our money back
but nothing for labour”.
This “massive comedy of errors” did not
deter the budding driller. In 1968, after
managing sheep stations with young wife
Maureen, Dinny put the wheels in motion
once more. “And then, believe it or not,
we went from a sheep station to a service
station in Coolgardie. Of course, that’s
when the nickel boom really hit its straps
and Kambalda was being developed. So I
got the wanderlust again and that’s when
it came time to give it another go on my
own account”. Not without challenges. The
small Landrover mounted rig he bought
was not the most capable of machines.
Through most of the 70s, Dinny
drilled at Forrestania using a Mole
Pioneer auger flight rig. Grimwood
Drilling was well on its way but
Dinny thought better results were
possible with small rigs.
10 AUSTRALASIAN DRILLING NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2009 www.adia.com.au

RAB rig bogged at Forrestania during a wet winter in the 1970s
“Geologists wanted to have a
deeper look, wanted angle holes
and all that, all the things that
augers didn’t lend themselves to”.
“It was time to put a compressor
on the rig and convert to the
system that the larger air rigs
were using, thereby starting the
RAB system which has been very
successful. After having a win
with the RAB in the early 80s, I
purchased a few more rigs (all
RAB) which worked well”.
Dinny’s flair for innovation means
he’s sometimes called a’pioneer’.
But he says, “I don’t know about
that. I just did what needed to
be done. The Schramm seemed
to be the popular rig of the day.
They were drilling open hole of
course with a bigger rig. All I did
was basically scale that down to
bring it down to a smaller fastermoving
rig which of course didn’t
drill to anything like the depth of
those heavier ones. It was just a
matter of thinking it through”.
The key to building a rig suitable for one’s
needs is for drillers to have a lot more
input because, even though “there’s some
very good engineers around to put a rig
together, I think in a lot of cases, the
drillers themselves don’t have enough
input”, says Dinny.
Grimwood Drilling was sold in 1987 and
bought with Davies Drilling to become
Grimwood Davies on the ASX. Dinny ran
www.adia.com.au
the company for a short while after the
change of ownership then set up the
appropriately named Challenge Drilling
with son Peter and Jamie Seed. Peter has
since moved on to form his own company,
Direct Push Probing, in Perth. Dinny
finished up on the rigs 20 years ago, and up
until five or six years ago, was involved in
the day-to-day running of Challenge where
he still retains an interest. Many of the
company’s current clients have been with
them since the 1980s.
Laverton, 1983
Challenge Drilling’s current RC rigs are the
brainchild of Dinny, Jamie and engineer
Keith Littlely. “Jamie and I had a lot of
input into those [rigs] to come up with
what we wanted, and having Keith’s input
as well, we’ve come up with a rig that fits
in with the class we want. I don’t think
there would be many better”.
By the same token, Dinny chuckles at
the thought of working on a modern
rig. “Look, I’m frightened to touch the
levers because it might turn into a snake
and bite me”. On a serious note, bigger
compressors and hands-free rod handling
systems have had an enormous impact
on rig performance and drilling results,
he says. “The compressor I started with
was 250cfm/100psi whereas now our
RAB rigs have got 750cfm/400psi”. He
also says constantly changing technology,
better roads and transport have improved
“out of sight. There are so many ways
it’s improved, the past and present are
practically chalk and cheese”.
Dinny believes there are still many areas the
industry could improve on. “For a start, I think
safety is a big priority which probably comes
back a little bit to the calibre of people a
company employs. We need people who are
willing to keep their noses clean and do their
job right. The other one is training. If we get
young folk into the industry who want to
make a career out of it and hang in there,
they will do quite nicely”.
As an elder statesman in the drilling
industry, Dinny has well and truly earned
his leisure time and is now semi-retired.
Recently, he has enjoyed travelling around
Australia with Maureen and they are
both active in supporting many causes
including raising money for the Peel Health
Foundation in Mandurah, the Leukaemia
Foundation and donating to the Victorian
bushfire appeal.
Challenge Drilling staff, late 1990s.
AUSTRALASIAN DRILLING NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2009 11