Horizontal Directional Drilling

Horizontal Directional Drilling
Horizontal directional drilling (HDD) was introduced in the late 1980s; the process was not an overnight success. Drill manufacturers spent the initial years explaining to skeptical contractors the potential benefits of using a machine that could install underground infrastructure whether gas lines, water pipes, electrical conduits, or large-diameter pipelines—without leaving much surface evidence of having done so.
Horizontal directional drilling is today a mainstream technique used on sites from residential front yards to cross-county pipelines, and the technology keeps advancing. As HDD becomes a mainstream technique, drill manufacturers—as well as suppliers of down-hole tools, bore-tracking/bore-planning systems, and drilling fluids—have significantly advanced HDD technology, allowing longer, deeper, more accurate bores through the most difficult materials, all the while more safely avoiding the infrastructure already in place.
HDD machines are available today with a wide range of capabilities. At the small end are those having less than 20,000 pounds of thrust/pullback and dimensions compact enough to allow working unobtrusively in residential neighborhoods such as the Ditch Witch JT5 , McLaughlin MCL10H , and Toro DD2024.