Treat HDD Drill Rod Like a Purchasing Strategy, Not a Line Item

Let me tell you something I learned way too late.

When I first got into this hdd game, I’d sit down with customers and walk them through their quote. Drill rod, it was just a line item. You know, like ‘yeah we need x feet of 2-3/8″ rod, next. Done. Price per foot. Go to the boring heads or the tracking stuff.

And guess what? So did most of my customers. They’d look around, buy the cheapest rod that didn’t look like total junk, call it good.

Then one day I was on a job site. Muddy boots, yelling over the rig noise, watching a crew replace their third broken rod of the morning. The foreman was going crazy. The owner was watching his profit per foot just disappear. And I realised, nobody ever sat down and said, ‘hey, what’s this rod actually costing us over a season?

Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you start buying drill rod: the purchase price is almost a fiction. It’s like a cheap mattress.” Sure, you saved $200 up front but you are going to wake up with a backache for five years. You save a few bucks a foot, then spend the next six months dealing with twisted connections, washouts, premature fatigue, and that one miserable Tuesday when a snapped rod leaves 300 feet of string in a bore under a highway.

That’s not on a line item. That’s an operational headache in a “deal” disguise.

So now when I talk to customers – whether you’ve been buying from us for years or you’re just kicking tyres – I always tell them the same thing: treat your rod purchase like a strategy, not a checklist.

It means you ask yourself: what kind of ground do you drill mostly? Sandy, rocky, clay that clutches like a fist? What depth are your usual bores? How many feet do you put on a rod before it starts to feel “soft”? What is your crew’s downtime tolerance? Are they running three rigs or just one?

Because the sort of rod that makes sense for a guy drilling 800-foot bores in soft Midwest dirt is completely different from the rod a municipal crew needs for 200-foot rock shots under a parking lot.

I had a customer last year, great guy, 4 rigs, who was religiously buying the cheapest imported rod he could find. He was no fool. He only cared about that first PO. We sat down and did the math on the last six months: broken rods, reaming time lost to bad threads, a couple of washed out connections that turned into fishing jobs. He nearly choked on his coffee. He was not economising. He was bleeding it out.

We put him on a mid-tier rod, not even our top-end stuff, and just changed the way he rotated his string. No more running the same stick until it screamed for mercy. Simple things. Six months later the cost of each completed bore was down by about 18%. And he quit hollering at his drillers. That alone is worth something isn’t it?

A cheap rod is fine for some jobs. Short pulls, soft ground, low risk. But call that a conscious decision, not a default. Know why you’re buying what you buy. Imagine the entire life of that rod, from the first spin to the day you finally retire it to fencepost duty.

And for the love of God, stop treating your drill rod like it’s just another box on the quote. It’s what links each dollar you earn to the ground you stand on. Break that and none of the rest counts, not your fancy locator, not your new rig, not your perfect mud mix.

So next time you’re putting together a purchase, take a seat. Let’s discuss what you’re really drilling, what’s been breaking your heart, and what a smart string looks like to you. No worries. Just stories and maybe a little math.

Because, really? I’d rather you call me with questions, than call me to fish a broken rod out of a bore at 10 o’clock at night.

Keep boring smart

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