10 years ago, Daniel Leitch found himself working all week long as a driller operating horizontal directional drilling (HDD) machinery and spending his weekends building custom solutions for the industry.
Mr Leitch says once HDD Solutions was born, it developed alongside both the industry and his own career. Once he got into the civil engineering side and started working in HDD, Mr Leitch says his understanding of the industry grew – and so did his business prospects.
“Through that, as I grew in that industry, I saw different things and slowly started to fix things and do things differently. Then I started building my own, custom stuff as the need arose,” he says.
“Word got out and then other people started asking for tooling, so I was working every day of the week as a driller and every weekend building things as well. It just got to a point where I was making so much tooling for other people that I could do it full time.”
A 760 mm bi-directional fly cutter with the HDD Creations signature logo.
Now, Mr Leitch is not only building customised solutions for the industry full time with HDD Creations, but also fixing, repairing and rebuilding other machinery and offering expertise and advice to contractors all across Australia.
Insider knowledge
Mr Leitch now has an intricate knowledge of products, machinery and solutions. He says that since the team has used specific products – like the mud and drilling fluids from Mudex that HDD Creations now sells – they are able to give real world advice to their customers.
This knowledge also extends to tooling and machinery; having used it personally, Mr Leitch says he has a “pretty good idea of what’s going to work in different situations”.
“Part of my little niche is having a background in this industry; you understand why things are the way they are. A lot of the customers I get actually come to me when they’re quoting jobs and ask how they should do them,” says Mr Leitch.
“I think that’s one of the things that keeps bringing people back is the fact that they can come to me if they don’t actually know how to do something or they’re not sure about it, and I can not only build something for them but also give them a lot of support and advise them how best to use it – because I want my products to work.
“I could give them the best reamer in the world – if they don’t know how to use it properly, it still won’t work.”
Mr Leitch says there is a lot of knowledge and information that goes into the HDD industry, and that insider knowledge is one of the things he can provide that other tooling manufacturers may not. Mr Leitch says he never gives out a product and says, ‘here it is, you work it out’, instead always making sure the customer is using the right tool for the right job.
“Sometimes a customer will ring me wanting a certain tool, but it’s actually the wrong style for the application they’re wanting to use it in. A lot of the time we can then work through what they are planning to do, and I can advise them of a better way of doing it,” he says.
On a recent, unique job in New South Wales, HDD Creations was able to create a unique solution to match.
“The last job we did was a bit of an off the cuff job, it wasn’t your typical project,” he says.
“They had an existing pipe in the ground that was full of slurry and packed off, so it was no longer any good and the client wanted to go back through the same pipe, clean that out where they could since it had collapsed, and then open it up, destroy the old pipe, remove the old pipe, and then cut a new hole to put a bigger pipe in the existing hole of the original pipe.
“It was a large job with a lot of customised cutters and back reamers, and we had to work different things out to make it work for the client – but it turned out quite well.”
Popular products
Mr Leitch says he often finds himself making clay reamers of different kinds and cutters as per the last project, as well as a device he has dubbed a ‘mandrel’.
“It’s a small little device used to pull back smaller pipe that’s really changed the way many people do things,” he says.
“You’re able to put pipe in the ground without using as much mud and time, so it’s costing the contractor less money at the end of the day. In some situations, it’s even halving the cost of what contractors are doing, so they’ve been very popular.”
Mr Leitch says that other reamers have different styles and sizes, so HDD Creations does not have stock of every size and every style available constantly; however, the ‘mandrel reamer’ comes in set sizes – since it is targeted towards smaller pipes – so it is made constantly and kept on hand due to its popularity.
“We’ll fix anything”
Along with building custom HDD solutions, Mr Leitch says almost half of what the business keeps busy with is rebuilding existing cutters and machinery, saying it is “always a constant job” in replacing consumable items when pieces are worn down or worn out.
“Once it goes out and gets used, quite often it comes back and we’ll rebuild it where necessary,” says Mr Leitch.
“But it doesn’t have to be tooling. We’ll fix anything that comes back.”
Mr Leitch provides a full service by always offering advice, but being willing to head out onto project sites to assist with a client’s needs where necessary.
This article was featured in the December 2020 edition of Trenchless Australasia. To view the magazine on your PC, Mac, tablet or mobile device, click here.
For more information visit the HDD Creations website.
If you have news you would like featured in Trenchless Australasia contact Assistant Editor Sophie Venz at svenz@gs-press.com.au