Fred Melsheimer founded Melfred Welding & Manufacturing in 1946 as a venture to make tools for the installation of underground utilities without the use of trenches, excavators or shovels — a precursor to today’s HDD. His son, Richard ‘Dick’ Melsheimer joined him, pushing the industry forward and becoming an HDD industry icon.
Fred developed a method for horizontally drilling a hole using a pneumatic motor to install gas mains. It was one of the first appliances to use drilling techniques with little ground disruption for the purpose of installing utilities — a practice that later became known as directional drilling in 1971.
Fred designed the method as well as the bits, reamers and swivels to work with a pneumatic bore motor to power the tools. This method also used drill fluid to aid in the drilling and reaming process, much like it is in today’s HDD processes.
Dick Melsheimer went on to start his own company in the early 1980s called Borzall Equipment, which was distinct from his father’s entity. When Fred Melsheimer passed away in the mid-1980s, the two companies merged to form today’s Melfred Borzall.
In 2016, he handed the reins over to his sons Eric and Peter Melsheimer, who serve as the president and vice president respectively. Dick may have resigned his position as president, but he now heads research and development.
Two generations after Fred started the company, the Melsheimers are still immersed in HDD. Since the 1990s, the specialised tooling maker has established itself as a niche manufacturer of directional heads, backreamers, bits, blades and an assortment of tooling accessories for drillers. Fred’s grandsons each bring their own unique abilities to grow and expand the business.
One of the most exciting opportunities presented to the company was to manufacture one of the first HDD rigs available to contractors, called the Sure Shot. Eric and Dick made a trip to New Zealand to train a company that purchased the Sure Shot.
During the training, with Dick on the controls and Eric up to his waist in the river locating the bit, two crossings under the Waikane River were made to install conduit for fibre lines connecting the cities of Auckland and Wellington.
The crossing was 75 km north of Wellington and 2 km from the coast. The river was around 20 m wide and 2 m deep at the crossing point, which made this first-time effort a challenge. Using Melfred Borzall’s Sure Shot directional drilling system, the duo achieved a maximum depth of 7 m. After eight hours’ operation and 85 m of boring, the drill head successfully surfaced the opposite side of the river.
It was an exciting moment for HDD and the company, since this was the first successful directionally drilled river crossing in New Zealand.
Since then, the company has not ceased in its effort to innovate on a global scale. Melfred Borzall’s distribution network has expanded from the U.S. to Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and many more countries. In fact, even amidst the aftermath of a global pandemic, Melfred Borzall is expanding and growing at an unprecedented rate in its 75 years of business.
“Expanding our global distribution is a big goal of ours,” says Eric Melsheimer. With demand and support for more infrastructure improvements and communication work, Melfred Borzall is choosing its partners carefully to include in the ‘Red Network’, as they call their family of authorised distributors.
“Supporting our distributors is something that we take very seriously and is not simply a stamp of approval to sell red tooling,” says Josh Parker, Melfred Borzall’s marketing director. The company provides specialised training to all its distributors, so they are not simply tool suppliers, but problem solvers and educators for HDD contractors.
“We support our distributors with live and virtual trainings, sales materials, leads, and integrate them with our online portal to keep them in the loop with new product updates, HDD market trends and specials. As we look at global expansion, we are truly looking for companies that embody the same specialisation and focus that we have tried to maintain over the past seven decades. We seek to make ourselves and network specialised HDD problem solvers, rather than just tool suppliers.”
Melfred Borzall is always on the lookout for ways to help improve HDD tooling. Australasian soil is vastly different from one region to the next, and the company’s partnerships with key tooling distributors locally helps their insights into what drillers need at a local level.
The company has prided itself on acquiring local field knowledge for three-quarters of a century. With operations expanding, the industry should expect to see more red tooling on HDD jobsites.
For more information visit the Melfred Borzall website.
This article appeared in the ASTT 30th Anniversary Edition.