There’s a moment before every job where I stop and take in the quiet hum of the gunshop. It’s not glamorous—metal benches, primacord, detonators neatly laid out, the faint smell of oil and metal—but it’s sacred. Because what we do in the gunshop determines how the wireline tools will perform downhole. We were getting ready …
It was one of those quiet early mornings on location. The kind where you can hear the cable creak on the drum and the hum of the wireline truck as you run pre-job checks. I was prepping for a multi-zone perforation well, reviewing the string and wiring each perforating gun with the care these jobs …
We were deep into a long week of back-to-back cased hole logging jobs. The kind of week where the wireline truck barely gets a break, and the crew runs on muscle memory and good habits. The last well on the list was a high-temp perforation well—deep zone, heavy casing, hot formation. We’d loaded up with …
I remember my first perforation well. Not the formation, not the depth, not even the toolstring we ran—but I remember the way I felt walking up to a live gun for the first time. It wasn’t fear. It was respect. Because from the moment you work with explosives in this business, you learn that wireline …
You don’t really think about the collector—until it becomes the reason your job grinds to a halt. It’s one of those wireline components you trust will work, tucked neatly into the drum housing, doing its job as the wireline spins in and out of the well. That is, until it doesn’t. We were midway through …
There’s one sound no wireline engineer ever wants to hear—a sudden pop followed by silence. It’s the sound of a gunstring parting from the logging cable deep in a perforation well. I’ve been around long enough to know that in wireline logging, you don’t get many second chances. This wasn’t my job, but I was …
There’s a reason why I always say this job teaches you patience—and it’s not just because of the waiting. It’s because in the wireline business, success isn’t just about getting the guns downhole or logging data. It’s about doing it safely, predictably, and with the right tension at the right time. This is the story …
Some jobs stick with you—not because of what went wrong, but because of what had to go exactly right. This one wasn’t your typical wireline and perforating run. This was a full-blown TCP (Tubing Conveyed Perforation) operation where wireline logging simply couldn’t reach, and we had to adapt. It was a horizontal well, deep into …
There’s a moment in every wireline job when everything either comes together—or comes apart. On this particular cased hole wireline operation, it was a pumpdown job in a tight horizontal well, and it reminded me why wireline logging isn’t just a technical skill—it’s a discipline forged by precision, pressure, and practice. We were assigned a …
Some wireline jobs teach you about the well. Others teach you about yourself. But this one? It taught me the importance of knowing your tools inside and out—especially when those tools can make the difference between a successful perforation well and a dangerous misfire. We were gearing up for a standard cased hole logging run—wireline …
