Carson MacKinnon

Worked as a shop hand doing anything from:

• Welders helper
• Tool organization
• Whacking weeds
• Clean up/close up shop
• Forklift operator
• Painter's helper
• Sandblaster
• Loaded and strapped down trailers

At eighteen, I was promoted to a welder doing:

• Repairs to different drilling rigs when down (fixing cracks, handrails, and anything broken
• Repairing or building the derrick on a rig
• Chasing all types of drilling rigs and wells primarily for Sentinel Peak, CRC, Ensign, and Kenai landing wellheads, starter heads, abandonment's, building gun lines for mud pits, landing pack off flanges, building different blow off lines, diverter lines, and more. Pretty much if the rig or oil company needed it, we did it.
• Welding the liner as it goes down hole for a waterwell, cutting and welding the riser, building the riser, fabricating random rig tools or downhole tools for certain wells.
• Performed hot taps, which is where you UT test a piece of pipe to know you can safely weld on it, take a threaded weld olet and weld it to the material you tested, screw a valve into it, screw the hot tap drill onto it and drill through the pipe. The purpose is so that we can close the valve before our tools removed so that we now have control of the line and/or know if that specific line has pressure.
• Built multiple filtration units off of blueprints, cutting, fitting and welded thousands of inches of pipe to severe x-ray quality
• Built tanks, centre fuge stands, mud pits, derrick floors, and more from ground up.
• This company was a specialty company that did a little of everything, My experience in structural, pipe, oil, steam. and gas is far more than the average twenty year old.
• 4g Unlimited SMAW certification
• 4g Unlimited FMAW certification
• 6g 2" schedule 160 pipe certification
• Forklift Certification
• Confined space certification

This job required super long hours always on call, working in hot/cold climates, following OSHA and any other lease rules at all times, and understanding how to work as a team, not only to get a job done faster, but to figure out the safest way of executing tasks.

I pretty quickly was labeled as a lead welder at the shop or out in the field. When at rigs, the welder is in charge up to an extent, you have to command an entire crew of rig hands to help advance to the next step of anything you do. In the shop, I would lay out jobs for other welders, take a lead role on specific jobs most of the time by fabrication every part of the project so the other welders can just weld.