Local driller builds unique rig

WASILLA — Joe Wininger thinks he and his sons are on to something.

“We’ve been working on this and proving it on and off working for probably about seven years,” Wininger said.

He was talking about Tugster, the truck he and his sons built to shuttle drilling rigs to remote sites. One of the main things that sets it apart from trucks other companies use, Wininger said, is that it’s on tires.

“What they use to carry their drill around in remote locations and do geotech work, it’s always carried on a track-type vehicle,” he said.

There’s a few problems with those tracked vehicles. Wininger said they can do damage to the ground and plant life on the way out to a site. They also are terrible on hills and constantly breaking down. Oh, and they don’t have much for a braking system.

A lot of that, Wininger said, is because most of those vehicles were built to run on snow, but they’re not exactly safe.

“We’ve been scared to death of those other types so much that’s the reason we did this,” he said. “The safety thing was first, but then we saw how easy it was on the ground.”

The truck has four-wheel steering — you can steer the back wheels with a joystick — which helps keep the ground intact, but also helps get out of tough spots. It also has big tires, kind of like the Rolligons they use on the North Slope, but built to handle steeper terrain.

“A Rolligon wouldn’t stand a chance of getting into anything like that,” Wininger said.

Which, of course, is another advantage to the truck.

“These boys of mine, they’re big into off-roading and this has got a lot of the off-road technology in it,” Wininger said.

Headquartered off of Knik-Goose Bay Road, Wininger and Sons Drilling is a family owned and operated business. Wininger said he’s turned over most of it to his boys. He’s more of an adviser now than anything. His boys are third-generation drillers. There are pictures from the 1930s of Wininger’s dad and uncles drilling in Flagstaff, Ariz.

“There are three other rigs we got and we specialize in really deep geotech holes,” he said.

So if the truck came together through a lot of ideas that have already been out there — big tires, off-road technology — why didn’t anyone else put the pieces together first?

“One is money. These old Nodwells (tracked vehicles) are something you can buy and you don’t have to build it and it’s also much slower than this unit as far as getting from location to location and these guys charge by the hour so they don’t care,” Wininger said.

Though they built it themselves, it’s not anything exotic or hard to fix. In fact, that was part of what they were going for, he said.

“We built it so we can maintain it and fix it easy so that gets the cost of a day rate down,” Wininger said.

Why would a contractor want to reduce costs? Well, first it makes his bids more competitive, but there’s also a moral dimension. Most drilling work is for geotechnical data collection for public projects.

“This is public money and we’re able with this to get that price down there on doing that type of work cheaper than anybody else,” he said.

Of course, it’s still kind of proving itself. Those seven years of development led to its deployment this summer working with PND Engineers, which got the contract for geotech work on the district’s new high school off of Knik-Goose Bay Road.

“They kind of took a chance on using it,” he said.

But then, so was Wininger.

“We had our neck stuck out a little bit, believe me, but we knew it was going to perform, out-perform everything that’s ever been in the woods carrying a geotech rig,” Wininger said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.