Well/Borehole Camera

Background:
If your're involved in any part of the drilling industry, then you're probably aware of the borehole cameras out there. The ones that are available from various companies are no doubt very nice but $10,000 can be alot of money for a small company, and at that cost will get you the basic downhole view camera. I'm sure there have been times when one of these could have possibly saved some time if you could just get a glimpse of what was down hole, especially on fishing jobs. I could have used one myself on several occasions. So, here it is, Andrew's Engineering has done it again- the PVC series well video camera! All we needed was a basic setup to get a look in the borehole of a water well and this is what we came up with at a fraction of the cost of what's out there. The camera's video feed can be connected directly to a VCR, DVD recorder, a TV or a computer if you have a video capture card. We have run this camera down a 100 foot well during initial testing and it has been submerged in up to 70 feet of water!

Construction:
First we needed to find a suitable camera for the job. Since we are going to be looking down a dark hole in the ground we need a camera with lighting. Since this was a proto-type and the unit would be submerged in water we got a cheap camera to test with. Look on ebay, you can get them cheap, I didn't want to ruin an expensive camera in the event the enclosure leaked for whatever reason. Water and electricity don't get along very well, so this camera is a low voltage, 12 volt DC camera. The camera we got fit nicely inside 2" PVC schedule 40 pipe. The length of the PVC pipe is 12". We glued 2 threaded ends on and got two 2" PVC threaded plugs to match. One plug would be the top. We took this one and drilled and tapped the top for 1/2" NPT thread. Then using a brass 1/2" compression fitting, a washer and 2 rubber bushings we made the entry point for the cable. On the inside of the cap we filled the square section with silicone to double seal it and then put a clamp on the cable to make sure it would not pull out. On the other cap we cut out the entire center leaving us with a threaded ring. This is what will hold the lexan glass window in. We cut out the window with a hole saw and then machined it down to fit inside the open end, siliconed it in and installed the retaining ring. The cable is made from a 100 foot orange extension cord. The camera shared a common ground for the power and video ground so only 3 wires were needed to supply power and get the video feed. There is a AC to DC converter on the end of the cable and the video feed is the standard RCA male plug. The camera we used turned out to work real nice for the purpose. The finished unit is too light to dive into the water so we made some sinker rings out of brass that clip on to give it enough weight. We'll post some images we got from a well as soon as I get a chance to process them.