What does 80 years of horizontal directional drilling (HDD) innovation look like through the eyes of the people who helped build it? Dick, Eric and Peter Melsheimer join Subsurface Stories: The Underground Infrastructure Podcast for a conversation about Melfred Borzall's history and the evolution of HDD tooling.
Released September 15, 2026, the episode explores industry milestones, advances in safety and the challenges ahead for underground infrastructure. Watch the video above, edited and uploaded to Melfred Borzall's YouTube channel, or listen to the original audio episode on Subsurface Stories.
In this episode
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- 3:29 — How Melfred Borzall began in 1946
- 5:17 — Locators and steerable bits: the shift to directional drilling
- 9:28 — Safety innovations, including the electric strike alarm
- 14:41 — Manufacturing automation and helping contractors choose tooling
- 26:50 — Borzall University and tooling education
- 28:10 — The next challenge: effective tooling with less drilling fluid
About the podcast
This interview was hosted by Subsurface Stories, a podcast from Underground Infrastructure. We are sharing the video here so our customers, distributors and the wider HDD community can watch the conversation. Visit Subsurface Stories for the original audio and more conversations with underground infrastructure professionals.
Explore more HDD history
Continue with Before the Industry Had a Name, Dick Melsheimer's retrospective, or explore Melfred Borzall's story.
