It blows sideways at you when the oil or water comes shooting ... He could be sent to clean the rig manager’s — the “tool pusher’s”— kitchen. The roughneck’s iconic tools are the ...

the iron roughneck uses a rotary table and torque wrench(es) to make up or break down pipe. What was once an extremely dangerous process on the rig floor has now become almost completely automated ...

In On Oil, Don Gillmor, who worked as a roughneck on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta, looks at how the industry has changed over the decades since. The latest in our Field Notes ...

Nimeck, who started in oil as a 14-year-old roughneck on the Alberta service rigs, believes that prosperity is one of Alberta’s birthrights, as long as hard work is part of the mix.