I finished my Engineering degree in 2014 and started working at Wallis Drilling in January 2015. I thought that if I wanted to do interesting work, I’d need to move to the USA or Germany eventually. However, at Wallis, I’ve been privileged to be involved in some very advanced systems from the ground up.

My personal favourite project is still the Alcoa backhoe, Delta 17. Diggers and I were back and forth from the workshop to the office non-stop, trying to get that machine to operate the way Ross Richardson needed it to. Our later builds are certainly more sophisticated, but I really enjoyed the older “messy” projects. Delta 1, our first W300RC rig, is a close second.

A big thanks to the Wallis family, and to Brendan and Paul for giving me the opportunity to work with the technology we build. We are starting to design fully electric machines now, so it’s exciting to think about what could be next.