How to Assemble The Brace Sandline Cutter

Hello, I’m Clint with Brace Tool. I’m going to show you how to assemble our Hydraulic Sandline Cutter to set it up for cutting cable when you’re in need of fishing operations on a [00:00:21 – inaudible].

So anyway, we’ll start off with the firing head, it’s a pressure activated firing head. We have a piston with two O-rings on it which go inside the piston housing. Several pin holes which allow you to vary your pressure rating required to set it off. There’s your fishneck sub, a firing pin and a fishneck for retrieving it from the well.

So what we’ll start with is we’ll put the firing pin into the piston. It takes a ¼ 20 cent screw, to hold it in place. Screw that in, make sure it’s tight. It’s in there. We install the fishneck onto this sub. We’ll install our retrieving fishneck onto the piston. Thread that on. Clamp the fishneck in place. Use a crossing wrench to tighten that on. And tighten our set screw in the fishneck to retain it so it doesn’t fall off.

I find the easiest way to set this up is to install your piston and everything into your sub and thread it in, using the threads to push your O-rings into the sub. Once they’re in the sub you can clamp this in the vice leaving the shear pin holes exposed. Now if you take a ¼” pin punch and lay it inside the fishneck, out of the springer pin fishneck. Press them in to align the O-rings.

You’ll find that that perfectly aligns your shear pin holes with your piston groove. For this instance we use 330 seconds brass. Each 330 seconds brass shear pin in this tool requires about 470 Psi of pressure to shear it. Once the pin’s installed the piston cannot travel back and forth and accidently set off your firing pin.

I like to use a chisel just to nip off the excess brass shear pin. And there are six holes here. If you used drill rod for shear pin instead of the brass each pin would be weighted for about 1000 Psi, giving you a 6000 lb. Psi maximum. I’ll just install two pins at this point.

Now we can take our piston, our shell chamber and install our shell. It’s a 45 70 rimfire shell. Drop it in there, make sure it seats. If it doesn’t go in easily do not force it, do not hammer it, do not make an impact with the primer. Because it is a loaded firing shell, it should be treated just like a rifle shell.

A small brass disk goes on the top that creates a seal. And we’ll set that off to the side just for a moment. We’ll install our displacement piston which displaces the hydraulic oil in our body to make the cutter function. O-ring faces up towards the top of the tool.

And you want to push that into place just below the surface of the hole because there’s a little rubber disk that goes above it. The rubber disk should be flush with the top of the hole. The rubber disk is just a cushion for when the shell goes on for when the shell goes off and so it doesn’t damage your displacement piston.

Now we’ll install the shell chamber onto the firing head. Once this is installed, as I said before, we’ll treat this as a loaded gun. Caution should be used at all times. Any impact with the primer in this with the firing pin will cause this to detonate and go off.

Now we install the displacement piston housing. Thread that on until your O-rings are completely covered and seated. And as you can see there’s a recess here. There’s a little bit of space in between there. When we fill this tool with oil you have to fill the body quite full because you’ll leave yourself a gap of air and you want no air in this tool when you’re done.

So I like to take a good glob of grease and fill this hole up a little bit. Get rid of some of that dead air space. Press it in so you don’t have a bunch of air pocket in there. Okay, for the time being we’re finished with the firing head side of this.

Now we’ll work on assembling the cutter body with the cutter assembly and the crimper. This gets filled with [00:06:41 – inaudible] fluid as a [00:06:43 – inaudible] equalizing valves so you can bleed your air out of it. The top hole is for your crimper, the bottom hole is for your cutter and cutter piston, so I will proceed to assemble this. I put the cutter in first.

The cutter has a cutter piston. You want to lay the slots sideways and align it with this small hole in the side which a shear screw goes in which holds your column [00:07:13 – inaudible]. So I try to align that so it’s nice and straight and lined up with that hole so you don’t have to do much twisting on the tool once it’s off. It may take a little tap to get everything started in there.

You don’t want to hit too hard and damage your O-ring. Make sure it’s seated really well in the tool. And then your cutter has a small hole at the side which aligns with your shear screw hole. You can take the punch and make sure it all aligns properly. The shear screw has just a small but flat slot in it so use a small flat screwdriver to install that shear screw.

And because it’s brass you don’t want to torque it in, over torqued or else you’ll have trouble getting it out afterwards. So just thread it in and you should see it enter the cutter blade as you thread it in.

And as you can see, it’s kind of hard to see, but in there you can see the tip of the shear screw going into the cutter blade itself. It should go past the body and into the blade and hold the blade in so it will not fall out. It doesn’t have to be over torqued, as I said, because it’s just there as a retainer and it’ll shear when you fire the tool. The crimper. We make three different styles of crimper.

This one is for ½” and 9/16^th cable. This one is for anything smaller than 3/8^th cable and the blank is used typically when you’re running it in 23/8^th tubing because the crimper isn’t effective in two and three, it’s too big, because it has nothing to crimp against other than the tubing wall. And it won’t hold when it goes off.

So when you run it in 2 7/8^th or larger pipe you use this sleeve which slides over the body and the cutter and the crimper will cut against the cutter sleeve and helps you to crimp onto your line.

So, the same thing, there’s a small hole there and a shear screw hole there. Align those before you press it in. Slide it into the bottom. Install your shear screw in that hole as well. And the same precaution should be taken not to over torque your sheer screw and damage the little [00:10:21 – inaudible] on the flats making it hard to remove.

Okay, now that that’s installed we can proceed to fill our tool with oil. We need to install our bleed screw. It has a ¼” ball bearing. It drops in there and seats against the taper in the bottom. A bleed screw which holds the ball in place.

And because it’s a fine thread screw and a ball seat you do not need to over torque this. If you feel it touch bottom give it just a little slot so it holds the pressure in. And then you can put your cutter body into your vice. At this point you take your fluid that you’re going to use for your displacement and fill the tool.

Now, I’m going to use automatic transmission fluid. And we’ll fill it up. Fill it up so there’s about three or four threads left showing in your cutter body itself because you’re going to want to get all the air out of this tool and there’s still a little space where we’ve put the grease in.

So we’ll start installing this and you’ll see some oil start to weep out of here as we start to compress the oil. You don’t want to over torque this any time. Just turn it hand tight and once you start to feel your oil pressure build, you can shear these screws prematurely by forcing it, so you don’t want to do that.

Once you feel oil pressure and see the oil start coming out of here, you’ll stop, turn the tool upside down. Lock it in the vice, undo your bleed screw which will allow oil and air to come out of your housing, out the bleed hole, and then you’ll thread this in slowly watching to make sure that you’re not getting a bunch of air in there.

As you can see I’m still getting air so I still have some room here. So, optimally, when you have finished screwing this in you want to see a constant flow of oil out of this hole with no air bubbles. Once that’s into the tight position we’ll close our bleed screw nice and snug. We’ll turn tool back to the upright position. Wipe off the excess oil. We’ll tighten all of our connections to make sure everything’s good and tight and nothing’s going to come apart when you drop it into the well. Okay.

Now this is really a loaded gun because if this was to go off we’re going to shoot our piston and our crimper out of this tool, so at this point don’t let it face you. You want to align your groove in your fishneck with the groove in the cutter body itself which should turn because the only thing holding this is your shear screws.

So you align those in there and if you’re cutting ½” or 9/16^th cable and 2 3/8^th tubing, you could run this tool just like this in the well. There’s not enough room for the cable to get past from 2 3/8^th tubing so this will fall into your cutter position and at that point, if you’re able to you, can pressure up on the well to overcome your shear pin strikes, which will drive the piston down into the firing pin, shell will go off into the piston and drive the piston into the column oil, which in turn drives your cutter blade and your crimper out, cutting the line.

If you were going to use this in larger size plank, or what not, you can use guides on the top of here. This will slide over here. You put it on before you put the fishneck on. So that hole on there fits over the line, has a gap end screw that holds your line in place and just kind of keeps everything aligned on your tool.

There are also guides for casing sizes. Larger fish necks for casing sizes. And several other pieces of equipment available for this tool. If this tool is not able to be set off by pressure, because of well conditions, or what not, there are drop bars that can be dropped down beside the line. They basically have some fins on them here, depending on what size tubing you’re in.

You open up your well head, put this beside the line, line it up, drop it in the well. It will travel down the tubing, following the wire that you’re cutting and make contact with the top of your fishneck, shear your pins and doing the same as pressure activated. I hope this video was helpful for you. Thank you.