Anonymous
We dehead our drum by physically revoming the bolts and using a carriage. I suggested what you say, to move the cart in, loosen some bolts, and slightly drop the head. The fear is that the carriage will not be able to hold that much weight. I also forgot to mention that we were on low rates. Our drums were requiring roughly 130’000 bls of water to reach the middle K-Ray. On this drum the K-Ray rang in at 75’000 bls. There is a fear that the drum is not properly quenched. There is the possibility that if we are able to drop the head slightly that bitumen could ooze out. At that point we would no longer be able to put the bottom head back on, and would be in a worse place.
So far we have used 150 steam quench and water (using the quench pump) in the attempt to free up the plug. We have also tried to pressuring up the drum to 30psi and attempt to drain. It was unsuccessful.