Mt. Taranaki

A typical volcano near New Plymouth. In winter it is covered with snow and looks exactly like Mt. Fuji. To save production cost, some of the out door scenes of Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai were actually filmed in New Plymouth NZ. I was pleasantly

surprised to find this 24 inch Reed rock bit, sitting at the side of the road, at a rest stop near New Plymouth. Shell used a lot of Hughes and Reed tri-cone, rock bits in the off-shore oil fields in Sarawak. As a trainee driller, it was my job to install the correct sized nozzles in each bit before use. The nozzles were made of compressed tungsten carbide.