Drilling vibrations continue to have drastic negative effects on operational success and project costs.  In all instances, and as a requirement to facilitate development of appropriate solutions, sources of vibrations must always be identified.  Vibrations mode identification, while important, has less significance in comparison to vibrations source identification.  Source identification improves efficiency of remediation strategies.   

The discussion will show why severe vibrations, which could not be resolved with the known remediation strategies including – bit selection, BHA modeling, drilling parameter changes, persisted over several different projects.  Specifically, it will be shown that the dynamic conditions always worsened when the known strategies were executed, even when the specific vibrations modes were claimed to have been identified with downhole measurements. 

Most important, the presentation will also show re-focusing on the problems resulted in the identification of a new vibrations source.  This was aided by extensive analysis of worn downhole tools and their failure patterns.  The simplicity (little things) in the solution developed to address this new vibrations source, and the huge impact (big effects) the solutions continue to have on project success and cost savings in challenging environments will be presented.