Fubaya… Im laughing because as I was typing I thought I heard some old guy talking and freaked out. Glad I watched the rest of the video before submitting my post. I didn’t realize how intricate the well systems were at that time. Interesting to hear.
As a well guy the video is certainly a plausible use for such a tool. It certainly wasn’t a widely used tool or there would be more examples available and it wouldn’t be so hard to find similar ones.
There isn’t a large window in time for it to have seen use for that particular purpose. Precast concrete well tiles weren’t readily available till later years. You could get/make them in the time frame the tool is associated with but there weren’t in the pick them up at the general store kind of deal.
Going from field stone wells to other methods was drawn out over a significant time period with lots of trial and error along the way. I’m sure you can find plenty of random tools and methods tried by individuals that had varied degrees of success.
My Grandfathers method on tiled wells never involved lowering the tiles into the hole like that. Each subsequent tile was added at ground level and there was a guy inside the well who dug out under the bottom tile, the whole stack would make it’s way down via gravity.
Anytime on on a job site with one of those wells I just think about the poor guys he had doing that work. It’s incredibly rare for me to even climb in a tiled well, I couldn’t imagine having to dig that by hand, some of his wells went down 60 feet. Many days of shoveling mud into buckets with a tiny shovel in cramped quarters. Filling those wells back in is kinda sad in a way, erasing someones time and labor from ever having had existed.
New wells now we can go 600ft in a day no problem and get a better water source.