Hard to believe this pristine beach has tons of iron in the sand ! !
Gold Beach in Oregon had a lot more Iron in the sand 20 years ago.
This instructable shows you how to separate and collect the Gold Beach Iron using a simple Magnet.
Gold Beach in Oregon had a lot more Iron in the sand 20 years ago.
This instructable shows you how to separate and collect the Gold Beach Iron using a simple Magnet.
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Harbor Freight sells a magnetic pick-up and drop tool for under $10 dollars.
A dry soda bottle makes a convenient container for holding the iron fillings.
A dry soda bottle makes a convenient container for holding the iron fillings.
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Do you reside near a coastal area ?
Thanks for the pointer to laser glasses !
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The black sand on this beach is titanomagnetite and it is the titanium content that makes it impractical to reduce in a conventional arc furnace. Due to this problem our local steel mill is the only one in the world to manufacture iron and steel using ironsand as the primary raw material. The unique process is outliined here for those interested: http://www.nzsteel.co.nz/about-new-zealand-steel/operations-/glenbrook-steel-site.
Perhaps a funnel would make the loading easier?
But who brings a funnel on holiday or holiweek.
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and grand children who thinks of a funnel :-)
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Now imagine me holding my iPhone, the magnetic pickup tool and
a half bottle funnel but no tape to hold them secure together at the time.
All the while the collection bottle is secured in a depth of the sand there
is a pic of that..
Anyway there is enough Iron in the beach to collect a bottle full in an
afternoon just using the scrape method of placing filings in a small hole :-)
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It just makes it easier to get them off the magnet.
And as a BTW the fact that iron is everywhere is why it replaced bronze.
The truning point is when they learned to make a fire hot enough to work it.
The steps from stone to copper to bronze to iron were steps in heat production.
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Southern Oregon is an odd region whose mountains were raised from the sea floor and twisted 90 degrees from their original orientation. Curry County upriver to the east of Grants Pass and south to the Smith River is made up of Serpentine, a rock that's extremely high in Magnesium and Manganese content, good at growing trees and not much else.
It can be quite beautiful when wet, weathers quite easily and is some of the worst landslide material known when we get hit with a couple Pineapple expresses off the Pacific that saturate it beyond being able to hold together. 1100 feet of it slid into the Rogue across from my Grandfather's cabin down below Agness. The scar is visible to this day. You also don't want to fall on any freshly fractured surface, it breaks into thin blades, brittle and sharp, with no durability so it's useless for making arrowheads.
The region is also formed of lots of basalt with huge granitic plutons pushed up through it. Where there isn't rock, there's decomposed granite which is cement like in its composition, easily eroded into rather nasty terrain where vegetation has been scraped off with earth moving equipment. The eroded gravels and sands from this material are where you find most of the magnetite. It has a high nickel content, enough so that it has been considered mineable over in O'brien. Up near Roseburg, they've carved a whole mountaintop off mining Limonite, a weathered type of Peridotite similar to Serpentine.
Of late, we've been being warned about high amounts of Chromate 6 in the black sand. Laughable as it's everywhere.
Another thing to watch out for is Cinnabar, mercury is a naturally occuring metal around here, up Cow Creek, it's said to be of high enough content to literally bleed out of the rock.
Have you noticed a diminishing of the real dark black sand turning
to a lighter shade since grade school days?
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Here in the Pacific Northwest, in wintertime we have two major weather phenomena that are shaped by the jet stream out over the Pacific. One is the evaporation of tremendous quantities of water into a warm, unstable airmass which then gets conveyed into the western continental US almost straight out of Hawaii, hence its popular name, "The Pineapple Express". The other is southward pulses of extremely cold air off the Gulf of Alaska, or if even stronger, down from the Bearing Straits.
1964 was the best example of the perfect storm. You get a long term Pineapple Express which saturates everything with a long period of rain, then you start getting mixing between it and the cold air off the Gulf of Alaska which starts producing snow. Snow isn't so bad, but what we get in flood years is a complete wring-out of moisture in slushy snow that starts snapping off smaller trees from the sheer weight of it within a couple hours.
In December 1964, we had two weeks of this, followed by the return of warm rain in a Chinook that immediately pealed off all the snow in January and sent it downstream. On the hike down to Rainey Falls, there is a marker up on the hillside at 110 feet above average river level. That is the flood stage marker for the maximum height of the water flowing through that area during the flood. It was at 36 feet above flood stage at Grants Pass. At the height of the flood, it was estimated to be flowing at 500,000 cubic feet per second at Agness. This is the combined total flow from Elk Creek, the Applegate River, Illinois River and Rogue River.
These periodic major floods occurred quite regularly until the flood projects put in the Applegate and Lost Creek flood control dams. Another one was built on Elk Creek but the enviros got it and so it got partially built and then notched. Our last major flood was in 1997, from estimates it would have been as large or larger than the 1964 flood if the dams weren't there to modulate the water flow. It was kept back to a maximum of 27 feet above flood stage at Grants Pass.
With the removal of Savage Rapids Dam and a few really good floods we may get replenishment down at Gold Beach as all the sediment washes downstream.
I understand during the war our military would insert a Thermite plug
into a cannon barrel on a tank or artillery piece and the heat produced
would actually bend the barrel...
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So I suspect most metals are gone.
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Thomas Edison was doing this on a big scale on the sands in New Jersey in the late 1800's. See:
redrok
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when I bought a metal detector. In one of the issues there were instructions on how to make a magnet that will attract any metal you want but it had to have a core with the same kind of metal one wanted to attract. I thought I saved the magazine but tore the house upside down and cannot find it. Does anyone remember anything about this article? I know I'm older but there should be someone as old or has parents that had that hobby back then.
in the metal with one coil and use a secondary out of phase coil to attract the
metal by pulling on the induced Eddy current in the metal...
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atoms per iron to 1¼ O per Fe in magnetite the iron may self smelt.
Otherwise smelting may have to be tried at a plasma temperature
under a cover gas.
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I went out to the curb in front of my house and dropped a neodymium magnet into the sand there, and sure enough it was covered in that same ferrous dust. It's more likely that mine came from cars than from nature, though.
sometime after the Rocks ible that is coming soon...
Certainly if Fe2O3 rust works as oxidizer for Thermite at 1½ Oxygen
atoms per iron to 1¼ O per Fe in magnetite the iron may self smelt.
Otherwise smelting may have to be tried as a plasma under a cover gas.
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The hard part is separating gold out.
A fixed magnet pulls iron and some oxides out.
Then an ac resonator dual coil can fish out the no magnetic metals.
Gold is di-magnetic only one other metals is too maybe that can help
Collect micro-gold specs.
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when approaching the north Pacific.
Thanks for the warning but there was zip above background clicks :-)
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