Obtaining Black Sand For Tests

[bklein]

I occasionally come across intensive black sand conditions in my Orange County beaches and I’d like to set up such conditions at home to test different detectors.  Any tips on purchasing such sand or ferrous concentrations for such tests?  

[rvpopeye]

Why not collect it from wherever you want to hunt in it ? ?

 

[King-Of-Bling]

Exactly what Rvpop said. Go to the where the water tower is ( you should know where that is) and take a few 5 gallon buckets out. Very black and iron rich. Better yet , take your PIs and swing away. But you gotta go slow and keep the coil a few inches off the sand. Experiment. 

[strick]

Cant beat free sand at the beach.... I've done this before at one particular beach...get a plastic tub about 10 inches deep and have some fun testing your detectors.

strick 

[bklein]

I was at Corona Del Mar last weekend and my CTX would not see a pull tab dropped in a little 5-6” hole in the black sand there.  Take it out and wave above the coil and it sings loudly. I thought at first that was really shocking and I did a hard reset later and that seemed to improve behavior.  I went back a couple days ago and could not repeat the failure. So I guess it was a setup issue. The sand was not as black heavy so I didn’t bring any back. My first trip to the water tower area (north of dog beach?) was just three weeks or ago and I got skunked using the AQ. I’ve seen a certain guy’s videos showing how the black sand there hides coins from his then eq800. He still hunts there and finds nice rings though….

I went on a trip up to Oregon and Washington and got some black sand from the Columbia river outlet area. Turns out yeah it was black but no it wasn’t ferrous!  I want to run some tests comparing the DF, AQ, Excal, EQ600, and CTX.

[Jeff McClendon]

Take a strong magnet.

[Steve Herschbach]

The term “black sand” is misleading. It should be “magnetic sand” as not all black sands are magnetic, and many are not black. Best way to collect is to drag a large super magnet through dirt. The collected magnetic materials can be mixed with other soils in any ratio you desire.

[bklein]

Yeah I didn’t have a magnet with me in Oregon but I made assumptions because it was in the area where there is that beached iron ship and the sand was black around it. But a hard drive magnet showed it wasn’t very ferrous.

[brogansown]

Most of the streams here in Eastern Oregon have magnetic black sands, but not all have visible gold.  As others have said, gather and pan some gravels (as high up as possible), use a magnet and you might be surprised at the number of tiny specks of gold you find.