Figured I ought to disconnect this subject from my original post about bloom iron...
After that initial find of what seems to be bog iron in my wife's new garden, I convinced her to let me wrestle out the rest of the rock, with the promise that I'd repair and refill my damages. Glad I pushed and glad she acceded - wound up with another hundred or so pounds of the stuff. I weighed one 5 gallon pail of the rock chunks and did an eye ball estimate - I think I've got between 400 and 450 pounds of unprocessed rock.
And, while I was hacking away at the remaining segments of the ore, a neighbor stopped to watch some of the process. He told me that he'd run into the same kind of rock in his back yard. It's looking like there may be quite a bit of this stuff around the whole area where we live.
There are a few photos of the ore and location of the find on my site at:
I posted a lot of blather there that I won't bore you with here, but I'd appreciate any insights, advice and observations.
One question I'd have for anyone with any experience with this stuff is, do metal detectors pick it up? I talked with a guy at a local rental store who has a metal detector, but he warned that he knows for a fact the one he's got only will find things within an inch or so of the surface. This rock was about 4 inches down. I'm figuring on bringing a chunk of it to his shop to see if it does detect the iron in the open, then maybe trying to find a metal detector that penetrates better.
Then of course I know there's the old method of finding the stuff...wandering around with a long probe, driving it into the ground until you hit something and digging until you find out if it's an ore or not...just trying to avoid making too many holes in the yard .
O.K.,,, I've rambled on enough. Sorry for the nonsense.
Best regards, Bert