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Some clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 63F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph..
Some clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 63F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph.
Larry Pavelec discusses panning for gold at an Oelwein Public Library summer reading program Thursday. Young people looking on include Kayla Baker, 12, and Noah Graunke, 7, who each found small pieces of gold soon after.
Michael Graunke, 13, of Oelwein was among a few young people who found gold at an Oelwein Public Library program Larry Pavelec led on Thursday.
Larry Pavelec brought along artifacts he has found, or that are made from similar minerals to what he has found, while panning for gold to a program Thursday at the Oelwein Public Library.
Kayla Baker panned and found this piece of gold Thursday at an Oelwein Public Library program led by Larry Pavelec.
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Larry Pavelec discusses panning for gold at an Oelwein Public Library summer reading program Thursday. Young people looking on include Kayla Baker, 12, and Noah Graunke, 7, who each found small pieces of gold soon after.
Michael Graunke, 13, of Oelwein was among a few young people who found gold at an Oelwein Public Library program Larry Pavelec led on Thursday.
Larry Pavelec brought along artifacts he has found, or that are made from similar minerals to what he has found, while panning for gold to a program Thursday at the Oelwein Public Library.
Kayla Baker panned and found this piece of gold Thursday at an Oelwein Public Library program led by Larry Pavelec.
For anyone interested in Iowa’s natural gem and mineral landscape, Larry Pavelec’s talk on panning for gold Thursday was full of useful nuggets.
In addition to being the 2022 Readlyn Grump, Pavelec has in the past taken part in the Black Hawk County Gem and Mineral Society, according to his wife, Vicki.
Stick to public property when hunting for precious minerals, Pavelec advised a dozen or so attendees at his talk for the Oelwein Public Library summer reading program.
Water, such as in a stream bed, will concentrate the gold on the upstream side of certain sandbars.
“Say there’s a sandbar that happens, and if it’s got gravels, if you look at the pattern on it, most of the time it’s going to be on the upstream side of that,” Pavelec said.
“Then it will travel in a straight line to where the next gravel bar is. That line is called a pay streak.
“I use different settings on the metal detector, and it sounds off on the metals that are left in there.”
Pavelec held up a pan of dry sand, passed a magnet along it, and showed the audience that bits of sand stuck to it.
“In the gravel bar, we have magnetic sand,” he said. “This is usually magnetite and hematite. That’s a good indicator. I can go along that gravel bar, stick this magnet in a few places, and if I find things like that, I know where I’m going to test pan to find the gold.”
His metal detector, he said, can find about one-tenth of a gram of gold, something one-quarter the size of a piece of rice.
Gold is very heavy, having a specific gravity of
19 to water’s gravity of one, he said.
Because of its weight, gold falls to the bottom of the pan of water and sand, and the pan can be flipped over to reveal the gold.
“The specific gravity of water is 1,” Pavelec said. “Most of the sand that is in the water from the limestone and that, that is silica. That is 2 not even 3. The agates are close to 3. The shot from everybody shooting ducks on the water, that’s about 9. And gold is close to 19. So when I’m doing this (panning), all the heavies go to the bottom — flip — boom! And all the heavies will stick out.”
“Diamonds can be found in Iowa too,” he said. “The biggest one I know of was in Dubuque County and almost 14 karats of yellow diamond. They were brought in by the same great big glaciers pushing all that sand and gravel down here. The thing is they don’t concentrate like the gold. They are a little bit lighter and they travel a bit different.”
But still, he said, “Diamonds move to the bottom.
“Most of us will take along a black light. Most diamonds will give off a nice glow with the black light. They’re most of the time cloudy. It would be unbelievable if you found a clear one here,” he said.
Agates, which can be found in the great lakes, may be worth money if they contain multiple colors. He brought along a rough red agate and a faceted one in some jewelry.
“One time with the Gem and Mineral Society, we were in a basic materials pit where they dredge, and one of the gals found one about (fist size),” Pavelec said, holding up a fist-size circle with his fingers. “Thirteen colors in it. Greens, oranges, everything else. That rock there was worth about $13,000. Got quite a bit of value.”
A young spectator asked, “Could I turn some of my rocks into the bank and they would give me money?”
“Maybe some of the pawn shops might,” Pavelec said.
He asked Vicki, his wife, and she brought up a sample of rock with gold ore in it.
“That will sound off with a metal detector,” Pavelec said.
“Most of the time in hard rock mining, they would pulverize it, and run it through a sluice and eventually classify it out and get that gold out of the hard rock.”
Another way to take gold out of hard rock, or he said it works on scrap computer or phone parts, is to pulverize and combine hydrochloric and nitric acid, Pavelec said.
“You take those two together and you can dissolve gold and put gold in a solution,” he said. “You take a little bit of chlorine put it in the solution, and it will drop the gold out and you can make yourself a little ball of gold.”
Pavelec has not sold things that he has found. He identified himself as a retired contractor. At times when he would find a rock on a job site that looked interesting in this way, he said he gave it back to persons affiliated with the property. For instance while excavating at the then-future site of The W in Waverly, some findings from a rock sample were returned to the maintenance department.
For anyone too interested by his collecting patterns, he noted, he also keeps guns on his property.
Some clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 63F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph.
Some clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 63F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph.
Overcast. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 82F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph.
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