Our Thursday trip with a rented trailer-borne commercial air compressor was the most fruitful yet.
Thanks to advice and coaching from a new e-friend in Lubbock named Cary Austin (aka ValveMan), we were set up with materials to put a 1 ¼” pipe down the well with an air hose from the compressor which pumped 185 cubic feet per minute of air down the well. The rapid upward movement of the air creates a vacuum that literally sucks the sand off the bottom and sends it up the pipe. In this case, it went up over 100’. Where it spews out as a mixture of sand and vaporized water.
When we first put our pipe down, it ran into the sand at about 84 feet. As the compressor started doing its job we watched our pipe sink, as it should. By our best calculations we sucked about 12 ft of sand out of the bottom!
My thanks to Cary for the many answers and suggestions he gave me over the past few weeks.
Harvey