Thanks Allen. My thoughts are to take a post hole auger and drill down 5 ft or so. Then take a 14 ft section of 4 inch steel pipe necked down to kind of a point, but with enough space to allow the sand point well head through. The idea is to only have the smaller diameter of soil built up in the steel pipe that the sand point can still get through. Then I would use my neighbors post pounder to ram that sucker to almost water depth. Then put the sand point well head down and hammer it the rest of the way try to avoid any clay layers I might encounter as much as possible. If it works I will need to secure the well pipe to the steel pipe and then cap it of so dirt, critters, and other debris doesn't fall in. That's the plan. Won't know til I try it.
You have a good plan and it will work. That being said I despise sandpoints. Why? because we used them for years in our pastures and I hated driving the damn things. Then either the check valve would crap out, the shallow well pump would crap out, or the sandpoint would plug or rust out, also in the fall when temps would drop below freezing at night I'd have to drive 15 miles to our pastures and turn them on, we'd generally just let them pump then until it either warmed up or the cows came home, reason for this is with a shallow well pump with a check valve, they'd freeze and crack if they weren't running.
If you're planning to use this to water a garden and yard, do you need a pressure tank to turn it on and off when it builds pressure, or is it something you can turn on when needed and then turn off when done? If you need it to turn off, you can get a shallow well pump for a sandpoint with a small pressure tank on top that you'd just have to drain in the fall. If you can just start it when needed and shut it off when done, I'd recommend washing in or jetting in a 4 to 5 inch pvc casing and using a 4 inch submersible pump. We've switched all our pasture wells over from sandpoints to wells we've washed in ourselves. I've been using 4 inch casing with 5ft of slotted screen on the bottom that I cap the bottom to keep sand out, then I use a filter sock over the screen to keep even finer sand out, and finally fill in with pea gravel around the outside. They work great in our sandpoint country. We can pump them at 30 gpm and never run out of water. We just use a 10gpm 4inch submersible , which barely fits in a 4inch casing. There are numerous ways to wash in a well. but what we do is have a 6inch pvc with a screw on cap on one end and that end also has two banjo fittings to attach two 2inch suction hoses that are attached to two honda driven pacer pumps. dig a holethrough the sod, stand the 20ft 6 inch pvc with hoses attached in that hole, we used to use a farm loader, but now I have a crane truck which is much nicer. Then turn on both pumps, the water flows down the 6inch pipe and washes the sand up and around the 6 inch pipe, like sticking a garden hose in the ground when you were a kid if you ever did that. Then after 6 inch pipe reaches 19ft we stop the pumps, unscrew the cap and lower our 20ft 4 inch well casing down, 5ft of screen, 15ft of pipe, then either shovel pea gravel inside of 6 inch pipe but outside of 4 inch casing. As you slowly lift the 6 inch out the pea gravel shakes to the bottom and stays around the 4 inch screen.
Another way is to use a 1 inch pvc tubing hooked to a pacer pump. dig a hole as deep as you can, put casing in, then put 1inch pvc inside and began pumping water through to wash sand up and out, stopping to hammer casing down once in awhile. I've never done this but I want to try it and believe it will work just fine.
I've tried digging with a 6 inch post hole digger to make a hole for my casing but the problem there is, if there is enough water for a well, your hole will collapse faster than you can dig it out. deepest hole I've dug with a 6 inch post hole digger is 19ft and it was a dry hole. Most you hit water within 10 to 15ft and you can never dig deep enough to get the casing down in the water, it just collapses.
If your set on a sand point, either dig as far as you can with a post hole digger or use a hydraulic driven post driver even if you have to use 5 foot sections of pipe to keep adding on as you pound. Pounding sandpoints by hand is a young mans game and it still sucks.
