The Dirt Is Good To Me

Tiny Treasures from the Iron Pit

yaquigrande — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:37:31 +0000

I continue on my quest for gold. I have decided to hunt for gold until I fill a gallon container with pull tabs and other mid tone targets. I am hoping to find a gold item before I fill the container with stuff but I am alarmed at how quickly it’s filling up! I am digging an average of 40 mid tone signals per hour.

Meanwhile, I keep finding interesting stuff while digging for gold. Today at lunch, I returned to the Iron Pit. The Iron Pit is the name I’ve given the honey hole I found last Summer. Anyway, as I was scanning for mid tones, I got a foil signal on the AT Pro. The Target ID (TID) was 45 and the depth was two inches. I dug up an old zinc or lead bell emblem that may have been part of a tag.

Later, I got a mid tone with a TID that jumped from 49 to 50 and back. The AT Pro said the target was six inches deep. I began to dig the hole and just below the surface, I found a tiny tennis racquet charm. It looked pretty nice and silvery and I could see that it had a stamp. When I got to the car, I looked at it with my loupe and sure enough, the mark said sterling.

I am not surprised the charm read lower than a nickel. First, tiny silver can read like that. Second, with all the rusty iron at the Iron Pit, I expect the detector to get confused.

Tiny treasures

So this makes me wonder about how many countless treasures I’ve missed in the year I’ve been detecting because I haven’t been digging mid tones consistently. Heck, for the first eight months or so I downright ignored all mid tones.

And yes, I have to say it one more time: The Iron Pit doesn’t stop giving!

More stuff from the Iron Pit

yaquigrande — Mon, 28 May 2012 20:51:49 +0000

I went out hunting this morning for a couple of hours. I decided to try the honey hole with the AT Pro and the 5x8DD coil. First thing I did, was to change the name of the honey hole to The Iron Pit. Second thing I did was to lower the sensitivity on the AT Pro down to three bars. I did this to try to cope with the large amounts of iron there.

So the idea was to dig all foil and pull tab signals and any wayward high tone. After two hours, I had dug 47 signals and only two were high tones: a 1917 wheat that I got only after I had removed the rusty nail that was masking it and a bullet. The other 45 signals were all mid tones with the great majority of them being foil. I ended up with about 7 round pull tabs and a bunch of assorted metal bits. I was just commenting to another hunter, Stevouke, that I was surprised the Iron Pit still continued to yield cool stuff.

After almost a year of hunting this spot, I still find stuff

I don’t know when the Wichita Transportation Corporation started in Wichita but the newspaper has an article that says that in 1929, the company carried 18,000,000 fares. That means that there ought to be millions of these tokens laying around! The Iron Pit goes back to the late 1800′s.

A relic of Wichita’s past

When I started riding the bus in 1980, tokens were gone already.

They dropped this guy back in the 20′s I think

Last, I found this tag just under the ground. It is a tag for Royal Swan ribbon. This was popular in the 40′s. This particular ribbon was woven edge rayon. The term Rayon was first used in 1924 and rayon was first made in the U.S. in 1910 although it was patented in Britain in 1894.

A product of Burlington Mills

There is a very interesting article about Burlington Mills here.

All in all I had a great time hunting the Iron Pit. I am going to wait until it rains before I hunt there again because digging there today was like digging through concrete.

Thank you for looking!

The Very Definition of Masochism

yaquigrande — Mon, 28 May 2012 03:29:19 +0000

I have gold fever. I can’t deny it. I want gold and lots of it. To that end, me and another hunter, Stevouke, have vowed to dig pull tabs until we both find another gold ring.

The problem is that the very goal seems infinite. There seems to be an endless number of pull tabs and this makes the job seem unmanageable. Maybe I am over thinking this but I thought one way to make the task less daunting was to set boundaries to it somehow.

Stevouke is doing this by keeping a count of the pull tabs he digs. Me, I decided I needed something more tangible and visual. Here is my idea:

If you ever wonder what pain looked like…

I am going to see if I can find a gold ring before I fill this gallon container with pull tabs and foil.

Thank you for looking!

1929 Whatsit

yaquigrande — Sat, 26 May 2012 13:46:52 +0000

While hunting a 1925 park with the CZ-3D, I found this metal band. At first I thought it may be a bird’s id tag but once I made it round again, it seemed a bit too big for a bird’s leg.

It gave a high tone on the CZ and the needle landed on the Zinc facet. If I remember right, it was about five inches deep.

It has the following written on it: 63642 Kansas Accredited 1929.

We know whatever this was on was accredited in Kansas in 1929

’bout the size of a dime

Of course, anything with a date I think it’s pretty cool.

Thank you for looking!

Brothers In Arms

yaquigrande — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:11:52 +0000

After a little over an hour of digging for gold using my CZ-3D, my body and my soul were weary.

At least there’ll be less to dig next time

So I snapped a picture of my loot and sent it to Stevouke (from the Friendly Metal Detecting Forum) who was hunting in the morning like I was. I got a similar picture back from him and a similar story.

Somehow knowing there’s someone out there who understands what I am doing and why makes me feel a lot better.

Thank you for looking!

A small CZ-3D study

yaquigrande — Wed, 23 May 2012 22:06:44 +0000

I went to my trashy, hunted out park to run a little study on the CZ-3D. The site is not, strictly speaking, the kind of site for which the CZ-3D is optimized for. The park did open around 1880 but it has been in continued use since then so although there are still many old coins left, those coins are covered by a carpet of trash.

Nonetheless, I remained undaunted and carried on.

The settings on the CZ-3D were as follows: Discrimination set at zero. Ground Balance at 3.5. Volume at 4.5. Sensitivity at ~4.2. Enhanced mode. Eight inch stock coil.

I detected for two hours and dug only repeatable high tones regardless of the depth of the target. Below are the results

3 nickels
1 quarter
1 dime
3 memorial cents
5 beaver tails
1 round pull tab with beaver tail attached
2 square pull tabs
2 bottle caps
3 wine screw caps
6 pieces of can slaw
1 bent rusty nail
1 piece of aluminum wire
1 unidentified piece of brass

30 pieces dug
8 good targets
22 trash targets

approx 27% of the targets were good. The oldest coin was a 1959 nickel.

Not bad for a spot of the park that I and others have hit heavily in recent months.

Thank you for looking!

The Mystery of Plated Gold

yaquigrande — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:09:47 +0000

I found yet another ring today. I hunted with my good friend Patton from the Friendly forum and at one point we were joined by another friend and hunter from the Friendly, Stevouke.

I was hunting with the CZ-3D and toward the end of the hunt, I got a nickel signal. It was a repeatable high tone that sounded deep. The pinpoint verified that the target was six inches deep. I was expecting an old nickel but instead, I found a ring at the bottom of the hole.

The ring looked to be made from gold so I immediately looked for markings. The first thing I noticed was a 1/500. I didn’t need to look anymore. I knew this was a gold plated ring. The complete marking reads: 1/500 10K R.G.P. –>M-H.
Seems like a lot of information for a plated ring.

1/500 gold. Does that mean his great-great-great-great grandpa was 100% gold?

The mystery to me is; if gold is so stable, why do gold plated rings turn to muck under the ground?

This ring retains the gold plating on the inside of the ring but it’s all gone from the outside.

At any rate, I like that the CZ-3D gives a high tone on 90% of nickels and on about 40% of the square pull tabs, and since gold often comes in at those readings, I think more rings are on my future.

Iron Semantics

yaquigrande — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:57:27 +0000

Do you want to discriminate iron? Or do you want to identify it? There is a subtle difference here. To be sure, your detector has to identify iron before it can discriminate it.

I believe the term discriminate comes to us from the time when detectors only had one tone and had no visual identification system. Basically, the machine would beep and then you would adjust a discrimination knob until the beep stopped. This was how you could tell if the beep was iron or if it was something else.

Nowadays, with the digital displays and with the multiple tones to help us id the targets under the ground,I think it’s important to know when the detector has identified iron. Knowing if your ground is laden with iron is very useful. Also in some machines anyway, if you discriminate iron, you may miss good targets sitting next to the iron. In other words, let the machine tell you when iron is present.

I run my machines wide open and I let the detector tell me when the iron is there. It’s all about getting more information about what’s under your feet.

Does it make a difference? I think so.

Thank your for looking and Happy Hunting!

Silver coin number 13 –with the CZ-3D

yaquigrande — Sun, 20 May 2012 01:48:42 +0000

I went out this evening to hunt my honey hole with the CZ-3D. I decided to put the eight inch coil back on the CZ and hit the site with a more relaxed attitude.

Well, my strategy paid off with a repeat of this morning’s hunt (plus a few nickels). First I hit a dateless Buffalo nickel. The CZ correctly identified the coin as a nickel with a nice repeatable signal. The coin was barely three inches deep. Next I hit three Jefferson nickels –1941,1949 and 1979, all correctly identified with a high tone using the Enhanced mode. Finally, the CZ gave me a nice, repeatable signal on the High Coin slot. When I dug the four inch hole, a beautiful 1944 Mercury silver dime stared at me from the ground. This is my first silver coin found using the CZ-3D.

Freshly dug Buff at my honey hole

Fresh out of the hole

Somewhat cleaner

Silver coin number 12

yaquigrande — Sat, 19 May 2012 19:27:42 +0000

I met fellow forum member lawdog1 this morning for a hunt in my silver park. Lawdog1 had asked me to let him know when I got a signal worth digging so he could check it with his AT Pro. I was hunting with my AT Pro as well. Eventually, I got a signal typical of this park. It was a mixed signal with mid tones and high tones. What got my attention was the quality of the high tones and the fact that the high tones repeated from multiple angles. After lawdog1 checked the signal we dug it up and this is what came up:

Dirty

Clean!

The dime was only five inches deep or so and there is no telling why the signal was the way it was. Right before I found this dime, I had gotten a signal that bounced from 51 through 53 and back. I dug up a 1936 Buffalo nickel in great shape except for the gash I put on it. Sigh! The nickel was only about four inches deep.

Fresh from the dirt

In such great shape and I ruined it!

Last, as I was digging up pull tab and foil signals, I came across a bouncy signal on the high forties. No particular thing about this signal made me dig it other than it was in the high forties and repeatable. When I first saw the pendant, I thought it may be just brass or something like that. Once I cleaned it though, I think it may be gold plated.

Gold plated?

The shell was about five inches deep.

All in all not a bad hunt. When I left, lawdog1 was still hunting. I wonder how he did.

Thank you for looking!