Tag Archives: coils

Deploying the BIG GUNS

10 Jun

*** Before you read this post, read this post about the time Dick Stout spoke to Congress about our hobby. Plus, check out the eye candy. No, I am not talking about the pictures of Stout.***

I decided it was time. No more pussyfooting around. It was time to dig deeply and carry a big coil.

I am not, generally speaking, a fan of large coils. As a coin shooter, I have never found a use for them. An 11 inch coil has been the limit for me. However, with my recent acquisition of the Blisstool V3, I became the proud owner of a 15 inch coil. This thing looks comical and to quote my fellow hunter Steve Ukena, it looks as if I am compensatin’.

Yet, there is a spot at a local old park. I hunted it once or twice with no good results. This spot is a sea of bottle caps. It is interesting how some areas of our city parks will get a certain personality. Sometimes it is pull tabs, sometimes it is bottle caps, and sometimes it is both.

So I drive by this particular area and think about the next time I will hit it. You see, this area has always been open. Since the very beginning of our city’s history. It never had any structures. I know, as I have been told by someone in their 80’s, that after swimming in the river or in the municipal swimming pool that stood nearby, people would sit in this very spot and have pick nicks. I can see how this may have happened all the way back to the late 1800’s.

There is evidence that this spot has been covered with silt from the river during the many pre-1960 floods that occurred here. There is a layer of clay on top of what I surmise to be the original sand.

This has led me to believe, that the very old coins and stuff are buried deep under the silt and the bottle caps. I spent some time with the Deus and the Bliss with the 11 inch coil but I am not penetrating deep enough; thus my decision to apply the 15 inch coil to the dirt here. I did the first excursion yesterday at lunch.

I was happy with the coil’s pinpointing ability. The Blisstool doesn’t have an all metal pinpointing feature. You pinpoint the old fashion way. I like to use the front of the coil
and use the wiggle method. I tested this yesterday and was able to pinpoint relatively shallow targets with precision. Of course, I had to work spots from every direction because of the coils large footprint but this does not represent a hindrance to me. I worked to empty a large enough area to be able to manually ground balance the Bliss but although I dug 5 pieces of trash from a 2×2 area, more trash was revealed that was previously masked. Such is the ground I hunt.

Last  I want to mention a phenomenon that I will call the “Now you don’t see it, now you do” syndrome. I have experienced it several times in the last 5 years. I select an area somewhere that’s utterly hopeless. I stick to it and after a number of excruciatingly painful hunts I cross a certain threshold and voila! keepers! It goes beyond removing trash; I believe it has to do with my brain getting to know the particulars of the dirt, almost as if a psychic connection is made between the site and me; as if the ghosts of the past finally break through the mist and whisper in my ear…
Laugh all you want, but I believe this is why I consistently pull silver out of certain parks where others don’t.

Anyway, it’s getting hot out there. The dirt is beginning to harden and time’s awastin’. Time to dig!

Thank you for stopping by.

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The 10.5 inch coil is in

9 Apr

The mailman delivered the 10.5 inch coil for the CZ-3D at 5:10pm! We never get the mail that late. Must be a new guy.

This meant that I only had ten to fifteen minutes to try the new coil. I put the new coil on and ran to the old trashy park (aka Riverside park). I purposely hit an area of the park that I have hunted before and so has everybody else lately. The first thing I noticed was how much heavier the larger coil was than the 8 inch coil. I am really going to have to move the control box off the rod to my belt.

Also, right away, I noticed I was picking up deeper targets. I could tell because I could really hear the modulation working. With the 8 inch coil, I didn’t really hear the difference in tone between targets. I believe this was due to the fact that with the 8 inch coil I was only hitting the top six inches of dirt, whereas with the 10.5 I was going much deeper. I pinpointed a few of the signals and sure enough, most were hitting the 7 and 8 inch depth mark.

Eventually, I had to dig a few to see how the new coil was really doing. The first couple of signals were foil signals. I selected them because they sounded deep. Only one of the foil signals turned out to be a deepish –7 inches deep piece of very old foil. The other was actually a very small piece of foil on the surface.

On to some high tones I went. I picked a couple of very faint high signals but I never reached them. Digging very deep holes with the Lesche is just awkward. The next three high tones I dug were all in the Nickel slot. The first two were the ubiquitous beaver tails, both around six inches deep. The last signal of my 15 minute trial was a nickel signal and this one turned out to be a 1964 Jefferson nickel, only five inches deep but completely on its side. I chuckled because I knew I had just read that area with the V3i this morning and this signal surely came up as iron trash on it.

And that’s the whole reason why I bought the CZ-3D. This machine puts me on a category of signals that other detectors will read as undesirable trash. I don’t mean to pick on the V3i. A couple of Etracs ran over that same piece of dirt and they didn’t dig any of the nickels that I’ve recovered since with the CZ-3D either. It’s just the nature of these coins and these machines.

The CZ-3D was created for just this situation; coins that read as trash.

Thank you for looking!

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