How old is your metal detector?

[pescadore]

My everyday detector now is a Troy Shadow X2 from 1998-99. Great machine !!

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[U.K. Brian]

My Tellus (manufactured under licence from Whites by Savo Whites) is around forty years old now and still works well though the correct batteries haven't been made for years. There's a stuck on paper label on the right of the coil proudly stating it has a waterproof coil !

 

[Tom_in_CA]

Hey UK brian, if that's 40 yrs. old, then that would make you amongst the first in Britain to be doing hobbyist detecting there, right? Because if I'm not mistaken, the hobby didn't get going there, till perhaps the early 1970s. Unlike here in the USA, where it took off earlier than that. So can you comment on who was amongst the first to be detecting there, what kind of machines they were using, types places they hunted, and what they were finding ? thanx !

 

[U.K. Brian]

Detecting started on a small scale in the 60's. By 1973 "JoanAllen" (which ended up being the biggest detector shop in the country within a few years) estimated that 30,000 were detecting on and off. Joan Allen herself was a coin dealer originally who was asked to display a few homemade detectors in her shop window in 1969/70. They sold straight out and the boom followed.

Mine detectors were used by a few but had to be modified. Some had an adjustment on the coil which improved sensitivity to smaller items. As the industry grew Best Electronics, C-Scope, Q-Tone, Fieldmaster, Location Technology, Protovale grew to fill the demand and Whites, Fisher, Gardiner began to be imported in larger numbers. John Webb, Tony White, Tony Hammond were a few of the more prominate detector users.

Hunting sites were anywhere you liked as most farmers/landowners didn't believe detectors would actually work. Finds were the same as today with the drawback that detector performance was so bad, especially when discriminators first arrived, that many stuck to the use of pulse machines and just had to live with a few thousand years of iron littering the ground almost everywhere. Very small items like almost foil thickness silver coins remained difficult to locate but U.S. advances in gold hunting machines helped. The Tesoro Eldorado for instance proved very successful at finding items other detectors would pass over without a beep.

I dread to think how many are detecting now which is making it difficult to find land. I was on a small beach this morning at 6.00 and there were ten or eleven already searching !

 

[Tom_in_CA]

Brian, thanx for the recap on detector usage history over there!

 

[U.K. Brian]

This book pushed many into detecting.

"Turn 60 cents into a million dollars" by Warren Smith. I think its been out of print for years but for those in the U.S. It GUARANTEED you could find treasure near your home. Published 1967.

 

[digger27]

I bought both of these used for $20.
The 71b does not work but the Judge 2 does.
I believe this non-automatic Judge came out in 1974 so also 40 years old.