Interesting Story on Why it may NOT be Correct to Disc Out Iron

spdrus

Jr. Member
Aug 25, 2010
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...in some instances.

Just read a story on Yahoo about the largest uncut emerald ever found in North America..here is a passage:

Terry Ledford, 53, found the roughly 2-inch-square chunk rimmed with spots of iron a year ago on a 200-acre farm owned by business partner Renn Adams, 90, and his siblings. The rural community of Hiddenite is named for a paler stone that resembles emerald.

Notice the phrase how the emerald was 'rimmed with spots of iron'.

Anyway, this find occurred in North Carolina so if any of you are MD'ing in that area you may not want to be so hasty to discriminate out or not investigate your iron signals.

That would be my luck..I'd be going along and pat myself on the back for 'not wasting time on that iron signal' only too happy to spend the next 20 minutes trying to pinpoint a penny and my buddy would dig it 'just in case' and wind up with a 2 million dollar find - LOL!!
 

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Smudge

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Jul 9, 2010
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I wonder if there'd be enough iron in the stone to set off the detector.
 

deepskyal

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Aug 17, 2007
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Natrona Heights, Pa.
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Smudge said:
I wonder if there'd be enough iron in the stone to set off the detector.

Don't take much iron to set off a machine. I dug many "ghosts" just small iron flakes from some long gone relic.

Al
 

Tom_in_CA

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Mar 23, 2007
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spdrus, I think the "iron" they are talking about, is some sort of naturally occuring mineralized crustration, or something to do with lapidary. I don't think they're talking about nails, or whatever we md'rs think of when talking about "disc'ing out iron".

In any case, there will ALWAYS be the lone-cases, where someone finds something masked by iron, leading to the knee-jerk reaction "gee, I guess we should never disc. out iron". But it's all in the odds: Trust me, iron disc. has netted more good finds, and upped the goodie ratio, far higher than if we were still in the "dig all" days of pre-discimination. For example, if you took the "better safe than sorry" stance of digging all, including iron, to some ghost towns or urban demo's or turfed city parks, etc... you might go psycho, and simply give up and leave for "greener grounds", as you would average thousands of iron, per each conductor, in some nasty places.

It's sort of like blackjack: If you have 20 in your hand, do you take another hit, or do you hold? Well of course, you hold, EVEN though the next card "might" be a one card, right? Why's that? because odds are, it's not going to be a one-card. The same is true for playing the odds in detecting.
 

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