Wheres the deep coins?

olstinker

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Apr 6, 2014
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Where's the deep coins?

I have a large schoolyard near me that I have been working pretty steady. The amount of coins in this 50+ yr. old schoolyard is amazing. There are spots where 1 swing may get 3 or 4 different signals.I have pulled over 100 coins out of this yard and have barely scratched the surface. The problem is not 1 single silver yet. The oldest coins Ive pulled are mid 60's. Do you think the newer coins near the surface are masking the older deeper coins?
 

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Hot zone

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I keep working a 1930s school site, found lots of clad including a couple 66 quarters... I have been told it was searched very hard in the past and I believe it... The older school site is a private home...the old logging show fairground nearby turns up the same 60s and later coins... The newer logging show fairgrounds has produced $50 worth of mid 70s and later clad and 1 indian head penny and a silver ring... It is what it is... Around here the best stuff is in someone's yard!
 

Tom_in_CA

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When was that Tom? The first motion machines?

Bryan, the very first motion discrimination machine (aka "vlf disc" or "GEB disc" or "SPD" depending on the manufacturer) was a bounty hunter Red Baron. It came out in 1977, if I'm not mistaken. But it didn't catch on very well. The following year (1978) Whites came out with their version of motion discrimination with the 6000D series I. THAT one sold like hot-cakes, since ... Whites was the bigger-namesake known-brand.

These two early first motion discriminators were heavy. And few people learned or wised up to hip-mount them. So you ended up have a STRONG wrist trying to whip/swing that thing after awhile. Doh! The faster you swung them, the deeper you went. So it almost looked as if you were golfing. Guys would "whip" them over suspected targets, to bring the target in better.

Within a few years (mid '80s) the swing speeds had been slowed way down, w/o loss of depth. That helped minimize masking, as the older ones had a long "tail" to their signals.
 

Jeremy S

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But now, if you talked to anyone who lives around that park, they'd probably tell you "no one's ever hunted that park". Why? Because md'rs avoid it like the plague now, d/t it's junky, clad-ridden, and the easies got picked off decades ago. However, that might not be a fair comparison, since this park goes back to the turn-of-century :)

That's exactly how you could describe a park that I recently started hitting in town. It dates back to the mid 19th century but is absolutely loaded down with trash! After a few hours I did pull out a few bucks in clad but my trash pouch was full. My second trip back I found a shallow 1919 wheat penny that has been in a ground a long time. I'll probably hunt it a few more times before I get completely burnt out on the trash.


The few old coins and silver that I have found in local pounded-to-death parks where either deep below a layer of pull tabs and nails that I found first, or were in the woods or edges of the park. I pulled a nice 1947 quarter at the base of a very old tree stump in a place that has been picked clean.

I have found a clear majority of my silver coins at private property. They are still out there at the public properties, but finding them is tricky and requires a lot of work.
 

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olstinker

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Apr 6, 2014
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Well, I have pulled between $70 and $100 out of this schoolyard and not a single silver yet. Multiple 66 and 65 coins but no silver yet. It has to be there. BTW what depth should I expect to get with an F5 and stock coil?
 

fistfulladirt

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OS, that school sounds typical of the schools in my area, most built in the late 1950's and early 60's, when the one-room schoolhouses annexed to the new schools in the district. I myself tend to wish silver into these spots, when the cold hard fact is that the silver just isn't there. Keep in mind that in 1960, one dime was a lot of money, not too many kids carried money like that to lose. I remember when several of us kids would rake yards back in the late 1960's, and after a couple hours of raking, we'd each get paid a dime, and head to the candy store, lol.

If you are digging clad from the 60's, the silver would be near or at the same depth. Like the others have mentioned, these spots have been hit hard in the past. I've detected a dozen of these sites over the last few years, if I said I found more than one or two silvers, I'd be kidding myself.
 

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olstinker

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I did a rough count today. Ive pulled about $90 of clad out of this schoolyard in the last few months. Still getting hits everywhere.
 

Ol' Hiker

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As the fellow said before me.... do the math.... and any silver, if the school was built in the early 60s, will be far and few between. Do not be discouraged for even the more "modern" coins you find the better you will become in "listening" to tones... rather than reading the face plate. So with that said, I'll pass on a few hints to where you can find those "deeper" coins. Research the history of your town and find if there was horse racing in the early days. If so, research where the concession stand may have been. On these ol' deep coins listen closely for the slightest audible "tic" your machine may emit, and don't rely so much on what the readings may indicate. Many deep old coins are missed by new machines because the panel didn't indicate anything worth digging. Also search next to the street curb in front of old houses. For it was common for girls and their date to set out by the curb, leaning against the car. I've found a lot of old, gold class rings in this area. Back in the 40s and 50s, girls wore their boyfriends class ring around their neck on a small chain or wrapped tape around the ring to make and smaller and wore it on their finger. Invariably, many were lost.
I've been huntin' for decades and when the only machines we had were the old BFO (Beat Frequency Oscillators) and before VLF/TR with discrimination came out. Even on my Minelab Safari and Garrett 350 I can "milk" them to seek out more than what the owner manual and DVDs say they can do. Keep at it...the rewards are great.
 

thumper

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If that school was open in the sixtys you should at least be digging cents from the 40's and 50's. Its very common even now to have 20 yr old pennies in your pocket
 

Dave Rishar

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More nerdy site analysis junk here:

Back when I was CRHing on a regular basis, I started to get a "feel" for how coins were circulating in my area. For example, when you go through a few hundred bucks of pennies (discounting boxes that are nearly full of shiny new shield pennies), patterns begin to emerge. I was finding 1-2 wheat pennies per $25 on average, and about 20% coppers. This is what got me started with analyzing sites and logging the results in a database in the first place. If I hit a site hard and the coppers range significantly above or below this, I know something about the last time that it was hit. Likewise, if I dig up 30 pennies and one is a wheatie, I might know something there too. If a wheatie pops up again or two or more appear, it's probably not an anomaly. This also tells me something about when silver may have been dropped there, and how far it's sunk. That's also why I don't get overly angry when beaver tails, or bottle caps and clads pop up at depth either. All of this tells me about how the site was used, and how it's been hunted since.

If there's little or nothing under a certain date (typically 1965 in my experience...go figure), it's safe to assume that someone has hit it hard since then. It's also safe to assume that they missed something, but don't expect silver hordes. In all likelihood, it's been hit multiple times since then with machines of different pedigrees, which would explain why the shallow coppers and silvers (and later the deeper silvers, when cherry-picking became easier) aren't in abundance.

Honestly, I'm more excited by the large amounts of clad; I could care less about the clad itself, but it's a useful tell. You just don't find that on public property around here. The prevalence of quarters and other high conductors tells me that either it hasn't been hit in a long time, or else the person who hit it was a superbly capable high grader with a good machine. The obvious silver coins are likely gone...but if they were high grading like that, they missed the gold. I'm more than happy to clean up after people who hunt like that.

I become alarmed when there's nothing but shallow clad or, worse, nothing at all - not even trash. That tells me that someone has been hitting it hard recently and is digging the pull tabs and nickels, meaning that they likely got the gold too. A site like that is a waste of time. But a site with decades of clads piled up on it? I'll certainly dig them, but you can bet the bank that I'll be digging up the mid conductors in the process. One piece of gold makes up for a lot of trash.

Again, don't worry about the dates on the clad coins because it really doesn't tell you anything. (Pennies are more informative due to the later transition and the fact that coppers still circulate commonly.) I dug up two more '65's last weekend and only one of them looked like it had been there for a while. '65's still circulate. A '65 could have been dropped yesterday. You could get one in your change tomorrow. They turn up all the time and they frustrate me all the time. The date on the coin merely establishes the early limit for when the coin was dropped, but has no bearing on when it happened. Corrosion will tell you more. Even depth will tell you more if you're recovering other objects that can be dated in the area at the same depth. That hard cutoff in target dates does suggest that someone cherry-picked the site at some point in the past.

By all means, keep looking for the silver, but don't get hung up on the clad dates.
 

RobRieman

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They made a billion more 1965 quarters than 1966 and they only made 560 million 1964 quarters so don't get hung up on dates. By the numbers, just because you find a 1965 does not mean you were that close to silver. There just were not as many in circulation to be dropped and the silver coins were hoarded out of circulation when clad arrived.
 

Hot zone

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And sure the nickels and gold were discriminated out, but buffalo nickels were rarely found in circulation in the 1960s...and 40s nickels are still circulated today... Gold on the otherhand has always been where you find it!
 

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