Tom_in_CA
Gold Member
- Mar 23, 2007
- 13,837
- 10,360
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- 2
- Detector(s) used
- Explorer II, Compass 77b, Tesoro shadow X2
Got contacted by a fellow, whose elderly brother passed away a few weeks ago. Over the years, the brother had mentioned gold coins, and how he buries them. Then now, before passing away, on his hospital bed, he tried to tell his brother exactly where they were buried. The man passed away that night, so the surviving brother only had a few clues to go by, via ramblings from his brother waining in and out of consciousness. The clues were various things like "by the wall", and "1.5 feet apart", and so forth.
The fellow had said "gold" though, with no mention of silver. The brother already knew his his brother collected and stashed coins (they'd talked about it over the years). But now that he's passed away, he rented a bob-cat tractor, and tried to follow the instructions/landmarks that his brother had said in his last days. He scraped various parts of the farm yard down to a foot, and then used a pipe-locator detector he'd rented from a rental yard somewhere. To no avail.
He got ahold of me via t-net forum, where I guess he deduced I was in the area, close by. I accepted the invite.
At first, I tried using my standard machine Explorer. But was immediately be-devilled by tons of trash. The rural yard had had trash-burn barrells/pits, and endless junk strewn about, for 70-odd years. There was no way I was going to strip-mine all that junk out, nor was I going to try to guesstimate and dig "only big signals" (d/t that's a never-ending guessing game, and small objects on top can fool you into wondering if it's a big-object-deeper, etc....). That's when I went to get a 2-box machine "TM-808" loaner from the local dealer here in my city.
That did the trick. When the 2-box unit is super-finely tuned, it can find only objects domino or butter-knife sized and larger. But realistically, only items sardine can sized or bigger (when not super finely tuned, and when at knee height, rather than super close to the ground). Thus it effortlessly passed up the zillion nails and nuisance foil, tabs, clad, etc..... in the yard. Still though, lots of flattened soda cans, large hinges, horse-shoes, etc... that the 2-box machine gets. I probably dug 100 pieces of large junk out of that yard. But eventually, 4 coin-containers did get found. Not too deep. Less than a foot. So depth was not the issue of needing the 2-box. It was more an issue of being able to see though/in/around all the small stuff, to *only* see the bigger stuff.
The deceased man was said to have buried "gold" and never made mention of "silver". Thus the brother who commissioned the hunt was puzzled by the silver, and lack of gold. Also his brother had told him 6 containers, and we only found those 4 so far. Thus perhaps there's more there.
We did find scattered pockets of clad (30 or more each in holes here and there) with evidence that they'd been part of a purposefull stash. Because I found fragments of fabric still enclosing some of the handfulls of clad. So it's possible that a 5th cache was filled with clad, but it got scattered around his yard when he'd gone through with the tractor a few days ago.
Anyhow, the total of silver coins is a few thousand silver coins I'm guessing. And the agreement was for 5%. I'll be giving some to the detector dealer for the loaner machine.
Here's some pix. I failed to get any pix of the intact jars (the one pictured is one of the 4 that had broken open in the ground). But later, I'll get some more pix to post from my host, who was taking some pix as well. The wooden box in one of the pix was because one of the 4 containers had broken open, so we had to sift through the dirt to pull out all the coins (that one was filled with silver quarters). And the plastic bin in the last pix is an example of some of endless just we were having to dig. The soup can tops were about the smallest target that the 2-box machine could find (if listening for slight whispers, and held close to the ground finely tuned). I could have passed more of the smaller types junk like that, but I was afraid that if gold coins were in something as small as a pill-box or snuff-tin, I didn't want to risk missing that.
The type silver coins was all "bag" silver. Just common roosies, mercs, quarters, halves, etc... Also a tube full of silver 1 oz. "rounds" (commemoratives, or whatever you call them). And a single morgan dollar: 1880 p. Also one of the containers had odd-ball stuff in it like modern mexican coins, costume jewelry, and about 7 or 8 rolls of Susan B. dollars, an Ike dollar, etc...
A friend of mine has tractors and heavy equipment. So sometime when he has time, and is in that area on business, we have permission to continue the hunt. We'd scrape off 6" at a time, I suppose, and repeat scan.
The fellow had said "gold" though, with no mention of silver. The brother already knew his his brother collected and stashed coins (they'd talked about it over the years). But now that he's passed away, he rented a bob-cat tractor, and tried to follow the instructions/landmarks that his brother had said in his last days. He scraped various parts of the farm yard down to a foot, and then used a pipe-locator detector he'd rented from a rental yard somewhere. To no avail.
He got ahold of me via t-net forum, where I guess he deduced I was in the area, close by. I accepted the invite.
At first, I tried using my standard machine Explorer. But was immediately be-devilled by tons of trash. The rural yard had had trash-burn barrells/pits, and endless junk strewn about, for 70-odd years. There was no way I was going to strip-mine all that junk out, nor was I going to try to guesstimate and dig "only big signals" (d/t that's a never-ending guessing game, and small objects on top can fool you into wondering if it's a big-object-deeper, etc....). That's when I went to get a 2-box machine "TM-808" loaner from the local dealer here in my city.
That did the trick. When the 2-box unit is super-finely tuned, it can find only objects domino or butter-knife sized and larger. But realistically, only items sardine can sized or bigger (when not super finely tuned, and when at knee height, rather than super close to the ground). Thus it effortlessly passed up the zillion nails and nuisance foil, tabs, clad, etc..... in the yard. Still though, lots of flattened soda cans, large hinges, horse-shoes, etc... that the 2-box machine gets. I probably dug 100 pieces of large junk out of that yard. But eventually, 4 coin-containers did get found. Not too deep. Less than a foot. So depth was not the issue of needing the 2-box. It was more an issue of being able to see though/in/around all the small stuff, to *only* see the bigger stuff.
The deceased man was said to have buried "gold" and never made mention of "silver". Thus the brother who commissioned the hunt was puzzled by the silver, and lack of gold. Also his brother had told him 6 containers, and we only found those 4 so far. Thus perhaps there's more there.
We did find scattered pockets of clad (30 or more each in holes here and there) with evidence that they'd been part of a purposefull stash. Because I found fragments of fabric still enclosing some of the handfulls of clad. So it's possible that a 5th cache was filled with clad, but it got scattered around his yard when he'd gone through with the tractor a few days ago.
Anyhow, the total of silver coins is a few thousand silver coins I'm guessing. And the agreement was for 5%. I'll be giving some to the detector dealer for the loaner machine.
Here's some pix. I failed to get any pix of the intact jars (the one pictured is one of the 4 that had broken open in the ground). But later, I'll get some more pix to post from my host, who was taking some pix as well. The wooden box in one of the pix was because one of the 4 containers had broken open, so we had to sift through the dirt to pull out all the coins (that one was filled with silver quarters). And the plastic bin in the last pix is an example of some of endless just we were having to dig. The soup can tops were about the smallest target that the 2-box machine could find (if listening for slight whispers, and held close to the ground finely tuned). I could have passed more of the smaller types junk like that, but I was afraid that if gold coins were in something as small as a pill-box or snuff-tin, I didn't want to risk missing that.
The type silver coins was all "bag" silver. Just common roosies, mercs, quarters, halves, etc... Also a tube full of silver 1 oz. "rounds" (commemoratives, or whatever you call them). And a single morgan dollar: 1880 p. Also one of the containers had odd-ball stuff in it like modern mexican coins, costume jewelry, and about 7 or 8 rolls of Susan B. dollars, an Ike dollar, etc...
A friend of mine has tractors and heavy equipment. So sometime when he has time, and is in that area on business, we have permission to continue the hunt. We'd scrape off 6" at a time, I suppose, and repeat scan.
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It's true that all the "treasure lore" stories are bogus (lost mines, stolen payrolls, ghost stories, blah blah blah are a dime-a-dozen stories). Yet this was a tame-commissioned hunt. And I suppose that some of them too could be wild-goose chases, where a family only has a "suspicion" (that's not necessarily even true).
