Building a metal detector,,, your choice...

[Gonehunting]

If you got to build a new metal detector to totally discriminate only one metal...which would it be... Aluminum, Iron, (pickyour own).... and why
Me personally aluminum... no pulltabs or cans

 

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[Charlie P. (NY)]

I guess I might agree. Aluminum is a real problem in some parts.

But good 'ol iron can be a horror in a lot of the spots I hunt. It's also easy to lock out iron without missing "good" stuff. Lacking a low tone or outright discrimination would make for an awful lot of noise.

Trouble with trying to discriminate aluminum in the real world is that detectors don't know one metal from another (I think iron is the exception). They go by condictivity and the eddy currents on the objects surface and are calibrated to "assume" it's a coin sized object within 12" of the surface. When you mask a certain range you invariably lose good metals that overlap.

According to my notes I've hit aluminum all along the TID scale from 33 to 70 on the scale to 99. Removing that would also remove almost all gold jewelry, most gold coins, all silver and clad coins less than 25¢ and possibly some nickels. The good news is that aluminum often does not hold a consistant VDI number when swept from different directions.