time4me
Bronze Member
- Aug 30, 2005
- 1,296
- 44
- Detector(s) used
- E-Trac, Explorer II, Excalibur
It seems I never get out metal detecting anymore. I live in northern California, and I haven't been detecting in at least a year near home. The only time I seem to detect anymore is during our annual summer vacation in Cape Cod where I love to water detect with my Minelab Excalibur, and when my family vacations at my wife's folks' home in Michigan.
Cape Cod is coming up at the end of July, and I hope to have some nice jewelery finds to post up like I did last summer when I found a man's platinum wedding band and a nice 14K crucifix ring.
We are in Michigan this week, and my in-laws have a mid 1800's farm house on 20 acres. I've hammered the yard and surrounding area pretty hard over the past 10 years during vacations here, as has my father-in-law, and now my nephew. While a coin or two still pop out each year, they are getting very few and far between, so we went looking for a new place to detect this week. Well, we found it! We were driving to visit my wife's sister in another town on Tuesday, and on the way we saw a very old (I need to research it to determine how old) estate house on an upscale street that is being remodeled into an office building, and the surrounding property which takes up about the whole block is being re-landscaped. We turned the car around and talked with the foreman on the job who gladly granted us permission to come back to detect the grounds as long as we stay clear of the heavy equipment. They had already moved a lot of dirt around, and scraped off a lot of the existing topsoil.
We had a couple of ours this morning to hit this new spot, so my father-in-law and I got up real early and drove the 30 minutes to the property. We got there about 6:30am so that we'd have an hour or so before any workers showed up.
I was really pleased with my finds for the couple of hours that we detected this morning...
In addition to the 7 modern clad coins, I found 6 wheat cents - 1917, 1918, 1942 (2), and 2 unidentifiable dates.
I also found a really cool, and heavy Junior Police badge. Unfortunately, the top part with the eagle was broken off of the badge when I found it, but I went back over the hole, and what do you know - I found the eagle!
Now for the two firsts for me. The first, is a crotal bell. At least I believe this is a "crotal bell". I have been reading about people finding them for years in my W&E Treasures magazines, and always hoped to find one. This one is small, but has a nice design on it. After I cleaned out all of the dirt, the little ball inside came loose and the bell rings again after all of those years in the ground.
And the second first for me, and the best find of the morning, was a key date coin. I have never found a key date coin before, and didn't even realize I had found one until I got back to the house and looked it up in the coin book. It was the only indian head that we found today, but it turned out to be a 1908. When I looked it up in the coin book, I saw that the 1908 was not so special, but the 1908-S seemed to be a pretty good coin, so I turned mine over, and sure enough, there was the S staring back at me. It seems to be in pretty nice condition too. If anyone knows anything about how to grade a coin, please let me know what you think this one might grade at if you can see the detail well enough in the pictures...
We did not find any silver in the couple of hours of detecting this morning. My father-in-law found a handful of coins, mostly clad, but had two wheaties.
I have two more days here in Michigan where I can hit this property, and I am sure my father-in-law will continue to hit it as long as he can before it gets re-landscaped. We are pretty bummed out tonight, though, as it has been storming hard and pouring for the past five hours or so. I just hope it lets up by morning.
I will post again tomorrow or Friday when we have the chance to get back to the property to detect some more to let you know what else we find.
Jim
Cape Cod is coming up at the end of July, and I hope to have some nice jewelery finds to post up like I did last summer when I found a man's platinum wedding band and a nice 14K crucifix ring.
We are in Michigan this week, and my in-laws have a mid 1800's farm house on 20 acres. I've hammered the yard and surrounding area pretty hard over the past 10 years during vacations here, as has my father-in-law, and now my nephew. While a coin or two still pop out each year, they are getting very few and far between, so we went looking for a new place to detect this week. Well, we found it! We were driving to visit my wife's sister in another town on Tuesday, and on the way we saw a very old (I need to research it to determine how old) estate house on an upscale street that is being remodeled into an office building, and the surrounding property which takes up about the whole block is being re-landscaped. We turned the car around and talked with the foreman on the job who gladly granted us permission to come back to detect the grounds as long as we stay clear of the heavy equipment. They had already moved a lot of dirt around, and scraped off a lot of the existing topsoil.
We had a couple of ours this morning to hit this new spot, so my father-in-law and I got up real early and drove the 30 minutes to the property. We got there about 6:30am so that we'd have an hour or so before any workers showed up.
I was really pleased with my finds for the couple of hours that we detected this morning...
In addition to the 7 modern clad coins, I found 6 wheat cents - 1917, 1918, 1942 (2), and 2 unidentifiable dates.
I also found a really cool, and heavy Junior Police badge. Unfortunately, the top part with the eagle was broken off of the badge when I found it, but I went back over the hole, and what do you know - I found the eagle!
Now for the two firsts for me. The first, is a crotal bell. At least I believe this is a "crotal bell". I have been reading about people finding them for years in my W&E Treasures magazines, and always hoped to find one. This one is small, but has a nice design on it. After I cleaned out all of the dirt, the little ball inside came loose and the bell rings again after all of those years in the ground.
And the second first for me, and the best find of the morning, was a key date coin. I have never found a key date coin before, and didn't even realize I had found one until I got back to the house and looked it up in the coin book. It was the only indian head that we found today, but it turned out to be a 1908. When I looked it up in the coin book, I saw that the 1908 was not so special, but the 1908-S seemed to be a pretty good coin, so I turned mine over, and sure enough, there was the S staring back at me. It seems to be in pretty nice condition too. If anyone knows anything about how to grade a coin, please let me know what you think this one might grade at if you can see the detail well enough in the pictures...
We did not find any silver in the couple of hours of detecting this morning. My father-in-law found a handful of coins, mostly clad, but had two wheaties.
I have two more days here in Michigan where I can hit this property, and I am sure my father-in-law will continue to hit it as long as he can before it gets re-landscaped. We are pretty bummed out tonight, though, as it has been storming hard and pouring for the past five hours or so. I just hope it lets up by morning.
I will post again tomorrow or Friday when we have the chance to get back to the property to detect some more to let you know what else we find.
Jim
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. Crotal bells, we find alot of them here in the Detroit parks, Namely, Rouge Park. I have about 10 of them. In the lower areas of this park, there used to be farms and their only mode of transportation in the 1800's was by horse or sleigh, so naturally they put gangs of bells on their horses, and apparently they lost quite a few bells. Anyway, Congratulations on the finds.....Not GE
