mcl
Sr. Member
Hello,
Today was the first time I've ever gone metal detecting. It was a ton of fun and since I did a lot of reading on here in preparation, I figured I'd share my story and finds. I can't promise what I found will be very interesting since it looks like the other people who posted in this section today found some pretty wild stuff, but I'll give it a shot.
My parents recently purchased some land adjacent to their house where I used to play as a kid. I've always thought it would be cool to metal detect there, for two reasons. First, I actually did find a mercury dime in the mud on the property as a kid -- sadly, I lost my footing on the way home as I was showing it off to a friend, and it went into the abyss of an alfalfa field. I've always wanted to find that thing again. The second reason, and really a lot more cool than the first, is that this parcel of land is about half of the total area that used to be a coal mining town between the late 1880s and about 1910. While literally all evidence of such is gone, at one point, there were well over 100 "houses" in the mining camp, a rail line (connecting the mines with a larger rail system), a saloon of sorts, a baseball field, and other sorts of things associated with the community. Two of my great-great grandfathers (and their sons) worked in the mines, and I've always thought it would be cool to find some traces of things from the workers/rails/community/etc. This is of course exceedingly unlikely, as virtually everything (including the railroad ties and wood from the houses) was sold when the mining operation closed just over 100 years ago.
Well, I finally got my first chance to do some metal detecting on the property, which was not only the first time I've ever done it, but also the first time the property has ever been searched with a metal detector. My mother had bought a Harbor Freight 9-Function metal detector for my father as a gift. He was a little leery of it I think, so I volunteered to test it out. I found a lot of information on this forum about it last night and decided to put the advice I found to use. As suggested, I read every single line of the manual (even the part that told me to wear ansi-approved gloves/goggles while I "assembled" the device). I gathered the test samples described in the manual, went through the tutorial on how to make a "DI" or a "KO" noise come out of the speaker, and before I knew it, I was discriminating a nickel from a silver quarter. I grabbed a tiny, handheld gardening shovel, threw the detector over my shoulder, and marched over hills and hills of alfalfa.
I'll be honest, I actually never made it to the area where I had planned to detect. I got a signal while I was still walking and from there, it was a wild, action-packed adventure of mosquito slapping and metal.. detecting. I literally never walked more than three feet before I would find another signal, dig up my prize (never had a single "false" alarm), refill the hole, and repeat. I ended up digging holes for about 6 hours before the mosquitoes finally won. But thanks to the tips on this forum and this wildly awesome Harbor Freight metal detector, I give you my inaugural "find" list.
Technically, the first thing I found was one of those pivoting dental mirrors you use to look inside your mouth, but I wasn't even officially looking for stuff yet, and that's gross so I didn't include it.
First thing I found was this bottle shoulderpad. It's not really a cap, it's more of a wrap. There was a bunch of glass in the gap between the edges, most likely from whatever bottle this scarf belonged to.
It didn't take me long before I started to find a whole bunch of hinge things. I don't know what they went to, I can only imagine that some sort of farming apparatus must have just fallen entirely apart all of a sudden, leaving only its hinges as a memento. This next picture is a bunch of those hinges and some other random stuff, like a broken nut.
Believe it or not, I legitimately thought I found a box of buried treasure next and was really excited. It's kind of embarrassing really. It was surprisingly deep in the ground, maybe six inches or so, laying perfectly flat. I was sure that it was an iron box, full of something great. It turned out to be a broken axe head.
A couple of feet away I found this. It could be a hand file, or a chisel, or something less exciting, I'm not really sure.
Pretty sure this next thing is a petrified ear.
A great big sprocket of some sort, which has a square hole in the middle.
This is the handle of something. Or maybe the adjustment buckle for a horse satchel.
Probably hard to tell, but whatever this is had a pretty good sized "8" embossed/raised in the metal. I'm not really sure what the significance is, maybe a part number or something.
Whatever this is, it broke my gardening shovel, and I had to walk back to home base and get a bigger one.
Thought I hit the mother load with this one -- the detector was letting out one long, continuous "DIIIIII" (as the manual described it). Apparently, it is a disc off a planter. Or it was, but now it's broken.
I honestly have no idea what this is. It could be martian.
This was one of the few non-iron things I found. It has a really cool design, but I have absolutely no idea what it is from, and that's all I could find of it.
Not metallic, but collectively, my favorite find of the day. As I was digging, I kept finding these weird little black rocks. I'm pretty sure, after washing them, that at least some of them are varying qualities of coal, perhaps remnants of the old mining operation. Probably not, but the story sounds good to me.
I found a lot of other stuff too. In fact, I filled up about a third of a five gallon bucket with rusty treasure. If you want some better pictures, let me know. I had no idea the forum automatically resized the images so I did a lot of cropping/resizing. Anyhow, this made for a nice trip home, since I normally don't have much to do. Might not be Morgan dollars, swords from shipwrecks, or an ancient bronze statue, but it was a lot of fun, and I appreciate the help I got from this website. Hope you enjoyed my stash as much as I did.
Today was the first time I've ever gone metal detecting. It was a ton of fun and since I did a lot of reading on here in preparation, I figured I'd share my story and finds. I can't promise what I found will be very interesting since it looks like the other people who posted in this section today found some pretty wild stuff, but I'll give it a shot.
My parents recently purchased some land adjacent to their house where I used to play as a kid. I've always thought it would be cool to metal detect there, for two reasons. First, I actually did find a mercury dime in the mud on the property as a kid -- sadly, I lost my footing on the way home as I was showing it off to a friend, and it went into the abyss of an alfalfa field. I've always wanted to find that thing again. The second reason, and really a lot more cool than the first, is that this parcel of land is about half of the total area that used to be a coal mining town between the late 1880s and about 1910. While literally all evidence of such is gone, at one point, there were well over 100 "houses" in the mining camp, a rail line (connecting the mines with a larger rail system), a saloon of sorts, a baseball field, and other sorts of things associated with the community. Two of my great-great grandfathers (and their sons) worked in the mines, and I've always thought it would be cool to find some traces of things from the workers/rails/community/etc. This is of course exceedingly unlikely, as virtually everything (including the railroad ties and wood from the houses) was sold when the mining operation closed just over 100 years ago.
Well, I finally got my first chance to do some metal detecting on the property, which was not only the first time I've ever done it, but also the first time the property has ever been searched with a metal detector. My mother had bought a Harbor Freight 9-Function metal detector for my father as a gift. He was a little leery of it I think, so I volunteered to test it out. I found a lot of information on this forum about it last night and decided to put the advice I found to use. As suggested, I read every single line of the manual (even the part that told me to wear ansi-approved gloves/goggles while I "assembled" the device). I gathered the test samples described in the manual, went through the tutorial on how to make a "DI" or a "KO" noise come out of the speaker, and before I knew it, I was discriminating a nickel from a silver quarter. I grabbed a tiny, handheld gardening shovel, threw the detector over my shoulder, and marched over hills and hills of alfalfa.
I'll be honest, I actually never made it to the area where I had planned to detect. I got a signal while I was still walking and from there, it was a wild, action-packed adventure of mosquito slapping and metal.. detecting. I literally never walked more than three feet before I would find another signal, dig up my prize (never had a single "false" alarm), refill the hole, and repeat. I ended up digging holes for about 6 hours before the mosquitoes finally won. But thanks to the tips on this forum and this wildly awesome Harbor Freight metal detector, I give you my inaugural "find" list.
Technically, the first thing I found was one of those pivoting dental mirrors you use to look inside your mouth, but I wasn't even officially looking for stuff yet, and that's gross so I didn't include it.
First thing I found was this bottle shoulderpad. It's not really a cap, it's more of a wrap. There was a bunch of glass in the gap between the edges, most likely from whatever bottle this scarf belonged to.
It didn't take me long before I started to find a whole bunch of hinge things. I don't know what they went to, I can only imagine that some sort of farming apparatus must have just fallen entirely apart all of a sudden, leaving only its hinges as a memento. This next picture is a bunch of those hinges and some other random stuff, like a broken nut.
Believe it or not, I legitimately thought I found a box of buried treasure next and was really excited. It's kind of embarrassing really. It was surprisingly deep in the ground, maybe six inches or so, laying perfectly flat. I was sure that it was an iron box, full of something great. It turned out to be a broken axe head.
A couple of feet away I found this. It could be a hand file, or a chisel, or something less exciting, I'm not really sure.
Pretty sure this next thing is a petrified ear.
A great big sprocket of some sort, which has a square hole in the middle.
This is the handle of something. Or maybe the adjustment buckle for a horse satchel.
Probably hard to tell, but whatever this is had a pretty good sized "8" embossed/raised in the metal. I'm not really sure what the significance is, maybe a part number or something.
Whatever this is, it broke my gardening shovel, and I had to walk back to home base and get a bigger one.
Thought I hit the mother load with this one -- the detector was letting out one long, continuous "DIIIIII" (as the manual described it). Apparently, it is a disc off a planter. Or it was, but now it's broken.
I honestly have no idea what this is. It could be martian.
This was one of the few non-iron things I found. It has a really cool design, but I have absolutely no idea what it is from, and that's all I could find of it.
Not metallic, but collectively, my favorite find of the day. As I was digging, I kept finding these weird little black rocks. I'm pretty sure, after washing them, that at least some of them are varying qualities of coal, perhaps remnants of the old mining operation. Probably not, but the story sounds good to me.
I found a lot of other stuff too. In fact, I filled up about a third of a five gallon bucket with rusty treasure. If you want some better pictures, let me know. I had no idea the forum automatically resized the images so I did a lot of cropping/resizing. Anyhow, this made for a nice trip home, since I normally don't have much to do. Might not be Morgan dollars, swords from shipwrecks, or an ancient bronze statue, but it was a lot of fun, and I appreciate the help I got from this website. Hope you enjoyed my stash as much as I did.
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