<<I see alot of posts on using screwdrivers and coin probes>>
Hi. I used nothing but probes and screwdrivers for 10 years. Generally, they are for fairly shallow targets but the better you get with it, the deeper you can retrieve.
Back in the old days, I use to put some solder on the tip of a screwdriver. This made the tip softer than coin metal.
After awhile you get the feel of it and can almost always tell a coin from anything else like rocks, etc. Eventually, you can get so good at it, so as to tell the difference between a large or small coin.
You have to have good pinpointing skills too. That helps alot! I could usually hit the coin dead center with the first probe or two.
Here's the technique I used. Push probe into the ground until you feel it hit your target. There's often even a sweet sound associated with the tip of the probe tapping on a metallic disc (coin) that was distinquishable from all other targets.
Believe it or not, I could use my probe to ID many targets. I usually could tell if it was a coin, tinfoil, a rock, and many times, even if it was a ring that I was probing.
Anyway, I hit the target with my probe. Then I slowly tapped my way across the surface of the coin with the probe until I reached the edge. Once I found the edge, now my mind's radar has a perfect picture of the position of the coin. At that point I knew the excat spot in the turf that my coin would eventually emerge. Knowing that spot, I could take the probe, pull it up from the edge of the coin, and move the probe handle sideways, back and forth. This creates a fissure from the surface, down to the coin. It also makes the opening soft enough that you can slide a finger down into the hole if need be. Often, this was all I needed to do and could retrive the coin with my fingers from that point. Just have to be careful of the occasional glass, lol.
Then I would relocate the coin with the probe and usually tap my way across it's surface, but this time to the opposite side of the coin from the fissure. Usually, now your probe is on a slight angle.Where the probe enters the ground and fissure is above one edge of the coin, whereas the probe's tip is on the opposite edge of the coin. And then you have the earth in-between as a leverage point for your probe.
So then once the probe tip is on the opposite side of the coin from the slit, I pry the coin over to the slit. With practice, you can usually put the coin up on edge this way, and right in your slit/fissure.
With practice, you can often use the probe (a screwdriver is easier) alone to then coax it to the surface, by putting the tip all the way past the coin and under it and working it up. This isn't easy usually. Almost every single time, it is easier to slide a finger into the fissure and pinch the coin between the probe and your finger and then pull it up. Which makes for a nice recovery. It's almost as though you get a reading, locate and position it with your probe, and then merely reach down and insert your finger into mother earth and pull the coin up with exacting precision.
Before the advent of real coin probes, and before I invented the practice of putting soft solder on the tip of a screwdriver, every single coin would come up marred though. So it's a better practice for looking for clad and zinc coins, than for older copper and silver.
A word of caution...you can do some nasty damage in the lawn with a probe too, since the nature of targets and the ground is that it can sometimes be tough to find, let alone retrieve your target. You sometimes wind up needing to make a hole anyway. But if all you have is your probe, you're hole isn't very pretty.
In the olden days my father made a probe with a 10 inch long skewer on it and he fashioned...and get this...a brass doorknob on the end of it. He did this because we use to detect in some bad areas in Chicago and one time he did have to threaten to bury the skewer into a hoodlum when he demanded my dad hand over his detector. Another time he turned it around and used the brass knob upside the head of a doberman pincher that was attempting to bite him while he was detecting.
Hope this info helps,
Paul T.
~CO2
