I am a little stumped!

[deepbeep]

This will be a long post, so go get some coffee. I am hoping somebody can give me some insite. Please understand, I am not telling this story to complain, because I am having a blast! But here it my delema:

In 1988 I bought my first detector. It was a Garrett GTA1000. The first day I had it, I found an old rusty gun along the great trail. I was hooked! Over the next 15 or so years I hunted pretty regularly. I was out at least 2 or 3 times a week. I mostly hunted the yards of older homes, some old churches and older schools.

I have a collection of about 250 silver, hundreds of wheats, and probably about 30 indians as a result. I have kept every coin I ever found, including clads. I always said I was keeping everything until I reach retirment age, then selling and buying the "best-state-of-the-art-machine" in the market at that time.

Well, the old GTA1000 didn't quite make it to retirment. So, I recently bought a Garrett GTAX550. I know neither of these machines are in the catagory of the best Whites, or a Minelab, but they certianly aren't junk machines either.

Now to get to the point. I bought the GTAX about 6 weeks ago. Since then, I have found and hit some incredible spots.....

1. A "ghost town" with 6 old building that used to be taverns.
2. 5 yards around old houses that were built in the mid to late 1880's
3. A total of 9 one room school foundations found on a map of 1903.
4. 4 old parks from around 1900 that have been heavily hunted.
5. An old stone church foundation with 1822 carved in the stone step.

Of all these places, the oldest coins I have found so far were a couple of wheats in yards. NOT ONE silver coin in over 100 hours of swinging the detector. Is it getting that hard to come by silver? Im I doing something wrong? I would love to hear some input.

Like I said, I am not complaining......I have loved the scenery of these old places, and it is just great getting out again. I am just trying to analize just what is going on and try to improve and learn in the process.

Thanks for chiming in!

Tim

 

[TORRERO]

I believe this is the issue...
take a look at this thread on Treasure net..

http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,250913.msg1794874.html


You can see my comments also about it being very hard anymore to find tons of stuff.
Metal Detecting has been around for almost 40 years as a hobby we all enjoy.
Many many people do as you do, so I say, if your not finding anything where there should be something.... then the proof speaks for itself... IT'S BEEN HUNTED !!

 

[deepbeep]

Torrero,
That thread was a very interesting read.

Thanks, Tim

 

[nova treasure]

Maybe trying to cover to many sites and not enough at just one ?

Nova Treasure

 

[BuckleBoy]

Actually, this is your problem:

http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,102361.0.html


Keep hunting and you will find what you're looking for.



Regards,


Buckleboy

 

[MEinWV]

Maybe trying to cover to many sites and not enough at just one ?

Nova Treasure

I think this statement is the one to think about. Thanks Nova! 8)

deepbeep, You got the detector 6 weeks ago and you have hit all those places.

The other examples of why you are not finding much are all good ones, but the key to success today calls for patience and a very slow pace. The "ghost town" you mention might take me 6 weeks to cover in itself.

Almost every site out there has been detected to some degree, some more than others.

When you go to a site these days, you have to go slow, and go into the tight areas in the brush around the outer limits of the area. The outer areas have probably not been hit as heavy as the obvious spots closer to the foundations and the lawns.

Good luck in your future hunts, and let us know how you are doing.

 

[deepbeep]

Well, I appreciate your input, and understand what you are saying. However, please understand, I was at that ghost town for 12 hours each day on 6 seperate days over a 2 week period. That is 72 hours of swinging my coin in that hollow.

Not an indian, not a wheat, and not a silver was found. About 30 cents in clad, and lots of junk. A few cool artifacts such as an axe head, and hinges off on old building. That's it. Now, if I had found even one merc.......I would have kept hitting it for a long time, but come on......geesh. Let's be realistic, if it is going to take 90 to 100 hours of metal detecting to find one merc, or a couple of wheats......we all might as well just start taking walks and collecting alluminum cans off the berm of the road. It will add up WAY quicker, and we can call it our treasure.

Tim

 

[Sandman]

There isn't much I can add to the examples of the posts that were given. Expect to hunt areas where other hunters find to difficult. That pile of heavy bushes weren't there many years ago. Also using the top of the line equipement helps reach the depths where some coins settle too depending on the type of soil. Also, and this is most important, remember the size of the coils field is only around 2" at it's deep end into the soil with a concentric coil and wider with a DD, but you still need to overlap your sweeps. Shallow junk can mask the deeper coins and the Minelabs can by pass the shallow junk and respond to the deeper stuff. Try it with a large nail that is disc out and then place a gold ring under the nail and see if you can still hear it with the same settings.

 

[Uncle Willy]

Silver coins haven't been minted since 1964. Detectors have been around since 1931. I've been detecting for 45 years. That's why silver isn't popping out of the ground everywhere, plus back in the old days people didn't have any money to lose. Coins were valuable and people carried them in a coin purse not loose in their pocket and if they dropped a coin they hunted until they found it.

To give you an example - when I was a kid my mom would give me a quarter and that would pay my way into the movies, buy me a box of popcorn, a coke, and a candy bar. What would that cost you today? People were working for fifty cents to a dollar a day. Money was precious. That's why old coins ain't just laying around everywhere.

Bill

 

[deepbeep]

OK, I am about to leave on an adventure this morning. I have been researching for the past month. I have found the location of a foundation to a general store that was in business from 1864 to 1940. In 1940, the building was torn down and moved. Beside the general store, there was a train depot. It was also torn down and moved. I can't say why, or it could give away the location.

Durring my research, I found old articles that talked of "thousands of people" arriving by train to this destination. (Let's just say it was somewhat of a hub in the 1880's and 90's.) It spoke of ladies "rushing" from the train to the general store for refreshments after the long hot train ride. It was a "thriving business" for over 70 years, ran by 3 generations of the same family.

The foundations and old railroad bed are still in place, and on property owned by the decendants of the original founders. I have been given exclusive permission to metaldetect the area. To their knoledge, nobody has before.

I found a picture of the depot and store, next to a bridge. Although the railroad, and the old road bed have been abandoned, the bridge remains, are still in place as a reference point.

It is now 3 miles from the nearest exhisting road. I find it hard to beleave it has ever been found and detected. It was only by a huge amount of hard work researching, and a LOT of luck that I happened to be able to pinpoint it's location.

I will be backpacking into it this morning. If there isn't silver there....................than it is all gone! lol "Thousands of people" over a 76 years had to have dropped something!

One picture I found showed about 60 people in Victorian clothing, the ladies with parasols, men in vests, milling around loading onto stagecoachs, wagons and buggies. The artical said they had just arrived on one of 7 daily "arrivals" on the train. The ground around them was just mud and dust. Something should be there!

I will post later tonight one way or another with pictures.

Wish me luck!
Tim

 

[ivan salis]

that do sound good --good luck

 

[BIG61AL]

Fact is that silver coins will be harder and harder to find unless you get lucky enough to actually detect an unsearched site. This is my forth year detecting and with hundreds of hours under my belt I have only two silver coins found. That averages out to a single silver coin every two years. I think if i didn't find what little silver/gold jewelry that I do find I'd quit this futile effort in a heartbeat. I planned for this to be my retirement reward - detecting when ever I wanted BUT, if it keeps getting harder and harder to find keepers I may have to find something else to do when I retire.

 

[joecoin]

There are some who believe that coins keep getting deeper as time goes by. I am one of those believers. You have to have a machine that will go deep.

NASA Tom has some great articles about coin depths and the passage of time.

 

[limegoldconvertible68]

Deep, I hope you did well today but in my experience the place has probably been hit and hit hard before. You mention that it was in use during 30's and '40's. Back in the late 1970's people who used that store where still fifty maybe sixty years old. The metal detectors during that era were good and could get decent depth. Being from the Midwest I know for a fact that those kind of places got blitzed during that era. In my own research I don't even look at places that existed after 1920 anymore. Like you EVERY single place from those years draws few and I mean few good targets. Don't get me wrong I still hunt those places because they are easy to find but I keep my expectations at near zero.

 

[lastleg]

deepbeep:

If your detector is hitting non-ferrous copper or brass at good
depth it is not the detectors fault. Silver has been recovered at
most every out-of-the way location in the U.S. Those 'antique'
machines got the cream of the crop in the 60's through 80's.
Those early detectorists hit nearly every ghosttown like vacuum
cleaners using sifters and detectors.

But they missed spots, Go to the outskirts of the 'town and
work inward digging all signals and you shall be rewarded.

Also sift the 'dumps'. Before long you will stop counting coin
finds start digging history. Leave it like you found it. Best wishes.

lastleg

 

[TORRERO]

There are some who believe that coins keep getting deeper as time goes by. I am one of those believers. You have to have a machine that will go deep.

NASA Tom has some great articles about coin depths and the passage of time.

I can believe to some extent this is true, but the reality is that when (in the way past) I have hit
a spot that had not seen much hunting or even had been hunted but was a big area with some targets left, I found
that although there were deep targets, there were also just as many old
targets that were not so deep that I picked up.
An Indian head just 2 inches, thought to be a Zinc, or a Seated Liberty Dime, thought to be recent
pocket change, but was (wow) 140 years old...
In sand no less... (neutral mineralization soil and no trees roots or rocks)
Yes there were also deep targets, but this tells me that I was digging deep targets and shallow targets
that were old,
So no I don't believe (what I think the writer is eluding to) that if I go out and buy a $20,000 machine
that I will suddenly be swamped with thousands and thousands of wonderful coins that nobody else
could find, because they all sank to deep for everyone elses machines to find..
Yes, I think "Occasionally" you will get a coin or 2 that was out of reach of the persons before you...
But I don't buy into the concept that there are thousands of targets out there that I could have...
HA !!! If only I had a deeper detector....
Just not happening..
Richard

 

[deepbeep]

Richard,
I have to agree with your post. In the past week, I have found a wheat at 1" and a rosevelt dime at 3". I think it totally depends on the soil type and the climate. I think the frost brings many older coins back tward the surface. I also think you are right about an expensive machine finding SOME coins everybody else misses, but enough to justify the extra cost for that reason alone, I think is questionable.

Tim

 

[TORRERO]

There are some who believe that coins keep getting deeper as time goes by. I am one of those believers. You have to have a machine that will go deep.

NASA Tom has some great articles about coin depths and the passage of time.

I have another take on this....
My thought is that if all the coins in an old site have been taken, (or most of them) then there really
are non left to go deeper over time... so no mater the machine, you won't find much because most things are already gone.

I do have a story though that does back up the "someone had a machine that did not go very deep"
theory and I happened onto the site.
Over time you learn to look for signs that indicate if a site has been hunted or not.
I always try to judge a site by what I am finding to tell me what I want to know about wheather a site
has been hunted or not.
That said, I remember about 8 years ago, finding an old Baptist Church on my way to the beach.
Built around 1860's it looked like a good spot to check.
In front of the front doors, the steps went down (big church) to a flat area that was a dirt driveway and small parking lot.
Hunting in this area I started getting some good deep signals and dug several wheat's and 3-4 Indian
heads and 2 Barbar dimes ....
Boy was I in hog heaven....
But something was missing....
I did not find anything within the first 3-4 inches...
No clad coins no pull tabs no trash, all these targets were 4' + or -
Then I went out into the big side yard and in the open area I got another Barber dime, but nothing else.
In a flower bed around the side, I also got another Indian.
What does this tell me.. ??
What can you read into this ?
Someone with a basic machine that got 4-5 inches had been there before, probably had found some
really good stuff... ( I found no silver quarters or Half's or any type of big targets IE buckles or such)
They had taken ALL the shallow targets, all the clad, (this church was still in use)
Basically everything within 3-4 inches and bigger targets like Halves to an even greater depth...
It was a very good day for me, but I will always wonder what the other guy got..
That is how I read a site...
If I find nothing... someone has been there and cleaned house...
I also look for very shallow or surface trash that looks dirty, like it was dug and left, I also look
at the ground when I get a strange signal... it there already the remains of a dig hole ??
Like someone started to dig, then covered the hole back up, but this spot does not match
the surrounding ground ??
If you can read a site, it will tell you volumes about who might have been there before you...
This does not mean you will always see some kind of signs, I cover my holes well...
and if its been years since someone has been there...
you are likely to find lots of clad, and nothing old....
and indication that in the 70's or 80's someone worked this place well, then never came back...
and now you for the first time in 20 years are hunting it again...
I have done this a lot... lots of clad and nothing old...

Just more to keep in mind while you are out

 

[joecoin]

I urge you to read this:
http://detectorstuff.com/2009/news/love-is-deep-nasa-tom
to move this thread to the next level of discussion.

 

[allen]

someone may have beaten you to those sites.