Old house sites with tons of old nails, nails and more nails-what detector?

[makahaman]

Hi everyone, it is so nice getting all of the wonderful advice from everyone on this web site. I need help in getting a good metal detector for the land sites, they are mostly old ones from early 1900's to 1800's. These old house sites has tons of nails from the house because they were made of wood and tin. Any suggestions on a good easy to use metal detector would be much appreciated. I used to have a XLT and it worked alright I found a whole bunch of goodies with it. I hear that minelab is supposed to be top notched but how complicated is it to use compared to Whites? Help, Help, Help!! I need all of your wisdom with this matter, I also want to be able to change coils to find caches and possible privies. Thank very much!!

 

[erikk]

I have to say Minelab Explorer.XS,2 or SE all are nearly identical. The only sites I hunt are old homesites,demos really trashy boarded up houses in the ghetto. I used several different detectors before the ML and they would false all the time in the trash especially on old rusty nails. I got the ML and started hunting in conductivity sounds and I was still digging some nails but only deeper rusty ones. After reading and testing I changed everything and started hunting in ferrous tones. Now there is no mistaking nails or deep rusty iron. People say it will null out on nails and you will miss targets nearby. The trick is to hunt with very little or no discrimination at all. People may cry and moan its too noisey or how can you stand it but you really do get used to it after a bit and when there is a coin with a nail nearby you will hear them both. When you start to get to know an Explorer you don't look at the display very much at all its all in the sounds. When your coil is over a coin it makes a very distinct sound,it may be broken up or mixed in with other sounds but the sound is always there.Also you can almost tell the shape of the object by the sound it makes,its hard to explain but people that have them know what I mean. Its really not that complicated to operate one but it does take time to learn the machine and you have to dedicate yourself to it if you really want to dig good stuff in trash filled soils. Its not perfect it is quite heavy and will make your elbow/shoulder sore after a couple of hours but over time you get used to it and they make a harness which I plan to acquire when I cant swing it anymore. They are wonderful machines but you have to be willing to put the time in on the machine. If you get one and dot like it you can sell it here or ebay for pretty much the same money you have in it and nothing is lost,it may not be the machine for you,plenty of people cant stand them. Whichever machine you decide to buy make sure its fun for you,thats the most important part.

Ditto. Also Michigan Badger had some good comments.
Get an Explorer II or SE. Make sure you get a small coil too. I use an Explorer II.
I find that if I use a small coil, ferrous tones hunt in IM -16 or -15 and really go slow I can get good stuff amongst the nails. Now if there is a carpet of nails over the coins it's going to be impossible for any detector to find the deeper coins. Only solution is remove the nails/iron stuff.

The old homesites with lots of iron present a dilemma that we all face....limited time and too many targets. I think the Minelab's do a great job at identifying iron. From my experience, Tesoro's, White's and Fishers fall short in this area.

Bob

Have you tried the Fisher F-75? I have 2 EX2's with a 5,8,10.5, 12 & WOT coil and I can tell you the F-75 will do better in the nails/iron

 

[EasyMoney]

I challenge ANYONE in the State of Oregon that thinks a MInelab or Garrett of any type that is not a PI, and is not designed specifically for nugget hunting who thinks they can beat any Compass that I chose to match it aganst for depth in all-metal and discriminate and picking out coins in and between any iron or steel objects, from a thumbtack size up to a piece of steel 6 inches long and up to 1/2" in diameter. I am talking about targets in the soil that I chose (some real nasty soil too) that have not been freshly buried. We are talking about a nearly blind test here.

The Compass that I use will be stock with an 8" coil. The Minelab should have an equivalent factory 7-9" coil.

Any takers?

You better think real hard about it if you do, because what the kid is doing to the cat is what will happen to the Minelabs and the Garretts when you do. This won't be the first time I've done this.

Have fun all..

 

[erikk]

I challenge ANYONE in the State of Oregon that thinks a MInelab or Garrett of any type that is not a PI, and is not designed specifically for nugget hunting who thinks they can beat any Compass that I chose to match it aganst for depth in all-metal and discriminate and picking out coins in and between any iron or steel objects, from a thumbtack size up to a piece of steel 6 inches long and up to 1/2" in diameter. I am talking about targets in the soil that I chose (some real nasty soil too) that have not been freshly buried. We are talking about a nearly blind test here.

The Compass that I use will be stock with an 8" coil. The Minelab should have an equivalent factory 7-9" coil.

Any takers?
I would like to give it a shot with my Fisher F-75 but since I am 3500 miles away that isn't going to happen anytime soon. Might be fun to try the Excalibur too

You better think real hard about it if you do, because what the kid is doing to the cat is what will happen to the Minelabs and the Garretts when you do. This won't be the first time I've done this.

Have fun all..

 

[EasyMoney]

Good response.

In my writings I didn't mention any Fishers or White's or Tesoros. In fact, in really iron-deficient soil my Tejon beats the socks off anything I've seen, to include any Minelabs. It doesn't work well here though.

I took a certain Compass to the showroom of White's Electronics Main Plant here in Sweet Home, Oregon. After I was shown the MXT and the DFX under their indoor lighting conditions and by their expert both the MXT and DFX showed a max of 11-12 inches on a nickel in disc. In all-metal the Compass showed 14 inches max. When the gentleman left ( I won't mention his name) I quietly brought in a certain Compass detector and measured 14 inches on the same nickel and 16 inches in all-metal. The receptionist was out too.

A Fisher 1270 will air test at 18 inches on a nickel in good conditions and even KellyCo mentions it's amazing depth capabilities as being 18-20 inches on a coin! I have yet to this day seen a Minelab that can beat a good Fisher for depth, and so far, the White's beats any Minelab I've ever seen for cherry-picking.

Now this may not seem like a viable claim because I've heard and read some real whoppers about Minelabs getting up to three feet on a nickel! If one got that kind of depth (or even over 20 inches) it would naturally seem that it also got a proportionate amount of searching done on the side of the coils and radiate downward and into the soil. This would create a lot of chaos and a lot of noise and mahem, or one would think, especially since Minelabs are notorious for not centering as well as most detectors. In fact, Minelab owners purchase pinpointers more than those who use any other brand..

I won't name names, but there is a well-known gentleman who repairs detectors for a living and he concurs with me, that for the most part Minelabs do not do as they are said to do and that most of the enormous and ridiculous claims of their owners are just a lot of hype. I am not saying that a Minelab is an inferior machine, but that they are probably not what most people claim them to be. I think they are almost unbeatable as beach hunters though, they and the Fisher 1280, and it's not because they use multiple freqs either, since the machines automatically pick and run only 1-3 of several freqs to operate at any given time. They do not search with all running and searching and processing all at the same time.

I once knew a wealthy man who bought a high-end BMW 7 series and after about 3 years of it letting him down too often he finally put it in the front of his house and planted flowers in it, just to remind him that "price is not everything". I see Minelabs selling for less than half what they sold for yet are only 2 years old. A high price does not always equate to high value, does it? Minelabs do however ground balance VERY, VERY well and handle bad soil EXTREMELY well.

I am no longer impressed with Garretts. There was a time when they were the king of depth with their super low frequency searching, but that was in the 70's. I had one that commonly got 10-14 inches in all-metal on deeply buried rusty old pennies on black sand high-salt beaches in Puget Sound, Washington. But that was then, and this is now. White's aren't my favorite detector but I'd take one of them over any Minelab because they are more user-friendly and a bit cheaper and I've seen them operating side-by-side by competent operators and they seem to operate not only easier, but a lot better too..

Just my experiences and observations.

Have a pleasant day all. I'm ready for a good cup of coffee.

 

[makahaman]

Hey Easy money was wondering about purchasing another metal detector for my collection and dont know which one to get. Any suggestions? Hey I used to own a compass metal detector and believe it or not I found an old ink bottle with it. NO one believes me to this day but I swear I found it with that metal detector. I sent the metal detector back to compass and was going to have it fixed but decided not to, what a mistake! I should have kept it but didn't think much of it at that time, that was when I was a kid and didn't know any better. Hey so out of all the detectors on the market these days which brand do you think I should go with? I want to get something kind of simple and not too hard to work with as I am an amateur compared to most of you guys on this site. Right now I have a Whites IDX which works okay. I was thinking about getting a Fisher 1270 I heard some good things about it but not too sure how that machine works. Well, hope to get some of your input. Aloha

 

[golddust]

The best machine i ever seen in nails and i still use one is a compass 77b older tr machine,some of the other tr machines do ok to but the 77 was the best one they made.

 

[EasyMoney]

Well, I don't claim to know everything about every detector, but in most cases if someone wants to hunt in heavily infested iron places he needs to own something with at least three of the following. The more of these toys he has, the more likely the machine will work well in soil filled with a lot of nails, BUT a high gain one will often defeat the purpose.

# 1 High frequency continual search (over 10 K, and not a multi-freq one)
# 2 A CONCENTRIC coil. Not a coaxial or DD. VERY important!
# 3 8" or less in diameter. A 3" coil would be just about ideal.
# 4 Low gain (not running full power all the time)
# 5 A choice between automatic and manual ground balance built into the detector
# 6 EXTREMELY fast auto-retune (auto return to ground balance) recovery time
# 7 Very fast auto-threshold

There is still much debate as to whether a 2 filter, 4 filter or 6 filter works the best, because it really depends on how the circuitry is designed.

A Fisher 1236-x has a very well praised iron blanker (it lowers sensitivity) and is one of the very few that has #5 ratings across the board all the way, on Metaldectorreviews.com. Most Minelabs have iron blankers too but with so much gain they may still have too many troubles with too much linear scrap such as nails, screws and wire. White's and Minelabs have determinants to display how much iron is in the soil or is in a target, but that does not help in canceling all that noise. An MXT has some real problems in that area but a DFX does not have as many.

A 1270 has so much #$%$^% power in it (so does the Tejon) that they are absolutely overwhelmed in high magnetite and high hematite soil. So do Nautiluses. They do well in hunting relics because of all this power but they also have a lot of troble with a lot of nails, etc when used with full power, and bad soil makes things even worse.. Yes, the 1270 has an iron blanker too, just like the 1236, but it must have it's main sensitivity pot turned way down in such cases. In doing so, it nearly matches the 1236 in it's behavior..

If you want to see something that works fairly well in trashy areas get a cz with a digital screen, because it has a bit too much discrimination built into it to begin with. Turn the sensitivity down, cancel iron completely, notch out foil and do not dig anything that gives a double-blip or that has an elongated response one direction and a short one the other. Anything as big as a coke can or nearly that size or closer will always give a bell te;ephone sound on my cz-70, but it still won't beat the discriminating capabilities of the Compasses and some of the cheaper Tesoros overall.

If I were about to buy a new detector for your purposes I would strongly consider a Silver Sabre uMax or maybe one grade up. Get an Explorer or a DFX if you like to tinker and want reasonably good depth and target Fe analysis, or get a CZ3 if you like a real good one for older coins and use them wherever they work the best for you..

Those Tesoros are a lot more detector than they are often given credit for though. They are lightweight, cheap, and get 80% or better of all targets that people with $1000 machines do. They are superior discriminators and cherry-pickers too. MOST lower-powered detectors cancel iron better than powerful, expensive high-gain ones. White's classics, and other White's low-end detectors though, do not. They are very sensitive to linear steel and iron, such as nails. I own one. They do make fairly good relic machines though, in spite of their lack of really good depth.

BTW, an Ace 250 will drive you completely nutZ in that scenario. I used to own one. Notice, this is past tense as in "used to".

If your soil isn't high mineral (iron) I would look for one of the old 100 K's. I have had other brands of old 100 Hz detectors but the Compasses were the best of the best. Most people think the 77B auto (super fast retune) was the best of the lot. You can find one on e-Bay for less than $150 and if it doesn't work well in your soil you can always sell it again for the same money. Many people still know how well those old Compasses were made and still work. Again, I would look very strongly at the lower priced Tesoros.

 

[Willy]

Well well well, someone else who has tested out ML detectors and found them lacking. I've had people say I'm crazy, but side-to-side testing of ML BBS detectors (in -ground targets) against other detectors have shown (to me) that they're mostly 'show' and no 'go'. I'm up here in B.C. and hunt ground that rivals anything in the world for 'nasty'. I'll not get into my test results.. do a search. Aside from ML bashing (which is always fun), I figure that I should chip in with my $.02 regarding Compass detectors. I have a Compass X-100 that I'd put up against any VLF detector made when it comes to depth and disc. It's a heavy pig, but comes the closest to an all-round detector that I've seen. Look up some of the old field tests and scope out the features. If Compass would have had the money to 'update' the old X-100 with modern electronics, it would be a top seller today. For a nail patch, sticking it in TR mode will put the hurt on any of the 'slow sweep' detectors out there (can't get any slower than no-motion). With both a 2 filter (ultra slow sweep) and 4 filter (fast sweep) mode.. it's hard to beat. There's a Compass users Yahoo group where I've posted pics of my (modified somewhat) X-100 for any that are interested. ..Willy.

 

[EasyMoney]

Hey Willy!

Excellent post.

And well said.

The X-100 and X-200, Compass Scanner series all were originally designed by the same man who repackaged and improved the original first ground-canceling discriminator made my A.H. Pro Detectors back in Ohio. That man was George Payne, the original chief engineer at White's Electronics and the one who created the Technetics line of detectors 13 miles from here in Lebanon, Oregon.

I am with you on your claims, and lucky for we two we have basically the same guts in our machines, so the depth is nearly identical, however, the Challenger series may have a bit of an edge on my Scanner series for depth, and that's why I don't ever challenge them. They as you say also have one of the very best TR modes ever made. Remember, that it was Compass Electronics that invented the DD coil and the vari-filter on the Scanner series?

The X-100 and X-200 had a couple of things that my current ones didn't, and that is the ability to switch between filters, a definite plus. It wouldn't be the first time though that I won a $$$ bet against a Minelab owner for all I claim, and it won't be the last either. There are still people who really believe the ML hype that other people tell them.

My response to them is much like the time when I raced a man who was driving a V-12 Jag against my BMW 325e (stock, and running 5.5 seconds @ 0-60) . We were at a light with a bottle-neck dead ahead. I gunned it and so did he. Tires were squeeling, smoke was boiling, and off we went with me gaining a half car length when the squeeze finally hit us right in the face about 50 yards down the road. He gave me the sign of his obvious disconsolement, and number of known parents (or was it his IQ score?) and as he caught up with me and called me his "son", I yelled back at him and said; "Just go get a good car and you won't have that problem".

I like to call a spade a spade, and although I do know that most Minelabs are really excellent on most beaches and that some of them make real good nugget hunters too, I also know that they seldom are what people say they are.

And yes, the soils here AND in BC are some of the meanest soils straight out of the darknesses of H--l. I have seen soils here that only a PI will work in, unless you call 1" a good depth on a bottlecap. On some of the beaches here and especially Washington State the soil is completely black, as in jet black, and people in other parts of the world couldn't in their wildest dreams ever imagine how bad it is.

Peace be with you Willy. And happy hunting.

 

[golddust]

Actually the dd coils are better for nails an ruff uneven ground especally using a high feq detector.The lower the filters the better the seperation of target the old vlf were like 1 filter,the more filters the better it will handle minerlized ground.

 

[EasyMoney]

Look in "Find's Treasure Forum under "Tesoro Forum", dated 11/26/06, 11/27/06, and 11/28/06. The discussion is about how the concentrics discriminate better than DD (wide-scan) and that DD's handle high iron dirt best, just as they were designed for by Compass Electronics nearly 30 years ago...

George Payne, the Father of really good metal detectors and the ex chief engineer of White's Electronics, and the chief engineer and owner of Teknetics Metal Detectors and Jack Gifford the chief engineer of Tesoro Electronics give some very good info about the same subject and as to why this is so.. Just type in their names on your browser and enjoy the education.

George's info reads a bit harder because he is speaking as an engineer, but both give the same info, that DD's are best for bad ground, and that concentrics are best for target separation. They also as I recently wrote, say why too.

'Nuff said.