Ugly J
Jr. Member
Rainy day here, so I figured I’d finally go through one of my containers of beach and dirt finds before tossing everything into the cleaner. I’m terrible about cleaning coins after a hunt—I usually throw them in a bag, then eventually dump everything into a big protein container until it starts getting heavy.
I always give everything one last look before cleaning it, though, and this batch turned out to be pretty fun.
There were five wheat pennies, including a 1912-S that looks like somebody shot it with a BB gun, a 1964 Roosevelt dime, and several dollar coins from 1979, 2000 and 2010.
One of the stranger finds was a piece of a Sampson brass tire plug. I did a little digging on that one and found that Sampson brass plugs were an early puncture-repair system for pneumatic tires. Robert William Sampson of Whitestone, New York patented several versions of these devices around the turn of the 20th century, with examples carrying an April 19, 1898 patent date.
That little piece of brass might actually be my favorite surprise out of the bunch. I had no idea what it was when I dug it.
And I still get a kick out of finding piles of quarters. When a spot starts giving up quarter after quarter, especially at the beaches, it usually tells me I’m working ground that hasn’t been completely hammered. Lots of coins gets me just as excited as anything because sooner or later, mixed in with all those good coin signals, something better usually shows up.
The other pictures are just some of the rest of the finds from the pile. One is all the foreign coins, cheap jewelry and odds and ends, and the other is the usual beach trash—redneck rings, fishing weights and all the stuff we dig along the way. Nothing too exciting there, but it’s always fun seeing how much random stuff ends up in the pouch after a bunch of hunts.
Not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon—sometimes you get to hunt your finds twice.
I always give everything one last look before cleaning it, though, and this batch turned out to be pretty fun.
There were five wheat pennies, including a 1912-S that looks like somebody shot it with a BB gun, a 1964 Roosevelt dime, and several dollar coins from 1979, 2000 and 2010.
One of the stranger finds was a piece of a Sampson brass tire plug. I did a little digging on that one and found that Sampson brass plugs were an early puncture-repair system for pneumatic tires. Robert William Sampson of Whitestone, New York patented several versions of these devices around the turn of the 20th century, with examples carrying an April 19, 1898 patent date.
That little piece of brass might actually be my favorite surprise out of the bunch. I had no idea what it was when I dug it.
And I still get a kick out of finding piles of quarters. When a spot starts giving up quarter after quarter, especially at the beaches, it usually tells me I’m working ground that hasn’t been completely hammered. Lots of coins gets me just as excited as anything because sooner or later, mixed in with all those good coin signals, something better usually shows up.
The other pictures are just some of the rest of the finds from the pile. One is all the foreign coins, cheap jewelry and odds and ends, and the other is the usual beach trash—redneck rings, fishing weights and all the stuff we dig along the way. Nothing too exciting there, but it’s always fun seeing how much random stuff ends up in the pouch after a bunch of hunts.
Not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon—sometimes you get to hunt your finds twice.
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