10k 14k 18k and 22k

[mwaynebennett]

Men's gold rings in the USA are generally 10 k gold. That is because it is harder and it is assumed that men work with their hands and subject a ring to more abuse etc. Women's rings in the USA are generally 14k but in other countries, the gold can be a high as 22k in jewelry.

My question is about how the BH electronics evaluates the different grades of gold. Do they all show up as a pull tab, or do some of them show up as zinc or a coin?

Do any of you know?

Thanks,

Mark
Elite 2200

 

[mwaynebennett]

I just took 4 different gold rings and tested them with my Elite 2200. Three if them registered as PT (pull tab) and one as PT/nickel. I think the unique one has a higher percentage of gold which would make sense since the others were most likely alloyed with copper, which would push their signals towards the copper/silver range. My guess it that three of therm were 10k and the unique one 14k.

Do any of you have a pure gold Canadian maple leaf or Chinese panda coin they could test?

Mark
Elite 2200

 

[jim tn]

From my experience, the size of the gold item has as much to do with vdi readings as anything. I have dug small gold (charm size) that has read in the foil range and large mens rings that have read nearly in the zinc penny range. I am not a dig it all detectorist, so what gold I do get usually id's in the nickel range and then ocassionally I'll get a gold item that just sounded a bit different and I dug it. I firmly believe that if one has a detector that id's nickels well, one will get some gold. HH jim tn

 

[cal]

I also believe size has something to do with where gold registers on your detector. My QD2 registers Nickle,Zinc,& heaviest ring Screwcap. 5 dollar gold piece pulltab. CG

 

[woodwizard]

best to dig every signal and be sure-I hit a 10k ring with 14 diamonds once on a signal I almost walked away from.when hunting I take my time-as I am not in a race-hunt allmetel and dig it all-you'd be surprised what your discing out and missing

 

[Mick in Dubbo]

This question has just been gone through over on the Garrett forum. Uncle willy started it, but look for a post by Davehut. He talks about research done by the folks a Fisher. Very interesting reading on gold rings.
Mick Evans.

 

[mwaynebennett]

I looked for 15 minutes and could not find any such post by someone named "Davehut."
Will you please post the URL?

Thanks,

Mark
Elite 2200

 

[flash5153]

Its Dahut BTW, lol. http://www.findmall.com/read.php?32,1082046

 

[mwaynebennett]

I still saw no attempt to correlate percentage of gold to display reading. In other words, a 10K man's ring is 10/24 gold which is about 42% gold while a woman's 14K ring is 14/24 gold or 58% gold. In other countries, the percentage of gold goes much higher, I think up to 20k which would be 20/24 gold or about 83% gold.

The percentage of gold has to have some bearing on the displayed reading.

Mark
Elite 2200

 

[flash5153]

Well I believe you on that. But there polls were for random rings in general and where they fall in the ID scale.

Imagine the time it would take to test gold percent on the 160 rings and then to try to inform this into a test for ID.

Do you really care what the percentage is?? Well unless you was looking for a specific lost ring, then I could see your point.

M.W.B : You are getting wat too technical.

I thought it was some good info.

 

[flash5153]

I do see your point though, after thinking about it a minute. What if 100 of the 160 were almost the same karat and size ring. hmmmm

Its still good info . A Test for this is difficult no matter ,,,,because karat,size of ring, angle coil passes,this all makes a difference on how they read. Might be asking a question that cannot be answered because of these factors.

 

[mwaynebennett]

Flash5153:

Every piece of gold jewelry I have has a stamp inside designating the gold content. It would be very easy to simply look inside each ring and see if the gold content is the determining variable.

Mark

Elite 2200

PS: I am a Mechanical Engineer and I believe that if one cannot describe about what they speak using numbers, their knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory nature.

 

[flash5153]

Is that right. I have several rings in a box that are stamped for gold. 10 k. 14k ,,,that are NOT gold! And besides the size of the ring ,no matter the content of gold makes a huge difference ,,on how they show up on the ID scale. (NOT ALL 10K RINGS ARE GOING TO READ THE SAME) So if you want to get technical . You must get the size, wieght and gold content perfect and then figure what machine with what setting and ,then get your engineering skills out, and we need the perfect angle that the coil runs over the ring and then what angles change the reading.. If you can get the same reading from the same ring consistant, I'de be amazed.

You are asking a question that cannot be answered!

The info on the link above is the best around.
I tried to agree wt you but the field testers, I'm sure have already thought of all this.
Good Luck,,,, do some tests on 160 rings of different gold content and I'll be impressed if YOU can make any sense out of the results
.Are you trying to change the world one post at a time???

 

[mwaynebennett]

No, I just want any study to which I pay attention to have been done as well as possible and obviously the one with the 160 rings coudl have been done better with very little effort.

So what if you have rings that say "10k" or "14k," that information is totally irrelevant to the discussion. I said that every gold ring I had had the gold content stamped on it. I did not claim that all jewelry marked with a gold content indication was actually gold. Do you understand the logical difference?

Mark
Elite 2200

 

[dahut]

--- what detector you use, gold rings will ID in the same range on any of them. This generally includes the range from foil to screwcap/zinc cent. However there are some percentages as to where they fall in the range that seem to apply.

Fisher did a study some years ago on this subject. This is a summary of that research:

What About Those Gold Rings by Jack Ellet
We all have read, or been told, that if we want to find gold rings we must dig all the trash and hope a gold ring comes out of it.
[This is great for the masochists among us, I suppose, but it has never satisfied me. - David]
But, there is another way to increase your gold ring finds with a metal detector.

Many years ago when Fisher first came out with the CZ6 metal detector, they did a test on gold rings. That particular metal detector has a different type of discrimination than other detectors. On the lowest end is iron, next is foil, next comes round tabs, square tabs, then comes nickels, zinc pennies, and all other coins or items that have similar electrical conductivity.

To conduct the tests, they used 161 gold rings from four collections. They passed each ring across the coil and noted how it read on the ID scale. The results were interesting:

Iron - 0
Foil - 38%
Nickels - 9%
Round tabs - 15%
Square tabs - 29%
Zinc pennys - 5%

The remaining 4% were in the coin range, and of very low karat grade.

So if you have a detector that gives reliable ID, and only dig those targets in the foil and nickel range, you would find about 47% (nearly half) of all gold rings - without having to dig a lot of pull tabs! There will be some trash, of course, but not like if you dig all the pull tab readings. This system has worked pretty well for me. Those rings will be mostly thin gold ladies rings. (Maybe some with stones)

I have done better myself, this way, than I have water hunting. Also white gold reads very low on the scale. I have one heavy mans white gold ring that to my surprise read like a "beavertail" from a round tab. That is about the mid-high foil range. My wife's engagement ring which is also white gold reads almost iron. Very low in the foil range.

So go find some gold rings without having to dig everything."

Excerpted from the Golden Triangle Explorers Society newsletter, "Treasured Times, 2005"

I would also add that if you look at these numbers, you'll note something else:

Digging foil, nickle, and square tab through coin readings, will get 85% of all gold rings!
This brackets the range just above nickels. This bracketed, or "exclusion range," is where intact "beavertail" ring pulltabs are found. Since these account for only 15% of all rings in the study, it seems a fair trade to refrain from digging them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another interesting compilation comes from one of the Garrett users in Australia. He did the same sort of test, with an Ace 250....

Rings sampled, TOTAL: 43

Breakdown by discrimination notches:

23 rings in the 3&4 notches = 53.48% (Foil/nickel)
15 rings in the 5&6 notches = 34.8% (7 in the 5 notch, just above nickels and 8 in the 6 notch where square tabs fall)
3 rings in the 7 notch = 6.97% (zinc cent)
2 rings in the 8 notch = 4.65% (penny/dime)

Interesting here is that the majority of rings, 53.48%, fall into the range associated with foil and nickles... which was also seen in the Fisher study. This is due to the overwhelming number of 9K rings, the equivalent of our 10K in Euro influenced countries. 34.8% are in what we call the pull-tab range, which is double the numbers from the Fisher study. The remainder are in the screwcap/zinc cent and copper one cent coin ranges.

I was a little dismayed to see the even split for the 5&6 notches, as this differs from the Fisher study. This is where the more common higher karat values fall in this country, but which is also a sure bet for pulltabs!

The clear end result is that where gold rings read on your TID isn't what matters. No sir, the important thing is that you learn to discern the non-ferrous trash for what it really is, somehow. If you cannot do THAT, then you must content yourself with digging in the pull-tab range.

At the very least, get to know how your chosen instrument responds to the beaver tail pulltab - so you can steer clear of those. There is no "magic bullet" on this one, folks.