Compadre Hunt

[Smudge]

I went dirt fishing this morning after finding a small park in a remote area of town. It was in an older neighborhood.

At first I was pretty unhappy to discover that the tot lot was covered in astro-turf. But the parking lot was all dirt and sand and I know that's a pretty good place to hunt clad.

So I got out the Compadre, set the discrimination to the "F" in "FOIL" and started hunting.

Man, I haven't hit this many pull tabs in a long time! Most people hate these things, but I find them kind of reassuring because if someone has hunted this area before me, they had their discrimination set too high to find anything made of gold.

Well, make a long story short, I only found one quarter and 8 pennies, one of them torn up pretty badly. I also found one piece of costume jewelry, a pendant.

Oh yeah, and 48 pull tabs!

One more thing, I also nailed a gold ring! 14 karat, size 6, 2.4 grams! Depth was 3"-4".

I take two things from this:

1) The Compadre is an awesome coin and jewelry detector. This is my third gold ring using this unit.

2) You have seen it said many times, if you are not digging pull tabs, you will not dig gold jewelry. In fact, you need to set your discrimination even lower. The farther into the "FOIL" range I set my discriminator, the choppier the signal got. Past "FOIL" and the signal disappeared altogether.

This was a great day for me. There have been many where I've left with nothing but clad and a bag full of pull tabs and junk. But all that hard work and junk digging can lead you to moments like this.

Best of luck to everyone!

 

[Terry Soloman]

YES! Way to Go!

 

[John (Ma)]

Awsome

 

[tabman]

I see digging all that trash paid off for you big time.

You might want to move your discrimination knob back a tad. I've got a really thin and very small 14k gold wedding band that belonged to my wife's mother that will not give a solid beep on my Compadre unless I have the right edge of the discrimination pointer at the very bottom of the "F" in foil.

No need to do all that trash digging and leave something like that behind.

tabman

 

[dixiedigger57]

and don't forget $2.40 worth of pulltabs donated to the Ronald McDonald house childrens charities! aint that compadre great! get over it high dollar units, yer met yer match. nice gold!

 

[Ism]

Nice find...makes the dissapointing finds worth it all.
I had the same experience at a school last weekend. I get a bitter/sweet feeling about tabs for the very reason you stated.

 

[slingshot]

Nice! I set mine on the "r" in iron and it will still get fine gold chains. But it is a little more trouble, as it also gets the teeniest pieces of foil, etc. I have also found that a gold ring on edge will hit like a coin on edge with my Compadre.

 

[Craig]

Dig them Pull Tabs Congrats on the Gold

 

[tabman]

Dig them Pull Tabs Congrats on the Gold

That nice ring beeped in the "foil" range, not in the "pull tab" range. The majority of the gold rings that are lost are the small and medium sized ones that fall in the "foil" and "nickel" range. The larger gold rings are rarer and not as likely to be lost, fall in the "pull tab" range. Digging pull tabs to get a large gold ring is a long shot at best for park hunters. It happens though. Beach hunters probably have a better shot at finding a large gold ring than park hunters do. I'm notching out "pull tabs" on my Tesoro Golden uMax, so far so good. I've found my first gold ring and did so by not having to dig a bunch of pull tabs or any of those nasty rotten zinc pennies.

tabman

 

[DetectorOCD]

Go compadre go! Nice job!

 

[tab-nabit]

As long as you keep pulling out those tabs, your doing something right as far as I'm concerned. Cleaning out those tabs out and not wanting to risk missing something good that reads/sounds like a tab. WTG...

 

[foiled again tab hunter]

n/t

 

[ToddB64]

I see digging all that trash paid off for you big time.

You might want to move your discrimination knob back a tad. I've got a really thin and very small 14k gold wedding band that belonged to my wife's mother that will not give a solid beep on my Compadre unless I have the right edge of the discrimination pointer at the very bottom of the "F" in foil.

No need to do all that trash digging and leave something like that behind.

tabman

Hi tabman !

I just recently acquired a new Compadre and my focus is on gold and silver jewelry, rings, etc..

Presumably, there can be slight differences in the performance of one Compadre versus another of the same vintage, due to tolerances allowed on factory adjustments to circuitry components. Hence, the exact position of the Discriminator dial indicator (Pointer) could vary between two Compadres when the coils are scanned, for example, over the same thin gold ring to check the null point.

If the above postulation is correct, then the exact position of the Disc. dial indicator could be anywhere between "just above IRON", to the "F" in FOIL, to "the right edge of the discrimination pointer at the very bottom of the "F" in foil" on the two Compadres in this example. Therefore, this leads me to believe that each of us need to experiment with our own Compadre, using samples of the jewelry we hope to find, to see exactly where the null point is on the face plate and either mark or commit-to-memory this null point. Then on each hunt (and frequently during the hunt) check to make sure the dial indicator is slightly CCW (below) this null point.

If you have several jewelry samples that have null points in different places on the face plate, due to variances in size and/or conductivity, then I would suggest setting the Disc. indicator slightly CCW from the null point of the lowest conducting jewelry item you want to find. Doing this might mean digging more trash, but that goes with the territory !

Good Luck Everyone

ToddB64

 

[DiGGER27]

Take a hair pin, adjust the disc so it just crackles, dig everything else.
That's how I would do it to to feel confident I was in the range of most jewelry.

By the way, a couple of small 10k rings came in just below foil on my Vac.

 

[Topo]

persistence is the only way

 

[slingshot]

Take a hair pin, adjust the disc so it just crackles, dig everything else.
That's how I would do it to to feel confident I was in the range of most jewelry.

By the way, a couple of small 10k rings came in just below foil on my Vac.

I set mine for a paper clip. Good advice.

 

[DiGGER27]

Take a hair pin, adjust the disc so it just crackles, dig everything else.
That's how I would do it to to feel confident I was in the range of most jewelry.

By the way, a couple of small 10k rings came in just below foil on my Vac.

I set mine for a paper clip. Good advice.

Check!
As a matter of fact, this is YOUR advice...I just mixed up paperclips with bobby pins because I hate them so much!
I got this from Skiwhiz...who got it from you!

Gotta give credit where credit is due.
What goes around comes around....

 

[slingshot]

Take a hair pin, adjust the disc so it just crackles, dig everything else.
That's how I would do it to to feel confident I was in the range of most jewelry.

By the way, a couple of small 10k rings came in just below foil on my Vac.

I set mine for a paper clip. Good advice.

Check!
As a matter of fact, this is YOUR advice...I just mixed up paperclips with bobby pins because I hate them so much!
I got this from Skiwhiz...who got it from you!

Gotta give credit where credit is due.
What goes around comes around....

Oh, heck. I'm just tickled somebody found it good advice. I hate the things also and every other detector picks them up in a/m mode-the Compadre will match their finds without picking them up;

 

[TreasureHuntersSupply]

 

[mudfoot]

Todd, you are certainly right about testing with jewelry.

Recently I had the house to myself so I dragged my detectors up to the bedroom and tested some of my wife's jewelry. Now please don't tell, ok?

I had the machines facing out 90 degrees from each other and waved different items near the coils. Nothing remotely resembling proper testing and not even noting distances; just playing around At that time I had a Silver umax, a Compadre, & a Garrett 1350. I've added a Vaquero since but haven't had time to test it.

A lot of the stuff would only hit below foil on the Tesoros and some of it the smallest at just barely above Iron on the Compadre. And these were things I paid good money for which I thought were decent quality jewelry. Makes ya wonder.

The Garrett did pretty well until I got down to smaller, cheaper earrings & pins. Silver rings & pendants hit the strongest. White gold wedding bands were showing up as pull tabs, just as you'd expect.

The Silver uMax hung in with the Compadre until the smaller chains came out. Even then, the discrim' was way down near the 'n' in Iron on the Compadre.

There was one thick band-type ring that my wife has that wouldn't register on the anything but the Compadre and even then the discrim' was in all-metal. The ring had to be within 1 inch of the coil before it starting making any noise.

I found out later that the ring is not even metal but instead some sort of mineral! Hah! Dang Compadre was determined to find something.

Anyway, if y'all get the chance to try jewelry box testing it's worthwhile, and quite an eye-opener.

Just don't blame me if you get caught.