Detecting My Yard With My New To Me Vaquero

[MarkCZ]

Well, I've read about the "V" liking rusty nails. So I had a plan, which was to do some detecting in my own yard (keep in mind that every detector I've ever had over 30 years has been used in this yard, but I never ran anything looking for anything below coins)

So, now to test a detector I know that I have to look for any metal targets, or low conductors.

Today was "V" day and I went to my yard with the idea of finding anything that would be in the jewelry range (Gold) and to leave nails or other small rusty items which my yard has lots and LOTS of.
That means for this test aluminum is considered good targets, small iron is what I'm trying to work around.

Here is my total digs (that I'm very happy with)

Total finds = 22__(oh, and my yard is still very wet)
Iron = 1________(rusty nail, but it was in the excite same hole as a pull tab)
Aluminum = 20__(mix of screw caps, pull rings, square tabs, can slaw, and a few pieces of larger foil)
Coins = 1______(a nickel, which really surprised me, I mean a coin)


So, I had NO problem with iron, rusty or other wise and I KNOW there is plenty of it there.

Now let me cover some settings.
Disc = the mark between Iron and nickel (foil I guess)
Threshold = @ about 1:00 (clock face) (not super tuned)
Sensitivity = @ about 1:00 (I wasn't trying to run deep, I do know that at these settings I could easily hit my 6" nickel garden, So I was only trying to get down to no more than 5" or at lest 5")

Now, why wasn't I wanting to go as deep as it will run? (super tuned)
(1) Clay is at 5" in my yard, anything lost is above the clay.
(2) One main plan I have for the "V" is to surface hunt (shallow) for jewelry and coins will be just gravy. (So, I now know that without super tuning it in my soil I can hunt down to 6" and that is GREAT)

Now the other day I had it out in my side yard and I had it super tuned with the same disc settings and I was digging rusty nails (or some) But, I was only out for a few minutes because it was to cold, and that was also the first time I had put the 'V" to the dirt.

So, in conclusion,
Today's test is a 100% success!
It went as deep as I needed it to!
It hit hard on all the targets I found!
It pinpointed GREAT without leaving the discrimination mode (very cool)
It worked around the small rusty iron perfectly!

Did I miss anything? (Oh, I was using the stock large coil)

Question,
Could super tuning the "V" to stretch maximum depth make it a little more sensitive to rusty iron? I did perfect for me today.

Mark

 

[SpiritRelic]

Supertuning does have it's draw backs.The modulation disappears.A 8" target sounds like a 2"target.You got plenty depth without Supertuning.Supertuning is for a deep relic hunter like i do.Woods,fields,very old places,etc...You missed a nickel?All those detectors and years?Well i guess the vaquero is proving itself to you every day now.Put it though some more test.I can't wait.Great test report by the way.Very clear and concise. :-V

 

[tvr]

Could super tuning the "V" to stretch maximum depth make it a little more sensitive to rusty iron?

Yes! When I first got a Cibola I ran super tuned and dug a lot of iron, some very rusted, some not so rusted; and some at incredible depths. Through this forum, and with more testing, I learned that, for most of my hunting, my time was much better spent running with a usable threshold. Number of good targets to trash went way up when running a threshold that is usable for pinpointing. A little bit of super tuning does not hurt the iron discrimination a lot, but once you get past 2 to 3 o'clock on the threshold, iron of all sorts starts to sound very good.

 

[smokey63]

Mark, thought this might help you with the disc on the Vaquero. It is very close, but sometimes supertuning will throw it off a little more.

 

[JHM]

Actually I only get about an inch more supertuned. I only use it if I have an interesting Faint target and never past the 3 oclock position

 

[MarkCZ]

Back dirt fishing my yard after work this evening.
History first.
I live in a trailer park that in the early 70's was a golf course.
I have a corner lot where my front yard aligns right next to the road (people toss trash out of their cars, trailer trash jokes are fine)
I have lived here for 30 years.
My little front yard as been a testing ground for every detector I've ever owned.

White 5000 DI series 2
Teknetics 9000/B
Teknetics Mark I
Whites 5900 DI Pro sl
Bounty Hunter Land Star (times 2)
Fisher CZ-7a Pro
Fisher Coinstrike (times 2)
Whites XLT
Fisher 1266x
Teknetics Omega
Fisher ID Edge
and now the Tesoro Vaquero.
And I may have missed one or two??

Now, like I said earlier in this thread, I never really hunted my yard for anything below coins, I used to work around the Zinc's but as the coins dried up I started hunting those. If you look at my list of detectors you can see that I've been a coin shooter running mainly metered units. But I keep trading around detectors and for short test its my yard. So, the yard is primed for the purpose of my latest detector endeavor the "Vaquero". I want to start finding more jewelry and that means I need to start hunting/digging the targets in that range, which is about everything between small iron and copper pennies and that's about all that's left in my little patch of dirt, dig everything that gives me a good signal in that range (well, or above, I would like to know just how many coins may be left) and leave the iron.

I want to make a note here to the readers!
I live VERY close to an airport with commercial flights and they're times with my other detectors that I can't hardly run them due to some sort of interference?? but its not always a problem. In the two days of testing the Vaquero did well with only some mild chattering while ground balancing in All Metal Mode.

The dirt fishing today was the same setup as yesterday, same settings, same yard, same detector, and the same plan to hunt like I am looking for jewelry (and there could be, I've never really hunted my yard for that because of to much trash, nails, tabs, screws, large staples, wire, car parts, ect..)

For this hunt I chose the worst section for aluminum caps and tabs and that is the area from the roads edge out about 4' to 5' feet into the yard, believe me people over the past 30 years have tossed a lot of junk out of their cars in this area. The total length of this patch might be 50 feet.
I didn't stop at any particular number of digs, I just hunted for an hour or so and stopped when I got around the corner.

Results, (keep in mind, I'm trying to dig all good signals above iron)

Lead = 2_____(Bullet and a wheel weight)
Iron = 2_____(screw with some sort of aluminum clip still on it. And the only LONE piece of iron, a pretty thick, pretty large like 1" wrench size, but it has small inside dia, like 1/4")
Aluminum =19 (screw caps, large foil, pull rings, square tabs)
Total Targets =23

Pinpointing was fast using the discrimination mode, it was very accurate and very natural to learn.
The mild settings was easily hitting even small pieces of aluminum @ 6" to near 7" in my at lest average mineralized West Virginia soil.
The light weight of the "V" is for sure a plus for easy swinging.
It disc out 99 percent of the iron.
The standard coil in my early test seems to show it has good target separation.

When I first took the "V" out of the box I thought, this little thing can't be real?
I'm over that now,


Mark

 

[MarkCZ]

Mark, thought this might help you with the disc on the Vaquero. It is very close, but sometimes supertuning will throw it off a little more.

Thanks for the pic!

Mark

 

[toddyTvaq]

Great Picture smokey63

 

[BillF]

I am not understanding yours disc-ing out iron. Mine absolutely loves old, deep iron. Very small, rusty nails or bolt heads sound so much like good targets. I've just learned to live with it.

 

[WV62]

I am not understanding yours disc-ing out iron. Mine absolutely loves old, deep iron. Very small, rusty nails or bolt heads sound so much like good targets. I've just learned to live with it.

Try an air test on a nail and see if your disc is working properly, you shouldn't have any problems disc-ing it out.

Ron in WV

 

[BillF]

Ron, I dont believe in air tests. I dont feel they are representative of whats happening in the ground. An old nail in the ground for many years builds up a rust halo and I think thats why it plays so much hell with the V. I dont seem to be the only one with this problem, thats why I am having trouble understanding why Marks is disc-ing them out, unless they just arent old.

 

[MarkCZ]

I am not understanding yours disc-ing out iron. Mine absolutely loves old, deep iron. Very small, rusty nails or bolt heads sound so much like good targets. I've just learned to live with it.

I have no use for rusty barn door hinges LoL! j/k

I don't relic hunt, if I did I would just use my Fisher 1266x


Okay, here is the deal! (my idea of getting the Vaquero)
I have some places that I have been coin shooting for a few years now and so the old coins are getting pretty thinned out.
The thing about these places are they are public places and likely to have some unrecovered jewelry in them.

I have came in contact with a few of the old timers here and they claim that the Tesoro's are really hot on jewelry, so I started watching and reading some threads on the Tesoro forum (this forum) and I decided that the Vaquero would be a good one for my jewelry hunting plans (not rusty car parts).
So, I land a deal on a nice used one, then I start seeing Vaquero post about not being able to disc out rusty nails well, isn't that just great I thought, I buy one and for jewelry I'm going to have to dig every rusty nail on the planet (my 1266 is wonderful at doing that)

So, knowing most gold should fall in just above small iron I set out to see if I had gotten the wrong detector for the task. I was so heart sunk about buying a nail finder that I didn't want to even open the box it came in, I just laid it down and looked at it whenever I walked by, like, I had made a BIG mistake. Then when I finely opened it up and it look like a toy (so tiny and not real looking) my heart sunk even more, I thought "A $335.00 nail finder".

I finely put it together and put the ONE lonely 9 volt battery in it, and turned it on! "Hey, it beeps I thought"

So, I got this piece of crap "Nail Finder" (more thinking at the time) I wondered just how bad it is at not discriminating rusty nails? (in some of the post they claimed that they were still hitting rusty nails up past tabs)
I was a bit fearful to even try it after reading the bad reports of it on here. But, I finely got up the nerve to try some simple test, which is why I worked pretty hard at working around the iron and digging only targets that came in the range of common gold jewelry.

(Please Don't Take Me Wrong About Relic Hunting, Its For Some People, But Its Not For Everybody)

I was so disappointed thinking I had gotten a good machine for jewelry, one that had GREAT discrimination abilities right up until I paid the guy, then post start flying about it having problems with rusty nails.

Still in my disappointment I starting testing it to fine I was amazed!!!! how well it can sniff its way around iron, so surprised that I wondered the first day if I was just lucky, I set out on day two to see if It was repeatable. To my joy the little detector showed me that is has an unbelievable ability to disc out iron and still hit hard on the items in the gold range, even with iron in the same hole!

The detector had its job cut out for it with me, by the time I paid for it and it arrive I was about to set it out by the garbage bin! I'm glad I gave it a good trial run, it so far as risen to the task and I'm even excited about the little dream machine now

If I still want to coin shoot a location I can do that with the Vaquero, but I will most likely use one of my metered machines, then when the coins lean out, I'll know the area and I can take my little "Dream Machine" in and hunt for something entirely different. Another thing this does for me is around here good hunting spots are few and far between, but starting over at each one of them gives me years of places to hunt.

In about three hours of hunting my yard over two different days I dug 53 targets and ONLY ONE LONE piece of iron
I have a VERY small front yard, those three hours didn't cover a third of it.
I live in a double wide trailer that has been remodeled a couple of times, re-roofed three or for times, re-sided a couple of times. For years I worked on cars, motorcycles, and bicycles in that yard. There has been thousands of BB's shot in the ground from the three sons we raised here to the grand kids and their neighborhood friends that are here now, then all the trash that people toss out of their cars as they drive by, to even meteorites (found that with my 1266) then you have the buried junk from when it was a golf course.

Oh, did I mention,
Overhead electric wires that run right over my yard,
Underground pipes,
Power transformers across the street,
A local commercial airport.

So, with all that the Vaquero ran stable,
Discriminated excellent,
Pinpointed perfectly,
Sniffed around the iron,
And in general made me feel a lot better about it LoL!

My Yard.


Mark

 

[MarkCZ]

Ron, I dont believe in air tests. I dont feel they are representative of whats happening in the ground. An old nail in the ground for many years builds up a rust halo and I think thats why it plays so much hell with the V. I dont seem to be the only one with this problem, thats why I am having trouble understanding why Marks is disc-ing them out, unless they just arent old.

Its early yet, but many of the rusty screws, nails, stables, washers, nuts, bolts, clips, springs, clamps, ect.. have been here for OVER 30 years (in the ground that is).

The only thing that I can say about my test is early on just setting up the detector I hit rusty nails, right off the bat, but I started off SUPER TUNED! well after I got an idea of how deep the detector would go I thought, if I hut jewelry in these public places I didn't want to hunt that deep. So I dropped the supper tuning and I even lowered the sensitivity to (clock face values) 1:00 Threshold as well, Then I tested the depth and found it to still hit excellent at 6". Then I started the actual hunting in the front yard.

The only two possibilities I can think of is,
(1) Super Tuning is messing with the discrimination abilities. Or
(2) I landed a exceptional Vaquero??

Mark

 

[MarkCZ]

I am not understanding yours disc-ing out iron. Mine absolutely loves old, deep iron. Very small, rusty nails or bolt heads sound so much like good targets. I've just learned to live with it.

LoL!
I miss read your post I guess, I thought you were a relic hunter and didn't understand why I 'Wanted" to disc out the iron when the Vaquero was so good (loves) small deep iron.

Oh, well no harm in my rather long reply to why to your question LoL.

Mark

 

[BillF]

Mark, I'm still playing with this machine. Every time I get a good target, I play with the controls. When I feel confident that I am getting good targets at 6-7 inches or more NOT supertuned I'll dial things back, but even before I was running supertuned I was getting square nails at 7-8 inches that would not start to break up until almost maximum disc. I know this is hitting nice stuff now, maybe this winter I'll send it in to be checked, until then I just keep swinging.
I have kind of been avoiding our old parks because everything has been hit so hard, maybe I should get back out there and try again to see how deep the V will go.
Maybe you posted this before, but how old is your test garden?

 

[BillF]

I meant to say this in the last post and forgot. Saturday I went back to couple of places I have done well at and thought I had pretty much cleaned up. I slowed way down and dug targets that weren't necessarily "good". Not solid from all angles, a little scratchy maybe. Almost every one was a wheat. Lesson learned.

 

[HaroldILL.]

Hey Mark ,It's good to see I'm not the only one on the forums who lives in a Trailer! I have 4 Detectors myself including 2 CZ's. They have a room all to there self! LOL!

 

[MarkCZ]

Mark, I'm still playing with this machine. Every time I get a good target, I play with the controls. When I feel confident that I am getting good targets at 6-7 inches or more NOT supertuned I'll dial things back, but even before I was running supertuned I was getting square nails at 7-8 inches that would not start to break up until almost maximum disc. I know this is hitting nice stuff now, maybe this winter I'll send it in to be checked, until then I just keep swinging.
I have kind of been avoiding our old parks because everything has been hit so hard, maybe I should get back out there and try again to see how deep the V will go.
Maybe you posted this before, but how old is your test garden?

My test garden??

Well I have two pretty old ones now,
a 3" quarter, dime, & nickel (over two years)
a 8" half dollar, Indian Head Penny, & a large cent (over two years old)

Then I added three nickels off the end of the 3" garden, one @ 4", 5", & 6" (near two years old)

The most recent gardens are,
a 6" quarter, copper penny, nickel. (maybe four months old)
a 7" buffalo nickel, & a Jefferson nickel (also about four months old)
These are still not really usable, I think by this fall they will start acting like natural buried coins.

Mark

 

[MarkCZ]

Hey Mark ,It's good to see I'm not the only one on the forums who lives in a Trailer! I have 4 Detectors myself including 2 CZ's. They have a room all to there self! LOL!

That's funny,
I have two in what we call the office,
I have two in what we call the hobby room (more of a junk room now)
Then I have one in the master bedroom's closet.

Coils for all of them is the problem!
Three for the Omega,
Two for the Vaquero,
Two for the 1266,
Three for the ID Edge,
Two for the Coinstrike.

Mark

 

[MarkCZ]

I am not understanding yours disc-ing out iron. Mine absolutely loves old, deep iron. Very small, rusty nails or bolt heads sound so much like good targets. I've just learned to live with it.

I'm thinking about your rusty nail problem,
you said "Square nails" I wonder if those could have had some sort of an alloy mix in them? I've never found any of those in my yard, I have found them before but I can't say how my Vaquero will handle them?

Also, the guy I got the Vaquero from told me that he bought it new about four years ago, and the box is marked "W/Tone Change" (I guess its had a tone modification)

Mark