Dig those shallow hits

[BarberBill]

It's been mentioned from time to time that pulltabs generally don't settle as deeply as coins and therefore one can ignore IDs reading tab/foil that are shallow. That's true most of the time. However, nearly every ring, small piece of jewelry etc. that I've found in parks/lawns was hung in the sod at the same general depth as those pesky pull tabs. We just can't get away from it -- if you don't want to miss jewelry, dig everything as tedious as that can be;
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[Tom_in_CA]

Or ........ just go to places where jewelry ratios vs aluminum ratios are better to begin with. Ie.: swimming beaches. Especially ocean beaches after erosion when mother nature takes all the lightweight aluminum away The nature of swimming and sunbathing (lathering up with slippery lotion, frolicking around, splashing your hands about in cooler water which shrinks fingers, etc...) is much more condusive to jewelry losses.

I've seen some blighted parks where the foil, can-slaw, and tab ratio would be hundreds to one. You'd certainly soon decide it's simply not worth your while in some places to angle for gold jewelry, lest you go mad.

 

[GRAY GHOST]

good advice, bill. if it sounds good, i dig it! no questions asked! hh!

 

[silversmith]

Yes, I've found Mercury dimes on top of the ground and wadded up foil deep. Ya just never know! However I've also been to places so trashy I had to set my Big Bud to reject the top 4 inches of soil, rather than going home with pockets bulging with trash.

 

[BarberBill]

Tom_in_Ca makes a good point, but not all of us are handy to beaches. In really trashy parks, fair grounds and the like, digging it all certainly can drive one nuts. I've read where some will set themselves a goal to dig everything for a given amount of time or trash recoveries, then turn up the discrimination and cherry pick. I admit to getting frustrated after a bit and skipping over what are mostly junk targets wondering just what I may have missed.
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[Tom_in_CA]

True story: Back in the late 1970s/early '80s, before TID of any sort (disc. was just an ascending/descending dial), a friend of mine was getting a lot of silver in the parks with a 6000d (revolutionary at the time ). He would just crank the disc, so he wouldn't have to dig foil or tabs, and just go for the silver. After pulling a few hundred old coins from a certain oldtown park, he reasoned that there "must be some old nickels and gold jewelry I'm missing". So he sectioned off a particular area that had been good to him on silver coins, and spent several hunts turning down the disc. and digging all the low hits. At the end of several such hunts, all he had to show for his efforts was a few worthless orange buffalo nickels, and perhaps a single gold something-or-another. He reasoned it simply wasn't worth the embarassment of strip-mining in turf, when he could just go to a swim beach (fresh or saltwater), if jewelry were his goal. Naturally, at relicky places (oldtown urban demo's, ghost town type sites, etc...) he'd turn down the disc. But for junky turf, he reasoned that he was not going to be a hero.

I have seen the same thing today: I've hunted with persons in old junky parks, who bristle at the idea of passing shallow stuff (afterall, an old item is occasionnally shallow, or maybe it's shallow jewelry, etc...). They reason that "afterall, the clad adds up, and afterall, you can get both the oldies AND the new/shallow stuff, by digginng all". But invariably, by the end of the day, they'll have 1 or 2 old coins, and I'll have 8 or 10. The reason is that they spend all their time digging corroded zincs, surface tabs and foil globs, etc.... Their minds become subconsciously tuned to the "loud bongs", rather than the deep whispers of deep turf coins. It's all in the odds. Just like black-jack: when you have 20, you "hold", EVEN though the next card *might* be a one card, right? Why do that, if the next card *might* be a one? Because quite obviously, the odds are, it will not be a one card

 

[Uncle Willy]

As I've always said, " If you ain't digging some junk you ain't digging much else either."

Bill

 

[1859large]

Here in Newfoundland we have a rocky soil and coins cn hang up shallow. I found 3 pre 1900 silver 5 cent pieces last year and we also find a lot of large pennies which show shallow but are not, they are just so big. In my only real outing this year I found 34mm penny token that indicated a depth of "III" and was actually 5"down. The only time I have rejected shallow targets is when there is a lot of shallow trash in a site where the soil is likely undisturbed and the goodies are much older than the surface crap.

HH

1859

 

[BarberBill]

It comes down to how persistent one wishes to be on the admittedly slim chance of finding a goodie mixed in with the trash. That said, I've read where some deliberately dig lots of trash to clean an area so that the deeper, hopefully older, better targets can be detected. I'm not one of them, but whenever a shallow hit seems a bit odd on the display or in my headphones, I dig. Those particular hits have turned out good often enough to have been worth the effort. The better you know your detector, the better you'll pick up on these little variances in the reaction to the target.
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