Digging It All. Unmasking Silver Coins Or Finding Gold Rings & Other Good Finds. How Well Has It Worked Out For You?

[Critterhunter]

Just curious about this. I have at times dug it all in the hopes of unmasking old coins or finding a gold ring, but have to admit that I've done very little of that over the years. Just when I'm in the mood to do it. Once in a great while I'll steak out a small say 10x10 foot section of a trashy old park and dig every signal above iron. The few times I've done it I have been rewarded, such as a v-nickle that had 3 or 4 screw caps above it in the same hole. But I have to say that I've rarely had the mindset and will to do such a thing.

So I'm wondering how many of you guys have done that in an old park or such, where you just can't seem to find "easy" old coin finds anymore. Have you unmasked some silver, some gold rings, or found an old token or some other interesting find that you wouldn't have found any other way? Also curious what kind of silver you have found. Were they rosies that could easily have been masked by say a pull tab in the 60's or 70's, or have you found older silver that it took years for some more modern trash to fall over and mask?

As time goes by I think this kind of hunting will be more common. Machines have got so good that the real deep silver (say 8 to 12") , or the ones moderately masked by junk, have been or are being found by modern detectors. When those pickings get even slimer than they are now there won't be anything left but to dig all the signals above iron and hope for a good find or something that was being severly masked by junk.

 

[TerraDigger]

Dig it all? Only if I feel the area was not heavily detected in the past (1980's-2000). Experience has shown me that past detected areas don't produce much for the effort involved. In the 1980's detectors with VLF motion disc were getting a very good portion of coins. That's been my experience. Your mileage may vary.
The only exception is gold jewelry, as most detectorists past & present had/have their disc cranked up and miss it.

 

[Jason in Enid]

The only areas I am worried about missing masked coins, it would be an almost impossible task to clear it out. There areas that are solid iron nulls, or are non-stop machine gun chatter from aluminum trash. There would be thousands of targets in your 10x10 area. I'm sure these areas have great stuff hidden in them, but the only way to get them would be with a shovel and a sifting screen.

 

[osgood]

i rarely dig it all, although there are times I will dig only 8 inches or deeper targets- depending on the park that can be interesting. I will sometimes get silver that way. I dont have the patience for heavily junked up sites. I let others clean em out then go back for the deep stuff. Good Hunts

 

[gear box]

n/t

 

[gear box]

I'll have to say looking for masked coins and the deep ones not in the trash that others have missed. I don't have the patience for digging everything. I think that if you know your machine and crawl along at a snails pace you can get the coins that are masked without digging everything. There's something in that signal that should tell you that you need to take a closer look. As far how it has worked out for me, not bad, I have found more Barber dimes than silver Roosies and a near mint SLQ. These come from public areas like parks and fairgrounds that I pounded back in the 70's with plenty of trash in them. Good luck diggin,Gary

 

[osgood]

Gear, that is exactly how I see it. A good machine, and an operator in tune with it, can weed through some of that stuff and come up with good finds without digging everything. I like hearing "that park is hunted out", cause I know the fun is just ready to begin. CO

 

[Critterhunter]

What I'm wondering is are there really a lot of mercs and barbers that are being masked by pulltabs and other junk, or back when machines couldn't discriminate did they dig everything and thus remove those masked coins years ago. Granted I thiink they say those machines only got 2 or 3" of depth or so, so there could very well be deeper coins that they couldn't reach, and then later in say the 70's a pull tab fell over that coin before machines got good enough to reach those depths...And then these newer machines that could reach deeper had discrimination, so they never removed the trash that fell later. Hope you know the angle I'm trying to get at. Thoughts? This is being touched on in the other thread about detecting through the 50's to 80's.

 

[TerraDigger]

Critter, I am of the same mindset as JasoninEnid. To answer your question on dimes....oh yeah...theres lots of them silver lovelies out there still. Osgood & Gearbox know that And for the reasons they stated. Better machines, smaller coils and more experience make the difference. I actually find much more silver with my Omega than my older Whites Silver Eagle due to better technology and far superior coils (10" concentric/11" DD and 5" DD). In 1981, it was sweep fast, cover as much ground as possible. And it worked. Easier picken's. Just have to slow down these days and go to spots that have some potential. But, unlike the past, I no longer dig it all. Not worth it to me. Too much trash, especially aluminum. But I do leave my nickel notch open for gold in that range.

 

[gear box]

n/t

 

[gear box]

Critter I'm not so sure that it is as much the masking as it is the lack of patience for some people to wind their way thru a trash laden area, leaving good finds for the person who knows his machine and has the patience to carefully check those spots. thats what I do and the majority of my good finds are not that deep or covered with iron or flip tops. Just in the middle of a lot of junk. Another thing is when I go out I am looking for quality not quanity and I really enjoy going to the same places I went to back in the 70's when the pickings were easy and there just isn't that much left to think you will get a dozen silvers a day anymore. I had to change my mindset to quality not quanity, it's in the hunt for me and it is as rewarding to me now as it was almost 40 years ago. Good luck Gary ( PS-Sorry about the two no texts above got happy fingers)

 

[Critterhunter]

One thing about unmasking ability...You can't change the laws of physics. Think of the detection field as a beam from a flashlight. It can't go around corners. If trash is directly over the coin, or even a good deal off to the side of the coin but much shallower than the coin (how far off to the side it can be depends on how much difference there is in depth between the two targets), the coil signal will hit the trash first and never have the ability to reach the coin to see it.

The flashlight analogy isn't exactly the best way to describe the beam, because a flashlight can hit a closer object and still have part of it's beam go right past the side of it and continue on...Hitting the further away object as well. A coil's detection field tends to be more broad the closer it is to the coil, and if any of this beam first hits the shallower object it in effect collapses the field and doesn't allow any part of it to continue further on to see the deeper object. IE: It can't shoot a straight beam of detection right past the shallower object that part of it is hitting and down further to the deeper target. That's why the greater distance between depths means the two can be somewhat further off to the side of each other and still in effect the deeper target never gets hit by the detection field.

Even a small but shallower item such as a staple (read a test about this) will stop the detection field from reaching the deeper coin. That's where even a fast recovery machine really has no better ability than a slow recovery machine (so long as you are sweeping the slower machine slow enough to make it's recovery between targets a non-issue).

Where the real ability lies is in just how sharp the detection field is of the coil in order to be able to separate targets. Something like an SEF 12x10 has a much tighter left/right detection field than a typical DD coil, making it laser like in it's ability to separate two targets sitting right next to each other. I'm fairly impressed in the abilities of this coil in that respect. It feels like you are using a scalpel to slice between targets.

Now, when a coin and a piece of trash are laying at the same depth and so close that they are even touching each other, resulting in both being washed in the magnetic field from the coil at the same time....That's when it's up to the machine's internal processing to be able to separate the two in some way if it can. I've used some machines that were poor at this, and would either discriminate out the combined targets, or at least severely average the signal to somewhere halfway between them on the conductivity scale. Other machines seem better at making distinctions between the mixed signal, and won't discriminate or at least won't severely average the two targets on the conductivity scale...At least as often as other machines tend to.

Ask yourself this...Would you rather use a fast recovery machine that's coil is putting out a blunt and wide beam into the ground, or would you rather use a slow recovery machine that is using a coil with a very sharp detection field that can "light up' one target while not the other in it's detection field? Don't get me wrong, fast recovery has it's advantages with the ability to swing faster without missing targets, but slow recovery is for the most part a non-issue so long as you keep your sweep speed at a proper slow speed. That, combined with trying to "sniff" around targets with proper coil use (wiggling and such) to see if there are other objects also present, makes it less of an issue.

That's were some (including me) are big fans in the separation ability of DD coils versus concentrics. The DD detection pattern is somewhat like a line going from the tip to the tail of the coil, giving it better left/right separation over the entire depth range. While a concentric tends to have more of a blunted or more broad detection field, at least at shallower depths, and so tends to have it's best separation ability at the deepest part of the signal where it narrows towards a point. Of course these are very broad statements, as various coils have very different detection patterns and qualities that somewhat overlap each other when comparing one style (DD) to the other (concentric), so these aren't hard and fast rules or correct by any means in all respects. But one of the big perks of DD coils is that, because of their general detection field, they ride on and "see" (again, in general) less ground matrix than a concentric...Which means they are submitted to and washing in less ground matrix than a similar sized concentric. Translating into machines being able to handle rougher ground matrix's than is typical for similar sized concentric. Again, not a hard and fast rule....But in general.

One of the odd things I've noticed is that a small (5.5") DD coil seems to hold onto it's depth abilities better than a small concentric. I'm simply amazed that I'm getting 7 to 9" on a dime with such a little DD coil while my 8 to 10" concentric coils on other machines could only muster around 7.5" in my soil. That just blows my mind. I know that (again, generally speaking) a concentric of the same size as a DD will tend to have slightly better depth (even though it usually is only one small point at the center of the field that reaches deeper than the DD), but this rule seems to reverse it's self when the coils get smaller than say about 6"

I know I'm way off topic and have rambled enough. Sorry...

This is all my theory anyway, and so I welcome any different views on all this that don't agree.

 

[Critterhunter]

If trash is directly over the coin, or even a good deal off to the side of the coin but much shallower than the coin (how far off to the side it can be depends on how much difference there is in depth between the two targets), the coil signal will hit the trash first and never have the ability to reach the coin to see it.

Probably a better way to say that is....That the closer to the coil the shallower trash target is, the further off to the side the deeper coin can be and still be masked...Because the coil's signal is more broad (even on a DD, but worse on a concentric) closer to the coil, so it has more chance for the field to first hit the trash target and thus not reach the deeper coin. So the closer the trash is to the coil, the more off to the side that trash can be in relation to the coin and still block the signal.

Think of the detection field like a soap bubble. The first thing it hits causes the bubble to burst, and it won't squeeze past that object and still be able to hit something deeper.

Again, would like to hear opinions that differ on all this.

 

[Scaupus]

I take a little different angle on this, having started md'ing only a year and a half ago. Until this last New Years, I hunted only for coins, first at my nearby modern park for clads, and then at a virgin private 1925 yard where I recovered 10 silver coins. When it seemed I had dug all the higher tones, I resolved - on new years night - to start digging the low tones (zinc on down). It was hard for me to commit to purposely dig trash, but I did and in that yard I then found 2 Indian Head's; a lovely antique Italian sterling bracelet; a 1920's Irish gilt pendant; a 1930s-50s Mexican biker ring i sold for $250; some obsolete cartridge cases; and 2 more Mercs that I teased out from masking signals.

But, it didn't stop there. Digging low tones, I also found 2 gold rings at my local modern park as well as various sterling bracelets and an anklet, a child's sterling ring, small sterling charms, 3 zirconium sterling studs, and "sterling slaw". At a small townhouse I found a 1942 Victory Corps Lone Ranger pin.

My latest low tone find, which rang in as a large pulltab, is a beefy 2 ounce sterling chain.

If I hadn't started digging low tones, I would not have found any of these things. I think the low tone items I found so far this year probably equal in value all of the high tone items that I spent most of last year digging for: 56 silver coins; 7 silver rings; a couple of large sterling items (a pendant, a dope pipe); a lot of copper alloy items that I recycled; some collectibles that I sold, and maybe $250 in clad.

So, yes, I'll keep digging the low tones. If I skip anything these days, it's maybe the shallow penny/dime tones, and maybe shallow zinc if the zincolns are too numerous.

 

[Smudge]

I remember Tom Dankowski did a big write-up on masking using a small area of dirt.

According to his results, the amount of masking that occurs is absolutely incredible.

 

[REVIER]

I have mostly been a jewelry hunter since I started.
I also do this for the exercise as much as the treasure so digging a bunch of trash usually isn't a big deal for me.
I also have hunted some very trashy parks with tons of can slaw, foil, pull tabs and pop tops.
Most of the time I can tell those targets are junk, but the what ifs get to me usually if I don't dig them at the very least to get them out of the way.

Silver rings are easy, silver and gold chains and other gold objects are not because they can live in the same neighborhood as all that junk.
So I dig.
Then there are all those zinc penny signals.
I dig those too..
Somehow, the effort to dig all that worthless trash and tons of zincolns makes it all seems worthwhile when I take inventory of the things I have dug that came in below high tone silver level.

 

[Woodchuck]

I dig all repeatable signals I set disc just enough to disc out iron. I hunt one park hard that after removing all junk has produce 2 gold rings,1 gold chain & cross, I silver necklace, i silver ring, countless clad, 2 dollar coins etc.,1 copper bracelet, I dig tab signals on purpose.As for digging all no! i don't have patience

 

[firstring]

n/t

 

[Critterhunter]

Any of you guys dig a silver coin that for some reason read lower than it should have? I've dug quite a few of those over the years, that didn't even have trash or iron in the hole that could have brought the conductivity number down. Just oddly read low for some reason.

 

[REVIER]

Found a silver ring a few weeks ago that came in as a solid 68 on my F2.
That has happened twice and both times silver rings came up.
Every other silver ring, clad dime or silver dime I have ever dug with that one always came in at 71 or higher.
It was a pretty big one too.
Thought I was digging a large piece of can slaw...but it wasn't.