Here's more food-for-thought on the subject of whether and when to dig zinc signals. This only has to do with turf, and wouldn't apply to things like relicky sites, beaches, etc....
There was a particular fellow I corresponded with over email and forum posts, on a md'ing forum for our area. He didn't have many old coins in his collection, but was and is well-known in detecting circles in our area. One day, this particular fellow and I decided to meet up at a particular park (which has been worked hard since the 1970s, and given up thousands of silver coins over the years). We were meeting up to compare some new machine that had come out recently, which this fellow had his hands on. We wanted to compare signals, machines, etc... over suspected targets.
The day came, and we met at this park. I noticed that the fellow was digging clad, zinc, tabs, etc.... I, on the other hand, was only angling for deepies (and high conductor deepies at that!). So the friendly debate came up betweenst us. He couldn't understand why I would be rejecting things like zinc pennies for instance. In HIS mind, they "might be a large gold ring", or "it might be an old coin that happened to be a shallow fluke" or "it might be a gold coin with an odd VDI", and so forth. And thus he figured that cherry-picking was a big-no-no. Afterall, you "might miss a ring", or "you might miss a shallow oldie", or "afterall, the clad adds up over time, so why pass good money?" and so forth. And in this person's mindset, they would be having the "best of both worlds". Eg.: BOTH the new AND the old, AND the jewelry, and so forth.
Well by the end of the hunt, I had 6 or 8 oldies verses his 1 or 2. Oh sure, perhaps he could get a gold ring that I'd have passed. Sure, anything's possible. But if old coins are your goal, then you have to eventually ask yourself: Which do you want? I mean, if JEWELRY is your goal, then what the h*ck are you doing hunting junky turf, to begin with? Why not just go to the beach, instead of trying to be a hero and strip-mining the turf?
And the reason why this "dig all" mindset ends up with less oldies by the end of the day (restricting the conversation to park turf) has multiple reasons:
1) The person will undoubtedly be dropping down to dig 10x the number of targets (because there's no shortage of "beeps" in an inner-city urban park turf, afterall). And as we all know, the vast majority of them are going to be clad, foil, tabs, etc... right? Sure, maybe the 10th signal is an oldie, or the 100th signal a gold ring. But ..... you just spent a valuable portion of your time digging the clad and surface junk. Sure maybe each retrieval took only a few minutes, but ........ do the math on 50 targets, and you begin to see that you're spending a large portion of your available swing-time, digging non-old-coins. Contrast to the person who was going only for deep coin signals, and refusing to dig anything less than 6" deep 'coin' signal, and .... his time is honed to *just* the particular type of signals that *tends* to more-often-be an old coin.
2) The person who is in "dig-all" mindset in the turf, will also subconsciously end up not hearing the deeper targets. He *thinks* he'll dig BOTH the deepies AND the shallows, but it never works out like that in the end. Because when you are digging all, you're mind becomes subconsciously tuned to the loud bongs. You will find yourself going from "loud bong" to "loud bong", and become DE-tuned (in your subconscious hearing) to hear the faint whispers. It's a mind trick that we're all at risk of.
For example: If you've ever been to a relicky site that's brimming with easy targets (a virgin stage stop for instance), you will notice that ...... after a few months of working such a site, as you scan and re-scan the same ground looking for more, that over-time, you will start to get the smaller and whispier targets. Ie.: the "4-star" easy signals are now gone, so as you go back through, only now do you start to find more of the smaller targets (pencil eraser top things, .22 shells, and so forth). This is true EVEN when you never were in a cherry-picking mode on those first trips. What is subconsciously happening, is that since targets were easy and fast those first few times, you would subconsciously gravitate to the easier obvious targets. Thus the same thing is a play in deep-turf hunting: If you are digging all the shallow loud clad, then no matter how hard you try, you will, after awhile, become attuned to *JUST* the shallow loud clad, and start missing the deepies.
There was a particular fellow I corresponded with over email and forum posts, on a md'ing forum for our area. He didn't have many old coins in his collection, but was and is well-known in detecting circles in our area. One day, this particular fellow and I decided to meet up at a particular park (which has been worked hard since the 1970s, and given up thousands of silver coins over the years). We were meeting up to compare some new machine that had come out recently, which this fellow had his hands on. We wanted to compare signals, machines, etc... over suspected targets.
The day came, and we met at this park. I noticed that the fellow was digging clad, zinc, tabs, etc.... I, on the other hand, was only angling for deepies (and high conductor deepies at that!). So the friendly debate came up betweenst us. He couldn't understand why I would be rejecting things like zinc pennies for instance. In HIS mind, they "might be a large gold ring", or "it might be an old coin that happened to be a shallow fluke" or "it might be a gold coin with an odd VDI", and so forth. And thus he figured that cherry-picking was a big-no-no. Afterall, you "might miss a ring", or "you might miss a shallow oldie", or "afterall, the clad adds up over time, so why pass good money?" and so forth. And in this person's mindset, they would be having the "best of both worlds". Eg.: BOTH the new AND the old, AND the jewelry, and so forth.
Well by the end of the hunt, I had 6 or 8 oldies verses his 1 or 2. Oh sure, perhaps he could get a gold ring that I'd have passed. Sure, anything's possible. But if old coins are your goal, then you have to eventually ask yourself: Which do you want? I mean, if JEWELRY is your goal, then what the h*ck are you doing hunting junky turf, to begin with? Why not just go to the beach, instead of trying to be a hero and strip-mining the turf?
And the reason why this "dig all" mindset ends up with less oldies by the end of the day (restricting the conversation to park turf) has multiple reasons:
1) The person will undoubtedly be dropping down to dig 10x the number of targets (because there's no shortage of "beeps" in an inner-city urban park turf, afterall). And as we all know, the vast majority of them are going to be clad, foil, tabs, etc... right? Sure, maybe the 10th signal is an oldie, or the 100th signal a gold ring. But ..... you just spent a valuable portion of your time digging the clad and surface junk. Sure maybe each retrieval took only a few minutes, but ........ do the math on 50 targets, and you begin to see that you're spending a large portion of your available swing-time, digging non-old-coins. Contrast to the person who was going only for deep coin signals, and refusing to dig anything less than 6" deep 'coin' signal, and .... his time is honed to *just* the particular type of signals that *tends* to more-often-be an old coin.
2) The person who is in "dig-all" mindset in the turf, will also subconsciously end up not hearing the deeper targets. He *thinks* he'll dig BOTH the deepies AND the shallows, but it never works out like that in the end. Because when you are digging all, you're mind becomes subconsciously tuned to the loud bongs. You will find yourself going from "loud bong" to "loud bong", and become DE-tuned (in your subconscious hearing) to hear the faint whispers. It's a mind trick that we're all at risk of.
For example: If you've ever been to a relicky site that's brimming with easy targets (a virgin stage stop for instance), you will notice that ...... after a few months of working such a site, as you scan and re-scan the same ground looking for more, that over-time, you will start to get the smaller and whispier targets. Ie.: the "4-star" easy signals are now gone, so as you go back through, only now do you start to find more of the smaller targets (pencil eraser top things, .22 shells, and so forth). This is true EVEN when you never were in a cherry-picking mode on those first trips. What is subconsciously happening, is that since targets were easy and fast those first few times, you would subconsciously gravitate to the easier obvious targets. Thus the same thing is a play in deep-turf hunting: If you are digging all the shallow loud clad, then no matter how hard you try, you will, after awhile, become attuned to *JUST* the shallow loud clad, and start missing the deepies.
