How deep???

[mwaynebennett]

I have found hundreds of memorial pennies and clad coins but no wheaties or silver. I have noticed that the coins I have found were perhaps 3"-4" deep and I have scratched my head as to how coins got 4" under the surface. I asked an older detecting friend and he told me that vegetation growing up and over and onto coins then rots and forms a layer of organic soil. This process repeats every year and the result is coins getting under ground. Since I don't usually dig coins that register 6" deep or deeper (a 6" indication usually produces a coin at about 4" deep) this would explain why I have yet to find any silver coins because the older coins are deeper. Now, an eight inch coil can find a coin at 6"-8" deep, however I think that a 10" coil would serve me better. Is there any agreement from the peanut gallery?

My next concern is that deep coins are more difficult to "pin-point" and require a deeper and larger diameter hole. I am hesitant to bring in a back hoe and risk being charged with destruction of public park property and the though of digging such a crater with an Ames TrueTemper tool with 2" wide blade doesn't thrill me.

Any thoughts???

Mark
Elite 2200
WA St.

 

[dave5710]

Older coins may or may not be deeper. I dug a Barber quarter about 9" deep once and an Indian head cent at 8" about 3 feet from it. 75% or more of my silver coins have been at 3 to 4 inches deep. I have also found a Standing Liberty quarter sticking out of the ground like a tiny tombstone. Deeper coins are tougher to pinpoint with your detector. Many of us use hand held pin pointers.

Yes a larger coil will aid you in getting more depth, a smaller coil will aid you in separating good targets from trash. Maybe the Wheats and silvers are just laying near rusting cans, nails or foil. Turning up the sensitivity of your detector should aid you in getting better depth as well. How fast you sweep the coil, how long the arc of your sweep, and how close you hold the coil to the ground will also play a role in getting better depth.

Gosh Mark, I can't believe you haven't got a Wheatie yet. I bet your detector is more than powerful enough to get enough depth for the older stuff. I also know that your technique has produced results for you in the past.
You must be hunting some heavily pounded sites. Keep looking for new sites and think outside the box.

Take care, Dave Proud clueless member of the Peanut Gallery.

 

[marcomo]

Mark, logically the longer a coin has been in the ground the deeper it is likely to be.

But that's not a hard and fast rule. When the earth is exceptionally hard or dense, coins will usually sink more slowly. They can be stopped from sinking by something like a tree root. Or they can be plowed up if the earth has been disturbed by things like construction or gardening. As you stated, decomposing vegetation also contributes. So when the ground is hard and barren coins are likely to be more shallow than otherwise since you have less natural sinking and decomposing vegetation.

My experience is a little different than Dave's. I'd say at least 75% of my silver coins have been 4" or deeper. 90% silver coins stopped being made in 1964 and were mostly out of circulation within a couple years. So any silver coins you find have almost surely been in the ground at least close to 45 years. Wheaties stopped being made in 1958 and by the mid-late 1970's they were mostly out of circulation. So any wheaties you find have probably been in the ground at least 35 years.

If you haven't found any silver or wheat yet, the first thing I'd suggest is to think about and research where you're hunting so you can go where the old coins are. If you're hunting tot lots or schools, houses or parks less than 35 years old, obviously your chances of finding old coins are slim unless there was activity on the land before the newer usage.

The 2200 with the stock coil should be able to get a diggable signal on coins up to 5 or maybe 6 inches deep which is certainly deep enough to find some silver and wheat if you're hunting where it is. Sure, we all miss coins because our detector won't go deep enough.

But a lot of coins within the depths of our detectors are missed because of masking. I think the 10" coil you mention would be an advantage in cleaner areas that don't have much ferrous metal and trash.

In trashier areas I prefer a smaller coil. You lose some depth but your detector sees way less soil so masking is much less of an issue.

As far as bigger holes for deeper coins, that's true for me. But if you keep your digger sharpened you should be able to cut cleanly so the plug fits back nicely. I always leave a flap on one side and pull back the plug. And like Dave said, a good pinpointer is a huge help.

When I started, it was a struggle for me. It took me about 30 hours before I found my first obsolete coin - a wheat penny. I can tell you from experience that if you keep at it, the old coins will come.

 

[salmonriverhotrock]

Something I have found no matter the detector I used, most coins were at just below the surface to about "4 depth. In all the reading I've come across, the majority of authors have also indicated that most productive results will occur at those depths for coins. In my experience, age of coin has never seemed to favor any particular depth. Lawns I suspect grow over them as there is a certain amount of dust and dirt fallout from the atmosphere that eventually mixes in with vegetation and compost to cover the coin. Others I suspect find their way down by being in mud and by weight, naturally settle like Gold till they are stopped by something else or the ground has been tilled or moved around by blading and digging. Surf or wave action on beaches have been known to bring lost coins in and take them back out and I'm sure their depths will vary greatly.

One thing to keep in mind about coins, the ones most noticeable are the ones most likely to catch an observant eye. Metallic silver colored coins are more noticeable than tarnished copper. Another is few people will stop to pick up a penny where they will most likely stop to pick up a nickle. With the advent of the Zinc Penny, many MD'ers are leaving them where they find them but I still retrieve them to take them out of the loop. This last weekend, I found two very clean dimes on the surface but I would not have seen them for the winter fallen grass laying over them. If they had been a few feet another direction, anyone would have quickly seen them as there was no cover. So visual surface detection cleans up a number of coins before we get to them.

Except in one instance, none of my old coins have been found in towns or near any structures like homes. All the rest have been in the mountains. This coin was in a friends yard. I was looking for a supposed lost black hills gold ring in his yard. His daughter said she lost it after borrowing it from a girlfriend. I detected, he dug in the grass. He pulled up what at first looked like a washer and said it must have fell off the lawn mower and almost tossed it when I yelled no with my headphones on. He stopped and I told him to push out the center and sure enough, it was an old Chinese coin. I told him to look at the corners of the square hole to see if they had any cracks and sure enough, 3 corners of 4 did. A Professor at Idaho State univ. tried to figure out the date and Emperor on this coin but said it was so rare, he could not. His home was at the outer edges of the city limits with open ground behind the place and not far from where the Chinese railroad gangs lived in the later 1800's then outside the city. Oh, the ring I never found because she lied to her Dad and had sold it. It was his yard and though he offered it to me, I told him to keep it.

In the old days of Idaho, there was not much exchange of currency or coinage and much was done on paper, through bartering, or with gold dust. My oldest dated find was an 1899 V-Nickle. The rest have been Silver Halfs and Quarters, Mercury Dimes, Buffalo's, and War Clad and Wheaties. It has only been the more modern coins I've found in yards or along sidewalks, highway turn outs, and under clothes lines or in parking lots and camp grounds for instance.

A rule of thumb on round coils is the diameter will be representative of depth. It has been my experience with my Garrett Freedom II at 5.5 kHz, that the more wet the ground, the better it detects and I have read this can be the case with some models and makes of detectors. My Garrett Master Hunter and BH Pioneer 505 don't seem to care either way. With my Freedom II, knowing what I was looking for and roughly where it was, detected a property survey stake twice the depth of the diameter of my coil with no discrimination in a somewhat iron trashy environment. First found directly above the metal stake was a wooden stake with a nail in the top. The owner of the property removed it but with headphones, I could still hear the real one below and told him to dig more. He gave me a funny look but did it. This guy was so impressed, he bought himself a nice used top of the line Garrett metal detector. This of coarse was before I had the BH 505.

I have not used a 10" coil on a BH yet but I have with my Garrett Master Hunter. It has been my experience though I can still ground balance it out in my mineralized area, it is effected more by mineralization and will hit on deeper hot rocks and metallic items and it is also effected more by multiples of targets under the larger area it will cover, especially in trashed out locations. The hot rocks I can figure out with the flick of a switch but it takes some sorting out of multiples of targets detected all at once. Large coils have a time and place to be used. I've read where those in competitions will use the large coils not so much for depth but to cover more area than the next guy and in shorter time so to increase the chance of finding the better prizes you get to keep buried by the Detecting Clubs.

 

[marcomo]

Robert, but that's an excellent point you make about metallic silver colored coins being more likely to be visually observed before going beneath the surface. And more likely to have people bend over for them. I never gave it much thought, but that makes a lot of sense.

As far as coin depth goes, there are two different schools of thought exemplified by two really smart and experienced dirt fishers.

The first theory, which Bill Revis aka Uncle Willy on the Garrett forum espouses, is that while some coins may be deeper, most coins are at a depth of 5" or less.

The other theory which dirt fisher and NASA rocket scientist Tom Dankowski subscribes to is that the majority of coins in the ground, as high as 90% of them, are in the ground are deeper than modern detecting technology can detect.

Apparently my experience is contrary to what others have experienced here, but the older coins I find are usually deeper than the newer.

 

[salmonriverhotrock]

Have never heard of the 2nd theory but I would on land go as far as there are deep coins though I don't think quite as many deeper than the norm that can be and are found. Mud slides and massive volcanic ash fallout or events like Mt. St. Helen in Washington State could make for very deep coins with the unrecovered dead, their destroyed homes and out houses, or camp areas that had coins buried by ash and mud flows. Quake Lake in Montana is an example. That mountain side came down on a camp ground full of people and that is where they have remained.

In relation to water, I would suspect the 2nd theory to be very true as Wells, Ponds, Lakes, and even the Ocean have for more years than we could count, been used by those who make wishes by tossing all kinds of coins and other small metallic objects into them. In bodies of water that are much more difficult to search, there are various lost planes, boats and ships, even military tanks that have sunk, and countless bodies lost, that had coins in or on them and I would think only a very small percentage of these coins have been or will be found.

I will encourage you to be patient. Consider how many years people have been detecting and where. I'm a firm believer not all of it has been found but a great deal of the most accessible and popular places have been gone over visually and with various detector technologies and skills many times that have removed a great deal of the better finds. Here in the canyon, I'm hunting areas not so limited by winter I know others have gone over and even with much more expensive machines than I own but I'm thinking and searching differently than they and still finding coins that obviously have been buried for at least long enough to tarnish or oxidize. I have had a dry spell on old coins, even worse on rings but I know a day is going to come and will make a hit. Believe me, you will take a look at a chunk of ground covered in trees, weeds, and grass not knowing a thing about it and will suddenly get a hunch and walk over to a spot and start swinging and you will make a hit. It was not that way when I started in 1982 and it was so frustrating trying to learn the sounds of my machine, I almost gave up metal detecting.

 

[mwaynebennett]

I live in Washington State, home of Mt. St Helens. I have a friend who goes MD all over the state and he told me that the thin layer of volcanic ash in eastern Washington is already under an inch or more of "normal" soil build-up. It seems that the surface of the earth is constantly getting buried and pushed down. That explains why in ancient cities, ruins are found so far underground.

Speaking of mud flows, I own about 300' of frontage along the Toutle River, the river the took the major whack in the May 1980 eruption of the afore mentioned volcano. My property has a layer of volcanic mud about 8 feet deep on it that was not there prior to that eruption. The people that had the house next door had several large jars filled with Kennedy half dollars on the window sill. A year after the eruption, they went back to try to get the coins but could never locate them. They are somewhere within a known 20'dia circle but down about 8 feet. I suppose some archaeologist or metal detectorist with a quantum phase shifting matter-antimatter element discriminator in the future will retrieve those coins and then retire.

Mark
Elite 2200
WA St.