"How do I find gold Jewelry?
This is a common question, especially among newcomers to this hobby. They buy a new detector or get one given as a gift and, like Christmas sugarplums, visions of gold treasures soon dance in their heads. Manufacturers take advantage of this and make sure to include images of monstrous rings and other bejeweled items in their advertising. But before long, the newcomer, unless he or she is very lucky, soon asks the next question,
"Why am I not finding any gold?"
There is a simple answer, which says the more you look the more you will find... so be persistent
But, that is only part of the solution. It is a requirement to be actively searching, of course, yet that may actually be the lesser part of finding gold jewelry. Let's discuss a few other things on the matter that are at least pertinent... and probably more crucial to your success than just being out looking.
GOLD IS ELUSIVE
First, you must understand that there just is not that much quality gold jewelry lost. Gold itself, the mineral, is not actually rare. Go to any big-box store and look at the quantity of gold jewelry available. There's plenty, right? And that is repeated in discount stores, jewelry stores, catalogs and Internet sites across the globe.
Now take a look at the quantity of costume jewelry available. They are at least even, and I'd wager the fake stuff outnumbers the good stuff 2:1. I've even seen a disturbing trend towards using stainless steel to make rings of all kinds; even wedding bands! Add to that all the junk jewelry made from brass, pewter and plain old pot metal. Now add in the stuff from gum machines, Avon and countless other boutique outlets and you see the odds are stacked heavily against you. In all fairness, you stand to find more junk jewelry than gold jewelry.
GOLD ENVY
Then there is Gold Envy. This arises when you see several nice gold pieces displayed on a detecting website or in a magazine. It seems everyone is finding it but you. That is, until you step back and realize you have no idea what led to it's recovery. You don't know how many millions of detectorists were afield during the time of it's recovery - detectorists who found NO gold. You also don't know how much deduction, if any, was involved in finding it. It could have been just dumb luck (and was probably was). Flatly put, the same odds working against you were working against the ones who display those great finds.
Your fellow detectorists don't often help, either. If you are bold enough to ask how it was found, most will take the easy way out and simply say, "Research." Many of our brother hobbyists consider it a serious faux pas to even ask about a finds recovery and take umbrage at the question. Instead of being helpful and offering some good general advice which might assist you where you live, they clam up or offer something flippant. In essence they are saying, "I got mine, you gotta get your own."
Not all will do this, mind you - but it happens often enough.
So give up on negative Gold Envy right off.
When you do, you will have passed the first test to becoming a true detectorist.
However, while it may seem hardly worth continued effort to search for gold jewelry sometimes, don't be utterly dismayed.
There are some recognized things you can do to tilt the odds in your favor. Read on, my friend
THE BIG THREE
There are three primary elements involved in recovering lost gold jewelry. You will hit on the first yourself, when you ask this question:
"Am I detecting in the right places?"
Gold jewelry is made to stay on the wearer. It isn't meant to come off. So first and foremost, there must be the right sort of physical action to jar it loose from it's owner and send it off to be lost. Additionally, gold as a symbol of common wealth is a relatively new thing. Except for wealthier folks, most people years ago didn't have a lot of it. So if you are concentrating your detecting in old places, you can expect to find less of it. It's a paradox of sorts, but if you are searching for gold jewelry, you need to concentrate on more modern places. Look for places where people move about in pursuit of athletic, outdoor and work related activities. This is why much gold jewelry turns up on soccer and football fields.
Second, adults for the most part have the good, higher assay gold. Kids and adolescents may have a bit of it, but by and large the good stuff is worn by adults with enough money to buy the good stuff. This is because quality gold jewelry costs plenty of money to obtain. So, you need to look for the places where earning adults are active enough to lose their good gold jewelry.
Third, there needs to be large numbers of people frequenting these places on a regular basis. This dramatically skews the odds in your favor.
Most valuable jewelry, when discovered missing, is searched for and often found. So there must be a lot of people to both lose gold items and fail at recovering them. This means you really need to understand site usage and the numbers of people which pass through a given locale, if you are to get ahead of the odds.
A BLIND DOG
Now, "any one thing can be in any one place," to quote H. Glenn Carson. But he wasn't endorsing random searching with these words. Rather, he too, was suggesting adding focus to your efforts.
I was commissioned last year to search for a fellows 1952 college graduation ring. The ring had been lost in a residential backyard, while the man was feeding his pet horse. It was found after a short search, without difficulty, not far from the hay rack. But, it was the only piece of jewelry recovered there. It was a one of a kind situation, and I was led to within ten square yards of it's resting place.
So even a blind dog can sniff out a bone, now and then. But, that is definitely NOT what you are after. What you must concern yourself with and focus on, is increasing the odds of finding gold jewelry.
BACK TO MATH CLASS
Lets sum this up in a short and yet familiar way - mathematically. Simply put, we have a basic "gold equation" at hand:
Physical Activity + Earning Adults + Large Numbers = gold jewelry
This illustrates why the beaches along any shore produce jewelry in such steady numbers.... all three factors in the equation are present at the beach.
But, you must also multiply our basic equation with what I like to call the "Beach Factor." The Beach Factor is really an amalgam of elements and includes:
water (which causes skin to shrink and stretch),
sweat (from sun and strenuous activity),
suntan oil,
sudden cloudbursts,
sudden wind gusts..... and all the other things associated with beach going.
When we include the Beach Factor, our previous equation looks like this:
Physical Activity + Earning Adults + Large Numbers x (Beach Factor) = MORE gold jewelry
This is universal in it's application, too. From the Northern Tier to the equator, wherever people flock to the beach you will find a probable jewelry hot spot. If you do not have any beaches nearby, or never hunt them, then your annual jewelry finds are bound to decrease.
Happily, there aren't many places you can live where there is no swimming area of some sort. Whether freshwater or salt, you should be able to find one or two within easy driving distance.
THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM
Once the other elements are in place, you are ready to embrace the Secret, the thing most people don't talk about much:
You must become selective, even exclusionary in your recoveries if you want to find gold jewelry.
Most people are good at finding coins, and that is what most detectors sold are designed for. Quarters, dimes, cents, nickels, brass tokens - these are all common finds. I commend any detectorist for his or her heaping pile of recovered coins.
But, it must be known that, among coins, only nickles and tokens represent what would be seen by your detector as gold jewelry.
When I searched for that man's ring I mentioned above, I deliberately avoided anything in the coin range except nickles and screwcaps.
Occasionally a gold jewelry piece will go outside the "nickle and brass" realm, but not often.
I recall a study done by Fisher years ago. In the study, it was found that something like 76% of gold rings were found in the nickel/pulltab range. There were a few outside of that, notably small jewelry and filigree which tend to be below the range and 10K class rings, which tend to ring up around screwcap.
But, by and large, gold jewelry falls smack-dab in the low to center mid range of conductivity.
This means that the key to recovering gold jewelry is this:
You must be eager to dig targets in this range and NOT waste time on the others - if gold is your target.
THE LOWLY PULLTAB
One thing I rarely see when fellow detectorists show off their finds is the trash that accompanied their efforts. I especially don't see any pulltabs. Trash is, frankly, more telling than the good finds. And when it comes to gold jewelry, pulltabs hold a place of their own.
The bothersome, often despised pulltab is the low brow kin to gold jewelry, and is found in most of the same places. The pulltab also vastly outnumbers it's more precious cousins.
However, it is a brutal truth of detecting that beverage pulltabs look like gold rings to a detector. Period.
You cannot sugar coat that inconvenient truth, and you may as well burn that into your mind now. Go ahead, we'll wait...........
On the other hand, where you are finding pulltabs you know these things:
1. People have been there, and they have at least been active enough to be drinking beverages.
2. You are finding the right target range of objects to ensure your ability to find gold jewelry.
So pulltabs, contrary to what you may think, are your friends and you must dig them if you want the gold jewelry. Any decent detector can be a premier instrument for finding gold jewelry, since both jewelry and pulltabs are most often found in relatively new places and aren't deep in the ground.
But, when your detector tells you it sees a pulltab - you must believe that and dig it. This goes for any detector, whether an inexpensive model or high-dollar boomer. You cannot shirk, or whine, or pass it up "just this once." No sir, you must bend the knee and recover it.
And yes, you will dig a lot of trash and very few coins that way. But consider for a moment the value of just one half-way decent gold ring. It can be worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. Given that, you'll see that passing up a box full of Memorial cents could be to your advantage.
I personally recover items which indicate quarter/dime/half dollar when searching for rings, but that is just to keep it interesting. They are not my main quarry.
DOES ALL THIS WORK?
I know of a fellow detectorist who frequents at least one Internet forum, named Ralph B. He specifically notch-selects only the mid range targets and uses an inexpensive, box-stock Ace 250. He doesn't recover coins at all, except for nickles. And he finds a lot of rings... I mean a lot. When he was active at it, not a week went by where he didn't show off a nice one. I corresponded with Ralph recently, via email and he is still doing well. He's been busy with work and family, so hasn't done the amount of detecting he'd like. But he reminded me that he still uses this method. With great success, I'm certain, if his past performance is any indication!
So, if you really want to find gold jewelry, you must ponder these things. You must also vow to remain persistent at it, long term. Without dogged determination throughout the season, you will come up short at the end of the year.
After all, if finding gold jewelry with a detector were easy, everyone would do it.
[size=x-small]copyright ddh. All rights reserved.[/size]
This is a common question, especially among newcomers to this hobby. They buy a new detector or get one given as a gift and, like Christmas sugarplums, visions of gold treasures soon dance in their heads. Manufacturers take advantage of this and make sure to include images of monstrous rings and other bejeweled items in their advertising. But before long, the newcomer, unless he or she is very lucky, soon asks the next question,
"Why am I not finding any gold?"
There is a simple answer, which says the more you look the more you will find... so be persistent
But, that is only part of the solution. It is a requirement to be actively searching, of course, yet that may actually be the lesser part of finding gold jewelry. Let's discuss a few other things on the matter that are at least pertinent... and probably more crucial to your success than just being out looking.
GOLD IS ELUSIVE
First, you must understand that there just is not that much quality gold jewelry lost. Gold itself, the mineral, is not actually rare. Go to any big-box store and look at the quantity of gold jewelry available. There's plenty, right? And that is repeated in discount stores, jewelry stores, catalogs and Internet sites across the globe.
Now take a look at the quantity of costume jewelry available. They are at least even, and I'd wager the fake stuff outnumbers the good stuff 2:1. I've even seen a disturbing trend towards using stainless steel to make rings of all kinds; even wedding bands! Add to that all the junk jewelry made from brass, pewter and plain old pot metal. Now add in the stuff from gum machines, Avon and countless other boutique outlets and you see the odds are stacked heavily against you. In all fairness, you stand to find more junk jewelry than gold jewelry.
GOLD ENVY
Then there is Gold Envy. This arises when you see several nice gold pieces displayed on a detecting website or in a magazine. It seems everyone is finding it but you. That is, until you step back and realize you have no idea what led to it's recovery. You don't know how many millions of detectorists were afield during the time of it's recovery - detectorists who found NO gold. You also don't know how much deduction, if any, was involved in finding it. It could have been just dumb luck (and was probably was). Flatly put, the same odds working against you were working against the ones who display those great finds.
Your fellow detectorists don't often help, either. If you are bold enough to ask how it was found, most will take the easy way out and simply say, "Research." Many of our brother hobbyists consider it a serious faux pas to even ask about a finds recovery and take umbrage at the question. Instead of being helpful and offering some good general advice which might assist you where you live, they clam up or offer something flippant. In essence they are saying, "I got mine, you gotta get your own."
Not all will do this, mind you - but it happens often enough.
So give up on negative Gold Envy right off.
When you do, you will have passed the first test to becoming a true detectorist.
However, while it may seem hardly worth continued effort to search for gold jewelry sometimes, don't be utterly dismayed.
There are some recognized things you can do to tilt the odds in your favor. Read on, my friend
THE BIG THREE
There are three primary elements involved in recovering lost gold jewelry. You will hit on the first yourself, when you ask this question:
"Am I detecting in the right places?"
Gold jewelry is made to stay on the wearer. It isn't meant to come off. So first and foremost, there must be the right sort of physical action to jar it loose from it's owner and send it off to be lost. Additionally, gold as a symbol of common wealth is a relatively new thing. Except for wealthier folks, most people years ago didn't have a lot of it. So if you are concentrating your detecting in old places, you can expect to find less of it. It's a paradox of sorts, but if you are searching for gold jewelry, you need to concentrate on more modern places. Look for places where people move about in pursuit of athletic, outdoor and work related activities. This is why much gold jewelry turns up on soccer and football fields.
Second, adults for the most part have the good, higher assay gold. Kids and adolescents may have a bit of it, but by and large the good stuff is worn by adults with enough money to buy the good stuff. This is because quality gold jewelry costs plenty of money to obtain. So, you need to look for the places where earning adults are active enough to lose their good gold jewelry.
Third, there needs to be large numbers of people frequenting these places on a regular basis. This dramatically skews the odds in your favor.
Most valuable jewelry, when discovered missing, is searched for and often found. So there must be a lot of people to both lose gold items and fail at recovering them. This means you really need to understand site usage and the numbers of people which pass through a given locale, if you are to get ahead of the odds.
A BLIND DOG
Now, "any one thing can be in any one place," to quote H. Glenn Carson. But he wasn't endorsing random searching with these words. Rather, he too, was suggesting adding focus to your efforts.
I was commissioned last year to search for a fellows 1952 college graduation ring. The ring had been lost in a residential backyard, while the man was feeding his pet horse. It was found after a short search, without difficulty, not far from the hay rack. But, it was the only piece of jewelry recovered there. It was a one of a kind situation, and I was led to within ten square yards of it's resting place.
So even a blind dog can sniff out a bone, now and then. But, that is definitely NOT what you are after. What you must concern yourself with and focus on, is increasing the odds of finding gold jewelry.
BACK TO MATH CLASS
Lets sum this up in a short and yet familiar way - mathematically. Simply put, we have a basic "gold equation" at hand:
Physical Activity + Earning Adults + Large Numbers = gold jewelry
This illustrates why the beaches along any shore produce jewelry in such steady numbers.... all three factors in the equation are present at the beach.
But, you must also multiply our basic equation with what I like to call the "Beach Factor." The Beach Factor is really an amalgam of elements and includes:
water (which causes skin to shrink and stretch),
sweat (from sun and strenuous activity),
suntan oil,
sudden cloudbursts,
sudden wind gusts..... and all the other things associated with beach going.
When we include the Beach Factor, our previous equation looks like this:
Physical Activity + Earning Adults + Large Numbers x (Beach Factor) = MORE gold jewelry
This is universal in it's application, too. From the Northern Tier to the equator, wherever people flock to the beach you will find a probable jewelry hot spot. If you do not have any beaches nearby, or never hunt them, then your annual jewelry finds are bound to decrease.
Happily, there aren't many places you can live where there is no swimming area of some sort. Whether freshwater or salt, you should be able to find one or two within easy driving distance.
THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM
Once the other elements are in place, you are ready to embrace the Secret, the thing most people don't talk about much:
You must become selective, even exclusionary in your recoveries if you want to find gold jewelry.
Most people are good at finding coins, and that is what most detectors sold are designed for. Quarters, dimes, cents, nickels, brass tokens - these are all common finds. I commend any detectorist for his or her heaping pile of recovered coins.
But, it must be known that, among coins, only nickles and tokens represent what would be seen by your detector as gold jewelry.
When I searched for that man's ring I mentioned above, I deliberately avoided anything in the coin range except nickles and screwcaps.
Occasionally a gold jewelry piece will go outside the "nickle and brass" realm, but not often.
I recall a study done by Fisher years ago. In the study, it was found that something like 76% of gold rings were found in the nickel/pulltab range. There were a few outside of that, notably small jewelry and filigree which tend to be below the range and 10K class rings, which tend to ring up around screwcap.
But, by and large, gold jewelry falls smack-dab in the low to center mid range of conductivity.
This means that the key to recovering gold jewelry is this:
You must be eager to dig targets in this range and NOT waste time on the others - if gold is your target.
THE LOWLY PULLTAB
One thing I rarely see when fellow detectorists show off their finds is the trash that accompanied their efforts. I especially don't see any pulltabs. Trash is, frankly, more telling than the good finds. And when it comes to gold jewelry, pulltabs hold a place of their own.
The bothersome, often despised pulltab is the low brow kin to gold jewelry, and is found in most of the same places. The pulltab also vastly outnumbers it's more precious cousins.
However, it is a brutal truth of detecting that beverage pulltabs look like gold rings to a detector. Period.
You cannot sugar coat that inconvenient truth, and you may as well burn that into your mind now. Go ahead, we'll wait...........
On the other hand, where you are finding pulltabs you know these things:
1. People have been there, and they have at least been active enough to be drinking beverages.
2. You are finding the right target range of objects to ensure your ability to find gold jewelry.
So pulltabs, contrary to what you may think, are your friends and you must dig them if you want the gold jewelry. Any decent detector can be a premier instrument for finding gold jewelry, since both jewelry and pulltabs are most often found in relatively new places and aren't deep in the ground.
But, when your detector tells you it sees a pulltab - you must believe that and dig it. This goes for any detector, whether an inexpensive model or high-dollar boomer. You cannot shirk, or whine, or pass it up "just this once." No sir, you must bend the knee and recover it.
And yes, you will dig a lot of trash and very few coins that way. But consider for a moment the value of just one half-way decent gold ring. It can be worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. Given that, you'll see that passing up a box full of Memorial cents could be to your advantage.
I personally recover items which indicate quarter/dime/half dollar when searching for rings, but that is just to keep it interesting. They are not my main quarry.
DOES ALL THIS WORK?
I know of a fellow detectorist who frequents at least one Internet forum, named Ralph B. He specifically notch-selects only the mid range targets and uses an inexpensive, box-stock Ace 250. He doesn't recover coins at all, except for nickles. And he finds a lot of rings... I mean a lot. When he was active at it, not a week went by where he didn't show off a nice one. I corresponded with Ralph recently, via email and he is still doing well. He's been busy with work and family, so hasn't done the amount of detecting he'd like. But he reminded me that he still uses this method. With great success, I'm certain, if his past performance is any indication!
So, if you really want to find gold jewelry, you must ponder these things. You must also vow to remain persistent at it, long term. Without dogged determination throughout the season, you will come up short at the end of the year.
After all, if finding gold jewelry with a detector were easy, everyone would do it.
[size=x-small]copyright ddh. All rights reserved.[/size]
.
HH jim tn