no nickles.....no kidding

[gordygroover]

Since it is spring break here locally I headed to my old high school yesterday and did some hunting in peace and quiet. Quiet except for the Ace banging out coin tones at a regular clip.
I seldom do much more with my coins that pull them out of the ground, check the denomination and put them into my pouch.
When home I gave them a washing and saw I had four quarters, thirteen dimes and 58 pennies. And no nickles!! Nada, Zip and Zero Jeffersons in my pile.
I realise that nickles are a breed apart to a detector....My coin garden contains a number of nickles in different positions so I know the signal well. The soil is the same at my home as at the school.
Aint no way I could bring home that many coins and not have found a nickle.
Today was another beautiful day so I returned to the same plot of ground with a vengeance!!! My goal was to search in all metal with full sensitivity and pull every nickle out of the ground.
I have a shopping bag full of pull tabs, pencil foil, gum wrappers and every other metal object every handled by a high school student since l927 BUT NO NICKLES!!!
Recovered 95 percent of my targets and among the thirty-seven coins I still am amazed that not one nickle was in the pile.
Possibly another detectorist swinging a machine that was a nickle hammering wonder has been there before me but he sure left a lot of quarters and dimes behind.
No reason my machine can bang a nickle in my test garden and every other site I hunt but simply come up empty in this location.
Anybody else have any hunting puzzlers in their history???

 

[awhitster]

Strange. I usually get a few everytime I go out.

 

[treasurefiend]

See my totals below, I don't find too many nickels, and I dig every signal.

But I did find another one this afternoon.

 

[cwilk]

I probably notch nickels out about 30-40 percent of the time. In really trashy areas especially. Some days I just don't feel like digging pop tops and on those days I get very few nickels. I do the same thing with zinc cents. I usually don't notch them but I frequently ignore them. On days when I dig everything I usually find my share of nickels and more than my share of zinc cents. I will say this. Last year I found 469 zinc cents and 715 nickels. So far in 2008 zincs are ahead of nickels. 81 to 65. I dug very few nickels when it was really cold out.

If you think about it, the nickel really almost useless (except that it takes the place of 5 cents) as a coin. The most nickels you ever have to use (assuming you are issuing change with the fewest number of coins possible) is 1. Not true of any other coin except halves and we all know the story with them.

What does all this mean? I don't know. I think you just had one of those hunts.

Chris

 

[gordygroover]

I think you are right Chris.
I hit a jr. High school two blocks from the other place this evening and got l.99 total. One lousy cent away from a round number.
Happily I did pop three nickles. Knew what they were as soon as I finished pinpointing them. Sure did take a load off my shoulders knowing my machine and I aren't over the hill yet.
Did find a foreign coin....Not sure the country of origin though. Marked 25 cents but it feels as if it is aluminum. Date was l974 and it came out of the ground looking like it just left the mint.
sure wish I knew how to post pics...Sucks being a techno-moron.

 

[cwilk]

If you take some low res digital photos (I go with 3.2 megapixel) and can get them to your hard drive it isn't too hard to post photos. I take my photos a little larger than needed and cropping them brings them down below 420 Kb. Windows phot viewer should already be on your machine and it has crop capabilities. I set a resolution to photograph all my finds this year. So far 20 hunts, 20 posts, 20 plus photos. It's fun to see what everybody is finding especially when a real treasure like an old coin or a gold ring pops up. I also really like finding foreign coins. I think I've found Japan, Europe, Canada, Venezuala, Bermuda, UK detecting. Tokens are also interesting. Some arcade tokens will really make the Ace 250 scream. You'll see.

I hope you are keeping a log. Of my first 30 hunts with the 250, only 4 were more than 2 bucks. My last 30 hunts with the Ace 250 had no hunts under 2 bucks and ony 5 under $5.00.

Chris

I find the kids at Junior High have as much money in their pockets as the High School kids do, but they are more inclined to lose it. Elementary schools in prosperous neighborhoods are great too. Those little guys lose everything!

 

[Uncle Willy]

You can't find nickels where nickels ain't.

Bill

 

[Neil in West Jersey]

One reason you find less nickels is that they are less likely to get dropped and lost than dimes and pennies. Nickels are a little larger than both the dime and penny, and certainly shinier than a penny, hence easier to find when dropped. Couple that with the lower conductivity and your chances of finding a nickel are diminished. For example, a quarter will give a nice loud belltone at 5 inches, but a nickel can be questionable at this depth.

One of my goals for last year was to dig more nickels, hence find more jewelry, and it worked out pretty well. If I detected more at schools and parks I am sure my nickel (and jewelry) count would go up significantly.