OBSOLETE MAKRO RACER2 FINDS RARE 1800's KEY DATE U.S. SILVER

[Cal_Cobra]

Tom, his friend Tony, and I went on a 2.5 day weekend detecting adventure a couple of weekends ago.

This was the highlight of my finds, one of 56,000 minted, considered the key date Seated Liberty Quarter, sans the Carson City issues:



First site visited was a civil war era encampment that the Union Army frequented that seems to pork out lots of buttons and lead, a few relics, and very few coins (which seems really odd?). Id' say that by now, between Tom and I alone, that we've dug well over 600+ conductors there, of which only two were coins. No belt or cartridge box plates, no bit bosses, only one company letter, no regiment numbers, seems odd, but I'm not complaining, I enjoy finding civil war era buttons and lead, and heck we don't even have to go back east B)- Even though research seems to indicate this was mainly a cavalry camp, this is the first button we've found that actually had a cavalry C in the shield. Also that little bit on the bottom right, is actually a two piece button, the front seems to have some kind of goldstone that they polished out a letter "S" and left the rest matte finished. It's a tiny button, if it hadn't had a button loop on the back, I'd likely thought it was a bit of junk - lol





Does anyone know what this is? It was a heck of a signal, some kind of cast bronze/brass decorative thing, we're thinking it could be part of an old gun (see above next to the buttons for a size estimate)???

It definitely has a pre-industrial revolution era hand cast look to it like items we find at late 1700's/early 1800's Spanish era sites.





The next site is one that I've known of it's existence for ten years, but it wasn't until I brought Tom out on a ghost town trip, that we discussed the site, and decided to get serious about locating it. It took lots of research time and a few trips to the area to finally find the X marks the spot location. Now that we have, it seems to be a virgin site, all but forgotten to time.




Here's a video I made while digging the coin, had no idea what I'd really dug until about 60 seconds after the video was over and Tom checked PCGS to see if it was a rare date or anything and holy cow:

https://youtu.be/-Yl1Vr4ccKc

Thanks for looking and HH,
Brian

 

[dfmike]

Super finds. That coin is in exceptional shape.

 

[GlenOK]

Nice finds. Great coin.

 

[OregonGregg]

Very nice find Brian. Gotta love those now obsolete single freq. machines lol. They seem to still find the stuff. My Red Racer found my best coin yet a 1861s seated quarter in very nice cond. It too was low mintage but not as low or rare as yours. Again congrats and no way will I be trading in any of my Racers for ML,s new $900 fancy broomstick. Haven't seen a ML machine yet that does a very good job in dense iron and unmasking.

 

[NiagracountyNY]

Awesome finds! I bet that was a blast digging all those relics.That detectors far from obsolete id say..lol Im still using the cf77 ---Still finds it all ..lol Thanks for sharing the Hunt and pics...HH

 

[Scottowl]

Nice finds, and a beautiful coin.
Obsolete detector? Dang it! I haven't even fully adjusted to mine yet!

 

[Southwind]

Nice finds!

I wouldn't worry just yet. They haven't released the detector that a tester made the remark it would make the "single frequency detectors obsolete". Beside, there are people who still use and swear by 20+ old 6000 DI's so I doubt even a killer new technology is going to make all single frequency detectors obsolete. Change the expectations maybe. But obsolete? I doubt it.

 

[Cal_Cobra]

Very nice find Brian. Gotta love those now obsolete single freq. machines lol. They seem to still find the stuff. My Red Racer found my best coin yet a 1861s seated quarter in very nice cond. It too was low mintage but not as low or rare as yours. Again congrats and no way will I be trading in any of my Racers for ML,s new $900 fancy broomstick. Haven't seen a ML machine yet that does a very good job in dense iron and unmasking.

Congrats on your 1861S

Gregg the 1850's - 1860's Liberty Seated silver coins with San Francisco mint marks are almost all money coins

It will certainly be fun comparing the Equinox with the Racers and Impact. For me I know that simultaneous multifrequency can handle some of these mineralized sites we're detecting which will be a big help as it's handicapping my VLF detectors something serious (depth and TID are terrible), how they handle iron and unmasking remains to be seen.

hh,
Brian

 

[OregonGregg]

Ya I hear ya Brian....I'm curious to see how the Equinox does....just because of the buzz etc. Being it is a Minelab I really don't have any interest in it.....but you can't help but have some curiosity due to the amount of buzz the thing created. Like you said, it will be fun once its released and start seeing real reports, comparisons etc.

 

[amberjack]

rest of us can just dream.

AJ

 

[nuff coils]

Looks to be in xf (Extremely Fine) condition. Usually when they're that old and buried for that long, the coin will have some corrosion or tarnish.

Great job.

 

[UtahRich]

Newer technology will always come along, but that doesn't mean that the older stuff stops doing what they do.

That said, as I am getting older, I appreciate lighter weight, Some of those older machines I used to swing were great performers, but VERY heavy.

Rich (Utah)

 

[Monte]

That era would have been Philly, New Orleans or San Francisco mintage. I don't think a Carson City specimen was made until about 1870. I really admire the Seated Liberty coins and I believe I have found more Seated Liberty mintages than I have Barber's overall. From ghost towns and other early-era locations I know that to be true. I would say the average was 30 Seated Liberty to every 1 Barber coin I took out of 'Twin Flats' Utah [size=small](my all-time favorite ghost town I have hunted, heavily, since early May of '69)[/size], and in most other ghost towns that have produced for me in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California, Nevada and Oregon.

Older-use areas of older towns that are still alive can also bring us a surprise or two, if we look for and search some of the earlier period parts of those towns. As most know, I always have one or more detectors with me and I look for any opportunity to put in some hunt time. It was a clear and beautiful summer day in 1990 when I had a temporary government supervisor job with an hour to spare for lunch.

The evening before I had spotted a wide dirt parking strip that had been completely tilled and all the flowering shrubs removed. It was late in the evening when I worked it with my Tesoro and pulled a few modern coins, but also several early Wheat-back and Indian head cents, a Buffalo and early date 'V' nickel, and knew it still had potential. This was one of the more heavily used E and W roads used in Ogden, Utah in the 1850's and on until the town grew to a city and had groomed streets. When I got to the location the older homeowner was out sitting on his front steps. I greeted him when I got out and was lifting my detector off the seat and saying "Boy, this tilled site looks inviting!"

He was relaxing while watering his lawn and told me that I probably wouldn't find very much. He said he rotated his flowering shrubs every three of four years and used to metal detect it himself. Had found coins there but it was thinned out the last few times he worked it. I kind of forgot to tell him I had hit it the evening before and did okay. I asked how long ago he started detecting, if he still did it much, and asked what he was using. Remember, this was 1990 and was basically during the end of the peak period of heavy interest here in the USA, and he said he'd done it for 15 to 20 years. The detector he described was either a BFO or early '70s TR from White's.

I let him know my time was limited because I was on my lunch hour and would just make quick work of it and maybe return later that evening after work. I was in dressy work attire so didn't plan to get real dirty, either. He watched from his steps by the porch for a while and asked what I found after each recovery. 'Oh, just a penny' I would tell him, not better identifying it as a Wheatie or Indian Head, and there were some occasional pieces of trash. I had one pretty decent hit about a foot in from the curbing and it was very week, thus deeper, but it sounded good! I carefully made a little toe mark in the dirt and I continued to slowly advance.

Then the fellow got up, said "I'll be back after I move the sprinkler out back." As he walked out of sight around the corner of the house I quickly returned to my toe scuff-mark, and after removing about 7-8" of loose dirt I could see the edge of a quarter-size, shiny silver target. No time to waste as I quickly removed it, palmed it into my rear pants pocket and shoved the dirt back in the hole. I naturally check the target spot and moved ahead to where I might have been, and paused to recover a small metal object I eyeballed on top of the ground. Time was short and the fellow continued to walk out to see what I had found. I grabbed a handful of the trash in my pouch and he just said his detector doesn't find that kind of stuff. Humm. Interesting because a lot of it was higher conductive foil, not ferrous debris.

He wished me luck when I returned later, and that evening I did find coins dating from the 1880's to early 1930's. I hunted it very patiently, too, because after I drove four blocks back to work I paused to check out my quarter-size find. I was anticipating a Barber, would have been okay with a silver Washington, but hoped for maybe a Standing Liberty. Nope, it was my own 1860 Seated Liberty Quarter, easily in EF condition. I was hoping for an 'S' mintmark, and an 'O' would have been okay as well, but I was satisfied with that specimen all the way from the NE.

Over 52 years of avid detecting, concentrating on older sites for 75%± of that time, and I have only found one 1860 Seated Liberty Quarter, and after working so many out-of-use and abandoned sites I pluck it from an older area in my home town. Surprises happen.

Keep up the searching Brian as you're down there hunting a lot of sites with ample potential.

 

[Cal_Cobra]

That's a great story, Monte you have great stories from the golden era of detecting. One of the founders of the Mount Diablo detecting club I used to belong to (until I moved) told stories of hunting park scrapes and getting hundreds of silver coins, and over a 1,000 wheaties and indians from a single scrape, or going to Golden Gate Park in the morning and having to go back to his vehicle to empty his pockets at lunch because they were so full of silver coins, his pants were falling down I suspect his stories may have been someone embellished over the years, but I know your ghost town stories are not. What I wouldn't give to have been one of the first to detect a virgin'ish ghost town site.

There's an article in one of the bottle digger/treasure magazines from the early 1970's about a fellow that frequented one of the famous old town Nevada dumps, and there's a photo of the guy holding up an old porcelain Wells Fargo Express sign that was on top of the ground, and the old whiskey bottles he found on top of the ground. Geesh, now we work our butts off just to eek out a couple of interesting finds.

My friend Tom and I have detected 1840's-1850's emigrant trail type stops as well as late 1850's and on mining type sites (stage stops/ghost towns). You notice a big difference in the finds. The emigrant sites produced coins that were almost always minted back east and some early coins like bust halves, bust dimes, Spanish and Mexican reales, early seateds, etc. versus the slightly later mining related type sites which have a lot of San Francisco minted coins and tend to lack those earlier coins, but who can complain about seateds (barbers perhaps).

One thing these type of sites both tend to produce are gold coins. Keeping my fingers crossed that eventually I'll get one under my coil

HH,
Brian

 

[Tom Slick]

Brian,
I have a Wells Fargo porcelain sign that my Brother-in-Law gave me. The son of his friend does some kind of scuba work and was diving off shore in San Francisco when he found a stack of the signs. They think they were pushed out to sea after the 1906 earthquake. The signs have rusted in from the exposed edges but has remained in good shape where protected by the porcelain. Mine now hangs on the side of my storage shed.

 

[Cal_Cobra]

Brian,
I have a Wells Fargo porcelain sign that my Brother-in-Law gave me. The son of his friend does some kind of scuba work and was diving off shore in San Francisco when he found a stack of the signs. They think they were pushed out to sea after the 1906 earthquake. The signs have rusted in from the exposed edges but has remained in good shape where protected by the porcelain. Mine now hangs on the side of my storage shed.

That's awesome Tom!! Diving San Francisco, that's just incredible!!! Aside from the fruits and nuts around here, there's a lot of great history, I've seen incredible things found around the bay area. Does your brother-in-lay have any more of those signs he'd part with

I have a friend that used to scuba dive the Sacramento River, he used to be a hard core bottle hunter, but he found amazing things lost from the original gold rush era ports that sprung up between San Francisco and Sacramento on the river, I'm sure there's still plenty there for those that have that ability

 

[coinspader]

Damn, I just plopped down $500.00 for an R2 pro pack with an additional RC26 coil. I didn't know it was obsolete!

 

[Nokta Detectors]

Damn, I just plopped down $500.00 for an R2 pro pack with an additional RC26 coil. I didn't know it was obsolete!

Racer 2 is NOT obsolete... the subject of the thread is referencing a ''claim'' made by competition that their new model will obsolete all single frequency detectors.
Manufacturers cannot decide on what will be obsolete... only the END USERS can...and as long as our valued customers (such as the member who posted this thread) like and use our products, the only thing that will be obsolete are the claims made. Thank you!

 

[Cal_Cobra]

Damn, I just plopped down $500.00 for an R2 pro pack with an additional RC26 coil. I didn't know it was obsolete!

Racer 2 is NOT obsolete... the subject of the thread is referencing a ''claim'' made by competition that their new model will obsolete all single frequency detectors.
Manufacturers cannot decide on what will be obsolete... only the END USERS can...and as long as our valued customers (such as the member who posted this thread) like and use our products, the only thing that will be obsolete are the claims made. Thank you!

No, it's not obsolete, my Racer 2 is working just fine, and has paid for itself several times over

It was a satirical tongue in cheek statement given the outlandish claim made by a competing detector vendor in their latest marketing campaign innochio

 

[coinspader]

Oh don't worry, I love my R2! I was just being sarcastic.Makro detectors in my opinion are a step above everyone else.