Question About Detecting In The 50's, 60's, 70's, & 80's

[Critterhunter]

Didn't start in this hoppy until the early 90's so I don't know much about detecting in say the 60's or 70's. I would assume (?) the average depth of those machines was maybe 4 or 5" in good soil? Also, how good was their discrimination? What I'm wondering about is were they able to avoid things like pull tabs and only dig coin signals, and how deep? I'm primarily thinking about the trash from that era that may be masking coins to this day. If in the early days they had to dig it all then much of those masked coins would I think be gone by now. I'm wondering if later (say mid 70's or so) machines came along that were able to discriminate out pull tabs and such and so those more modern tabs and junk that was left behind at later dates aren't really masking any silver, because early they had to dig it all and thus removed the older trash along with any coins that might have been under them.

Of course I've dug my share of silver that was masked by tabs and other junk over the years, but when I think of those recoveries they were almost all rosies or other more recent coins of that era, and not so much barbers or seateds...So I'm thinking that if they had to dig it all at one time those older masked coins were found, and that in the era of rosies and such if machines were able to discriminate out tabs and other junk then that's the reason why rosies dropped and masked weren't recovered. Hope you know what I'm trying to get at here.

Of course even if all this is true it doesn't get rid of the fact that a lot of older coins that weren't masked were too deep or in bad ground that those machines couldn't reach, and before machines came along that could reach them more modern trash was dropped over them which then masked the coin.

I'd love to hear somebody who has been detecting since say the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's give a run down of the capabilites of the machines through those different eras. How good was the discrimination. What kind of depth did they get...And so on.

I remember a friend telling me of pictures in metal detecting mags in I think the 70's, with guys sitting by huge piles of silver including halves and dollars, that they found in just one day's hunt. Must have been a bonanza. Somebody was telling me about a guy who used to detect years ago, and just cashed in two five gallon buckets (don't know if they were all the way full, of course) that he had sitting around for years full of silver and was waiting for the high silver prices we have these days.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

I started in the mid 1970s, with a circa late 1960s/early '70's used detector (Whites 66TR) at that time. So here my thoughts:

For starters, you say "50s, 60s, 70s", and then ask several things. You've got to realize that during that 30-ish year period, the range of advancements was astronomical. So you'd have to hone down your question to a more finite set of years, for each question. For example: In the 1950s, there were very few machines even capable of finding a coin sized item. Yes a few did exist prior to 1960, that were sensitive enough to find individual coins, bullets, etc... But most of them from this '50s decade were strictly for hub-cap sized items (like mine detectors, or 2-box units). For those that did exist that could find coin-sized items then (there were many come & go shortlived companies...) I'd say a person would have been doing good to get 2 or 3", and even then so, only in good soil. And they would have been a bear to keep balanced and tuned, had no disc, etc....

By the early '60s though, word was getting out, and makers were starting to step up to demand. Transistors came about, etc... There were a few machines by the early '60s that might do 4" and were more user friendly. But still, many others that were still worthless junk, drifted horribly, etc.... Still no disc, still can't handle minerals, etc.... But some amazing stories come from this early '60s era of guys who were the first to detect in front of concession stands, or on virgin beaches, etc.... virgin schools, etc... Even though they only got 3 or 4" deep, yet all the coins were still silver then, and the pulltab hadn't been invented yet.

The very first discriminators were seen in the very early '70s (and perhaps one or two claims by the late '60s?). But for the most part, it was all metal till the early 1970s. Even when I started in the mid '70s, there were STILL some md'rs who "looked with suspicion" on these new-fangled discriminators (with cautionary claims that you'd "miss rings", blah blah). So some people stubbornly held on to their all-metal TR's Naturally that attitude changed when old-timers saw the disc. guys effortlessly passing tabs and foil in junky turf! doh! When knocking out foil you would loose some depth. When cranking it higher to pass tabs, you would loose even more depth, as disc. and depth were directly correlated on TR disc. of that era. And they were a bear to keep tuned. Depth on the best of the TR discriminators might have been 6" on a dime, if you tried hard. Depended on your ear, the minerals, etc... The TRs were next to useless in some nastier soils (the continental divide mountaneous regions, for instance).

Your question about masking and un-masking (all metal vs cherry picking periods) TOTALLY depends on the pressure in your specific area. Because ...... sure: If you live in an area that saw heavy pressure in the pre-disc days, the sure, perhaps they un-masked a lot of tabs, yet lacked the depth to go deeper to the barbers and such. For that, we can thank those yesteryear hunters But there were a heck of a lot of parks and schools that weren't really worked that hard UNTIL the disc. era came to be. That is to say: Even up to the mid 1970s, there were some areas of the US that detectors were still an oddity, so the first persons getting them (or using them heavily in certain parts), might have simply started with discriminators. Then in that case, odds are, they cranked the disc, leaving foil and tabs in junky turf, which .... yes .... equates to a deeper strata un-touched in junky inner city blighted parks. But pity the poor fellow now who thinks he can be a "hero" and go mine out all the surface zinc and tabs and foil, to try un-mask things, get gold in junky turf, etc.... In some junkier/blighted zones, it simply wouldn't be worth it.

It all boils down to the specific region you are in as per the past detecting hobbyists there, the depth of coins (if they were shallower in your soil, and the soil was innert, the perhaps it got worked good back then?). But if coin depths were deeper with age (as can be expected with moist turf), then the VLF machines of the mid to late '70s opened up a whole new pandora's box of finds, that the older machines couldn't reach (whether or not they elected to disc anything, or not).

 

[bugg]

My local dealer talked me into a new state of the art Mini-pro, for $190. It had disc, but could not knock out tabs. 6" coil. Coins about 3" deep. Course back then , I was finding indians and barbers an inch or two deep. We also hunted early mornings when on lookers were not around, it was more of a secretive hobby back then. But i would come home with more and better finds from the parks, than i do today, as a general rule.

 

[Southwind]

Pull tabs were not so abundant back in the 70's & 80's.

 

[Elton]

A Brief Bounty Hunter History

Pacific Northwest Instruments (PNI) in Klamath Falls, Oregon originated the Bounty Hunter brand of metal detectors sometime in the late 1960's or early 1970's. Click here for an August, 1971 ad in True Treasure magazine, featuring their trio of BFO machines. These were likely the first models offered by PNI and all three probably shared pretty much the same parts and circuitry. Just the addition of a few controls or a larger meter and case created the differences between them. Inside was a basic Beat Frequency Oscillator circuit that was no doubt very similar to what any of the competition was offering at the time. Anyone who could handle a soldering iron and read a simple schematic could design and build one.

In those days it was a wide-open field, literally. Dozens of small companies sprang up and began to compete. Most any new design was instantly seized upon by all the makers and copied as best they could, hopefully avoiding patent infringement lawsuits as they went. Detectorists also enjoyed wide-open fields that had never been hunted by anything but the eye or a magnet and shovel. Detecting was allowed most anywhere you chose to search.

By the mid-70's, PNI Bounty Hunter had survived and grown. The tried-and-true BFO was still featured in their lineup, and had added several TR, IB and combination designs. Click here to see a 1976 catalog. Ground compensation and trash discrimination were just beginning to be addressed.

Bounty Hunter had some real firsts in the industry. Their Red Baron detectors added phase discrimination and ground balance to a VLF design. Patented by George Payne for PNI in Tempe, AZ, in 1978, these machines are still popular today.

In this same era, Teknetics entered the fray, a young company created by some former technicians from White's. They acquired from PNI the Bounty Hunter name and several key patents. Using the revolutionary tone and visual ID circuits of George Payne, their Mark 1 detector put Teknetics on the map.

There was a shakeout in the industry in the later 80's to early 90's and unfortunately, Teknetics was one of the victims. The company's property eventually became the object of a badly-handled bankruptcy and was thus acquired by First Texas, which was already in the business of producing metal detectors under their own brand, sold mostly through mass-marketing chains such as Fingerhut and others. (I bought my first detector, a First Texas Search Master DX-8500 from Fingerhut in 1981. I still have it and will make a page for it here someday.)

So it was that Bounty Hunter/Tek made the trek to First Texas in the 1990's and it was soon evident First Texas had the funding and marketing to finally do something with the collection of innovative designs and patents. We owe visual target ID to George's unique concepts. The Big Bud series of detectors, built by George Payne, combined many of the features that almost all of today's machines continue to use, and are probably the most significant models to come from Bounty Hunter in this time frame. I believe this happened around the time First Texas acquired BH.

I'm writing all this from memory with only a few supporting documents, so if I've gotten the timeline incorrect in regards to when George Payne worked where for whom, please forgive me. Then, please send me an email with corrections, and I'll update the page.

From the early Outlaws and Red Barons, progressing through the Big Bud and Mark 1 concepts devised by George Payne and others, came the familiar machines we all know and love: Tracker, Quickdraw, Sharpshooter and all the rest. Meanwhile, George had moved on to work for Compass and other manufacturers. First Texas continued to improve upon the BH lineup by releasing several upgrades and new models. The Time Ranger and Land Ranger epitomized this era at Bounty Hunter.

[size=large]Entering the new millenium, things were still pretty much the same. Around 2002-2003 things started waking up at First Texas when Dave Johnson entered the picture. Dave is a well-known detector designer since 1981, with many successful designs under his belt. Among them the Fisher 1260-X, the Gold Bug I and other designs for Fisher, Tesoro, Troy and White's. Almost immediately we began to see new designs from Bounty Hunter, such as the Discovery 1100, 2200 and 3300 made for Radio Shack. The Time Ranger and perhaps a few other models got a quiet upgrade or two during this period[/size].

Around 2005, the Teknetics name burst back into the field with the introduction of the cutting-edge T2 detector primarily designed and programmed by Dave Johnson and John Gardiner. To say it made huge waves felt throughout the industry would be an understatement! Though many of us knew better, as we were aware of Bounty Hunter's important contributions to detecting, there was a public perception that BH machines were cheap junk not worth owning. This ill-informed perception was largely disbursed by the introduction of the T2 and its wide acceptance as a state-of-the-art metal detector.

A couple years later when Fisher began to founder, it , too was rescued by First Texas, vastly broadening the scope of products they could release.

We haven't reached the end of this story by any means, but this is about as far as my own involvement with First Texas' many products has taken me to date and it brings us close to the present. I am more interested in preserving on these pages the info that's becoming harder to find. The current state of the detecting art is already out there in wide array for anyone with questions. It makes no sense for me to try to cover it all in any detail here. I enjoy the new as much as the next guy, but I really appreciate the old. If you've read this far, you must enjoy it, too. Happy searching with (or for) whatever detector suits your fancy!

-Ed, January,1st, 2010


[size=x-large]PS ....... Always found from 4 to 8 pieces of Silver in the early eighties..........on a good day more.. Hardly ever saw anyone else detecting......[/size]

 

[TerraDigger]

Started in 1981. A 6-12 silver coin day was common....sigh....I miss that. And there wasn't near the aluminum **** as today.

 

[Jason in Enid]

Tom really nailed it with his answer.

I started in the early 80's. You really were limited to about 6-7 inches for a coin sized object in good soil. I still remember being able to hit a few still virgin spots back then. Of course tabs and foil were more than plentiful by then. Silver halves weren't an uncommon find back then. Today they are about as rare as hens teeth.

 

[Lipservice]

I don't know where to start, really. I am going on 65 years old now. For me it all started back in around 1971 with a Whites 63 TR. I lived in Omaha, Nebraska then. You can imagine the 'easy pickings'. There were hundreds of places to go that never saw a metal detector before. Silver could be found 1 or 2 inches down. It wasn't uncommon to find 5 or 6 hundred coins a day. As the years went by I would always buy 'the latest and greatest' detectors. The golden rule: always find enough to pay for that new detector with your old detector BEFORE buying the new one (my wife made sure of that!). I've had every major brand. To be honest so many I can't remember them all. I sure found a lot of stuff with them. I saved all my silver and in 1980 when silver went crazy I told my wife when it hits $20oz I was cashing in. It did. One morning it was $21oz. I packed it all up (no... not the rare ones!) along with two coathangers full of junk gold rings and a couple coffee cans full of silver rings/medals/etc. and headed for Sol's Jewelry and Loan in Omaha. I got there at 7AM and couldn't believe it... the line to sell stuff was two blocks long! To make a long story short I got a new Chevy Blazer and my wife got a new Honda Civic out of that deal! Over the years I sure had fun with my detectors. I always worked the night shift so there was plenty of time to go detecting. Got a lot of my friends into the hobby, too, so I always had guys to beep with.

Some of my best finds: Went to a metal detector hunt (contest) in Des moines , Iowa. When the contest was over we stopped in a little town nearby, Altoona, and did some detecting the city park there. If I recall I was using a Compass 77b at the time. Anyway, we weren't there 15 minutes when I got a good signal and dug down a few inches and got my best find ever... a huge 22 carat gold man's ring with a 3 carat really COOL banana yellow colored diamond. The ring had no initials or anything. I sold it for $5,200. Found a woman's wedding ring with 5 diamonds on the swimming beach at Louisville Lakes (near Omaha) with a Fisher 1260-X. Sold that one for $3,600. Have found COMPLETE sets of Mercury/Roosevelt dimes, Jefferson nickels. The 1916D Merc in the set was in EF condition and I ended up selling it a few years after finding it but I still have the rest of them. Found two $1 gold coins in the same hole once in old, overgrown, deserted cemetery. Lots of 1800s coins over the years. Etc.

I can say this. My first 4 or five detectors did not have discriminators on them... they were not invented yet. So lots of junk was dug up. BUT I found a LOT more gold rings back then by digging up foil and pop tops. The old Compass 77b in my avatar (circa 1973~1974) paid for itself many times over. Until the VLFs came out none of my detectors went over about 5 1/2" deep. I once sold 3 five gallon buckets of wheat cents to guy.

There used to be a LOT more half dollars to be found. Eight months ago someone asked How Many Half Dollars Have You Found ? http://www.findmall.com/read.php?63,1503110,page=1
I replied:

"I've been detecting since 1971. 24 years old then, always worked night shifts, and countless 6 to 8 hour days of hunting all week long. Oh my, all the untouched ground back then. And even into the mid 1980s. Things were much different then. I used to get mad if I didn't find 15 silver coins and at least 1 ring a day. Keep in mind there were no discriminators on the detectors then and the gold ring ratio finds compared to nowdays gold rings finds was HUGE. Quantity of finds per day? It's been so long ago but my best 3 days ever (that I DO remember)...Miller Park in Omaha, NE 650+ coins Compass 77b. North High School in Omaha, NE 600+ coins and 4 class rings Garrett ADS 2 (or mybe it was a an ADS 3). Brownell Talbot Catholic School 500+ coins White's Goldmaster 66TR.

So as far as half dollars go: 250 or so. 3 Seateds that I remember. I'd guess maybe 50 or so Barbers. Walkers/Franklins/Kennedys make up the rest.

Keep in mind, like I said, 40 years ago things were much different."

 

[Sven]

Those were the heyday for pull tabs, they were everywhere by the handfulls. A royal pain in the.....
If you weren't finding any, you discriminated them out. I'm guilty, of that as well most of the time because they were so abundant in spots, sadly missed a lot of coins and gold rings by doing so.
Still came home with pockets full of coins...........................

 

[mudpuppy]

Man......So how do you old timers feel about what is the most successful hunting style for todays noob? Looks like the majority will have to be happy to clad stab, totlot, relic, or beach sweep, or the various and sundry subgroups of each. If you had to begin your hunting career TODAY...what would you do? and what would you use?
Mud

 

[Elton]

The days of finding Silver laden public areas are growing slimmer by the day....Not saying some places do not exist..Just harder to find.

 

[MarkCZ]

A Brief Bounty Hunter History

Pacific Northwest Instruments (PNI) in Klamath Falls, Oregon originated the Bounty Hunter brand of metal detectors sometime in the late 1960's or early 1970's. Click here for an August, 1971 ad in True Treasure magazine, featuring their trio of BFO machines. These were likely the first models offered by PNI and all three probably shared pretty much the same parts and circuitry. Just the addition of a few controls or a larger meter and case created the differences between them. Inside was a basic Beat Frequency Oscillator circuit that was no doubt very similar to what any of the competition was offering at the time. Anyone who could handle a soldering iron and read a simple schematic could design and build one.

In those days it was a wide-open field, literally. Dozens of small companies sprang up and began to compete. Most any new design was instantly seized upon by all the makers and copied as best they could, hopefully avoiding patent infringement lawsuits as they went. Detectorists also enjoyed wide-open fields that had never been hunted by anything but the eye or a magnet and shovel. Detecting was allowed most anywhere you chose to search.

By the mid-70's, PNI Bounty Hunter had survived and grown. The tried-and-true BFO was still featured in their lineup, and had added several TR, IB and combination designs. Click here to see a 1976 catalog. Ground compensation and trash discrimination were just beginning to be addressed.

Bounty Hunter had some real firsts in the industry. Their Red Baron detectors added phase discrimination and ground balance to a VLF design. Patented by George Payne for PNI in Tempe, AZ, in 1978, these machines are still popular today.

In this same era, Teknetics entered the fray, a young company created by some former technicians from White's. They acquired from PNI the Bounty Hunter name and several key patents. Using the revolutionary tone and visual ID circuits of George Payne, their Mark 1 detector put Teknetics on the map.

There was a shakeout in the industry in the later 80's to early 90's and unfortunately, Teknetics was one of the victims. The company's property eventually became the object of a badly-handled bankruptcy and was thus acquired by First Texas, which was already in the business of producing metal detectors under their own brand, sold mostly through mass-marketing chains such as Fingerhut and others. (I bought my first detector, a First Texas Search Master DX-8500 from Fingerhut in 1981. I still have it and will make a page for it here someday.)

So it was that Bounty Hunter/Tek made the trek to First Texas in the 1990's and it was soon evident First Texas had the funding and marketing to finally do something with the collection of innovative designs and patents. We owe visual target ID to George's unique concepts. The Big Bud series of detectors, built by George Payne, combined many of the features that almost all of today's machines continue to use, and are probably the most significant models to come from Bounty Hunter in this time frame. I believe this happened around the time First Texas acquired BH.

I'm writing all this from memory with only a few supporting documents, so if I've gotten the timeline incorrect in regards to when George Payne worked where for whom, please forgive me. Then, please send me an email with corrections, and I'll update the page.

From the early Outlaws and Red Barons, progressing through the Big Bud and Mark 1 concepts devised by George Payne and others, came the familiar machines we all know and love: Tracker, Quickdraw, Sharpshooter and all the rest. Meanwhile, George had moved on to work for Compass and other manufacturers. First Texas continued to improve upon the BH lineup by releasing several upgrades and new models. The Time Ranger and Land Ranger epitomized this era at Bounty Hunter.

[size=large]Entering the new millenium, things were still pretty much the same. Around 2002-2003 things started waking up at First Texas when Dave Johnson entered the picture. Dave is a well-known detector designer since 1981, with many successful designs under his belt. Among them the Fisher 1260-X, the Gold Bug I and other designs for Fisher, Tesoro, Troy and White's. Almost immediately we began to see new designs from Bounty Hunter, such as the Discovery 1100, 2200 and 3300 made for Radio Shack. The Time Ranger and perhaps a few other models got a quiet upgrade or two during this period[/size].

Around 2005, the Teknetics name burst back into the field with the introduction of the cutting-edge T2 detector primarily designed and programmed by Dave Johnson and John Gardiner. To say it made huge waves felt throughout the industry would be an understatement! Though many of us knew better, as we were aware of Bounty Hunter's important contributions to detecting, there was a public perception that BH machines were cheap junk not worth owning. This ill-informed perception was largely disbursed by the introduction of the T2 and its wide acceptance as a state-of-the-art metal detector.

A couple years later when Fisher began to founder, it , too was rescued by First Texas, vastly broadening the scope of products they could release.

We haven't reached the end of this story by any means, but this is about as far as my own involvement with First Texas' many products has taken me to date and it brings us close to the present. I am more interested in preserving on these pages the info that's becoming harder to find. The current state of the detecting art is already out there in wide array for anyone with questions. It makes no sense for me to try to cover it all in any detail here. I enjoy the new as much as the next guy, but I really appreciate the old. If you've read this far, you must enjoy it, too. Happy searching with (or for) whatever detector suits your fancy!

-Ed, January,1st, 2010


[size=x-large]PS ....... Always found from 4 to 8 pieces of Silver in the early eighties..........on a good day more.. Hardly ever saw anyone else detecting......[/size]

Actually the Mark 1 came a little later in the Teknetics history, Their 9000 was a earlier Kick off than the Mark1.

Between the two the 9000 ID'ed better than the Mark 1,
The Mark 1 was a bit deeper and had a slower sweep speed.
I never own a Teknetics Eagle or a Condor, but I would say they were probably as good as the Mark 1 for depth and would ID as well as the earlier 9000 and 8500.

The History of the Tabs, (pull & Toss beaver tail rings)
They hit main stream in 1965 and were in heavy use until 1975.

The smaller square sta-tabs hit the market as a replacement to the pull & Toss tabs, the idea was to reduce litter problems from the pull & toss.

My first little adventure in detecting was with my grandfather who had gotten some piece of junk detector and wanted to go to the park and fine some money (this was somewhere around 1970, he died in 1972) after a short while of hunting he found out that after picking up and digging dozens of pull tabs to one penny it wasn't worth it, that ended his detecting.
By 1970 in our local parks the pull tabs where laying on the ground, while some where just below the surface. (The same park now, those tabs are about 3" to 4.5")

I started hunting in the early 80's.. and those tabs were the problem as they are now! Then like now the detectors (the good ones) you could work around the tabs and coin hunt, but Not Nickles! and the same then as now for gold. There isn't any way around those tabs if you want to find the nickles and the gold.

VID detectors of the past (high end ones)
I've had,

Teknetics 9000
Tek 8500 (I still use one of these for cherry picking)
Tek Mark 1
Fisher CZ-7a-Pro
Whites 5900/Di Pro-sl

and I've got,
Whites XLT
Coinstrike
ID-Edge
F2

And as far as just target ID ability calling a coin a coin those old ones in many way are as good, some ways better!
The biggest gain I can see is in,
smaller packages,
less weight,
and in the early 90's came some improved depth.

The Teknetics 9000, 8500 and the Whites 5900 ID as well as anything detector I've seen! And the fact that the 5900 came out after 1990 put it at the increased depth.

If I were the owner of a detector company I would came down out of the Ivory tower with a bag of tabs and I would tell my engineers to build a detector around finding these tabs! I want it to be able to as much as possible leave everything else. Then wen done I would tell them to incorporate that system into a normal metal detector, I would have they add a toggle to switch off the tab detection and switch to normal detection. It seem that going the other way isn't possible, but I'm thinking the other way is!

But, the Tabs in local parks were a nightmare by 1970 (around where I live anyway)

Mark

 

[John(Tx)]

I started in 1976 and found lots of silver coins in an old park along with hundreds of pulltabs....HH

 

[Tom_in_CA]

Lip-service, thanx for the recap nostalgia. The 63tr was akin to the 66tr, so I can relate to your story Although by the mid 1970s, when I started, my used 66tr that I'd bought (only 5 or 6 yr. old machine!) was already a "dinasour"! doh

Question for you: Since you say you were practically the first to hit various parks in your area, then what inspired you to get into detecting then? I mean, did you see someone else, for example, and get the bug? Or did you respond to a magazine mail order ad? Or was there a dealer in your area to simply walk in and buy one? Etc...

The first guy in my city, from what old-timers told me, was looking at a "True West" or "Desert Tales" type western lore magazine. In the back pages, in the classifieds, he saw an ad that said "find buried treasure.....". So he sent off a postcard to the address, to receive a Whites catalog. That was in about 1963 or '64. After looking through the catalog, he placed an order, and was soon the proud owner of a monster-big lunch-box sized Whites BFO. Mind you, he had never even SEEN one in use, and had no idea about where to go, or how to use it. So upon reading the material that came with it, it made suggestions like, of course: fairgrounds, school yards, beaches, ghost towns, etc.... He took it to some schools in our town, starting in 1964 or so. As far as he knows, he was the first to ever hit them. He got a lot of silver quarters, some halves, etc.... But I don't think it was on the order of "100's of coins per day". The machines of that era could probably scarcely do 2" on a coin.

 

[MarkCZ]

This is for around here anyway,
Along in the mid 80's detecting clubs were the big hit, from spring until fall on good days the people in these clubs swarmed the Parks, Court House lawns, and School Yards like bee's in a field of clover, on those REALLY great days they were like locus swarms!

And to add to that they ALL had their club hunts and Monthly meetings in the parks.
The parks around here have been Hunted heavy!! but most of the hunting was coin hunting, that means that they ignored pretty much everything below copper cents and screw caps.

So, in 1970 the beaver tail tabs were still pretty much surface junk in the park, my brother has been back in the park pretty heavy this year and he's been after gold, which means he is digging ALL the pull tabs, that's how I know the depth of the stuff in the park.
Those 1965-1975 surface tabs are now a nice thick blanket from 3" to 4.5" That dates that depth 1965 to 1975, well the park has been there sense the early 20's. That means as he clears out BAGS and BAGS of tabs he is starting to find more silver, and even an 1889 Indian penny and a 1918 Buffalo nickle and all closer to the 5" depth range, or to say below the Pull & Toss rings.

So, now if I'm hunting in a public place (an older place) I can judge the depth of things by the tabs. Now keep in mind that it is possible to find a 1964 dime dropped in 1968 and it be in the pull tab bed. But a well detailed 1936 coin dropped near 1936 will almost for sure be below the tabs, unless,
The area has been dug up,
Near large tree roots where the roots has raised the soil,
ect..
So, I'm talking about normal circumstances, a coin dropped in 1925 will for sure be below a tabs that was dropped over it in 1965 and my brother is confirming that about every time he hunts the park.
Those coin hunters of old left a Lot Of Nickles and Tabs and in doing that there HAS to be some gold as well, but now unlike then the tabs has to be gone through and now they 4" deep give or take a little.

Mark

 

[Lipservice]

Lip-service, thanx for the recap nostalgia. The 63tr was akin to the 66tr, so I can relate to your story Although by the mid 1970s, when I started, my used 66tr that I'd bought (only 5 or 6 yr. old machine!) was already a "dinasour"! doh

Question for you: Since you say you were practically the first to hit various parks in your area, then what inspired you to get into detecting then? I mean, did you see someone else, for example, and get the bug? Or did you respond to a magazine mail order ad? Or was there a dealer in your area to simply walk in and buy one? Etc...

The first guy in my city, from what old-timers told me, was looking at a "True West" or "Desert Tales" type western lore magazine. In the back pages, in the classifieds, he saw an ad that said "find buried treasure.....". So he sent off a postcard to the address, to receive a Whites catalog. That was in about 1963 or '64. After looking through the catalog, he placed an order, and was soon the proud owner of a monster-big lunch-box sized Whites BFO. Mind you, he had never even SEEN one in use, and had no idea about where to go, or how to use it. So upon reading the material that came with it, it made suggestions like, of course: fairgrounds, school yards, beaches, ghost towns, etc.... He took it to some schools in our town, starting in 1964 or so. As far as he knows, he was the first to ever hit them. He got a lot of silver quarters, some halves, etc.... But I don't think it was on the order of "100's of coins per day". The machines of that era could probably scarcely do 2" on a coin.

Two things got me started. This first one is an awesome story...
A friend of mine worked for Fontenelle Forest in Bellevue, Nebraska (well on the outskirts of Bellevue). One day he was looking at an old painting in Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Ne. It was painted by a man who was on a steamboat that had docked for the night right where Fontenelle Forest butted up against the river. Since Ed (my friend) worked for Fontenelle Forest he recognized the landscape. In the painting there was an old, delapitated, building that no one ever knew was there. He knew it had to be early 1800s.
So he had a metal detector... an old Whites that had vacuum tubes! Not transistors like modern detectors. He hiked to where the building once stood and started detecting. he started finding lots of relics and some pre 1825 coins. Turns out he found the Joshua Pilcher (of the Missouri Fur Company) trading post. More info from here: http://www.fontenelleforest.org/about-us/history
"In 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition undoubtedly crossed our lands, and in 1822, Joshua Pilcher of the Missouri Fur Company built a trading post near the present Great Marsh (in Fontenelle Forest). This trading post began the settlement of Bellevue, Nebraska's oldest community, and served as a major stopover during the illustrious days of the Rocky Mountain fur trade."
Well that discovery was a REALLY BIG DEAL! They excavated the entire area after he told them about it and found some very historic items.
Now this is what really sucks: Ed never got a single word of credit for any of it. Without him it probably never would have been found! What a bunch of ingrates. Ed quit and moved to Idaho where he studied at the University of Idaho and went on to be a doctor. So in the end I guess it all worked out best for him. So this story got me interested in metal detectors... but I did not buy one.... YET. A few months later I DID buy one. It was a Relco BFO that would not find a quarter buried 1" in the ground. I was so discouraged. But I got what I paid for. And I knew Ed's old Whites did much better than that. I knew I was going to have to pay a LOT more for a good one so I started saving money up for one.

In the spring of 1971 there was an Omaha annual event called the Omaha Home Show at the old Omaha Civic Auditorium (they still have it yearly to this day). Anyway my wife wanted to go so off we went. We were walking around... then I saw it... I stopped dead in my tracks! A guy named Steve, who lived in Council Bluffs (right across the river from Omaha), had a display table set up. And a big Whites Metal Detector banner hanging behind the table. There were some new Whites detectors on the table and something else... an absolutely amazing pile of dug coins/rings/jewelry. I mean there were thousands piled up there! Tons of silver in that pile. So I got to talking to him. He had just became a Whites Dealer a few months before that but had been using them for a couple years. He said he had gotten all those finds right there in Council Bluffs in schools/parks/yards. he said he never even bothered coming over to Omaha cuz the hunting was so good there. Man was I interested! He offered to let try one out. I went over to his house the very next day. He took me to Bayliss Park (mid 1800s park) right there in Council Bluffs, not far from his house. He had Whites 63TR all ready to go. He gave me a quick run thru on operating it and walked around with me. I dug a couple pop tops and some foil up. Along with a couple coins. Then BAM! A Walking Liberty Half about 2" deep. Demonstration over! I bought it. I also bought my next detector, a Whites 66TR, from him. Game on. Omaha was my pearl!

 

[gilfordberry]

My first was a Heathkit I put together in the late 60's or early 70's. It could find a quarter at about 2 or 3 inches.... but it was sensitive enough to pick out my wife's wedding band where she had dropped it in a snowbank next to our driveway. I was always working so many hours I really didn't have time to do much detecting until about the time I retired ('91), so don't have any personal tales to tell like the guys above....but I did hear one story from an elderly lady that had used an early detector at the beach here in southern California in the 60's or 70's. She said that on some occasions she found so many coins that she had to leave the beach, go to her car, and dump her pouch because it was just to heavy for her to carry anymore....and that on some days she'd have to do that several times. unbelievable. That same beach (a very large one) is hit so hard today that I doubt there is one square foot of sand that hasn't seen at least one detector in less than a week. Early in the morning the detectorists outnumber everyone else at the beach - including the surf fishermen. But it's still fun and even though hit hard, it still produces 'treasure' from time to time. Day before yesterday I was pleased that I had scooped up a nice silver ring until I met up with my wife and hunting partner, who had been hunting a short distance from me, who showed off an 18k diamond wedding band with sixty-two channel set diamonds - real ones! Oh well, a silver ring is still better than nothing, and she'll wind up with both of them to add to her collection anyway.

 

[Critterhunter]

Amazing information. Thanks. I'm printing it out to read over a smoke or two.

So you are saying that your brother (or friend...can't remember) IS finding his share of old silver under pulltabs and other junk that he is cleaning out of a park? That's what I'm most curious about, and was the main reason for me posting this thread. As said, I've dug my share of silver mixed with trash, but usually they turn out to be Rosies. Thus my question if older machines had no ability to discriminate out pull tabs and other junk, and as a result those guys were digging it all and thus recovering most of the masked old barbers and seateds that were under the stuff? Then along comes machines with discrimination abilities and guys started passing up the fresh dropped tabs and such, which were dropped over freshly dropped Rosies. Hope you know the question I'm asking here. It may already have been answered in your posts, as I only glanced over it for now and plan to read the thread later after I print it out. What's your opinion on this?

And even if they were digging it all back then, there would of course have been deeper silver that they couldn't reach....And say later on down the road trash was dropped over those coins before machines came along that could reach them...And then these newer machines had the ability to discriminate out trash and so they never unmasked those coins? Again, you very may well have answered these questions in the thread so I apologize for asking again if it's already been answered.

I've done a little "digging it all" in a small area of a trashy park here and there over the years to see if I could unmask some silver. Not really put that much time into it though to see how productive it could be. I do remember though doing this once and after digging 3 or 4 screw caps out of a hole I found my first v-nickle underneath them.

I'm much more prone to using my S-5 coil to try to unmask some coins, but must admit I haven't used that as much either. Used a 5 or 6" coil on my Whites too in the past, but again not as much as I probably should have. Unmasked my share of silver with larger coils over the years, though. Some with iron in the same hole and such.

 

[Hank68]

I started in 1989 with a old garrett machine an found a 1814 bust dime in a field and 2 civil war buckles, it was just more in the ground then, I didn't see many other detectorist then, now its a challenge to find anything with historical value.

 

[MarkCZ]

Well, my retired brother is has been working the local park, and he has been finding some stuff but its coming @ a lot of work.

I would say by the time the Sta-tabs come to be some of the better detectors had discrimination and could hit most of the silver from the early 1900's anyway.
But, silver wasn't that big of a deal then and for most people it for sure wasn't worth digging 20 to 30 tabs to one silver dime or maybe 40 to 50 tabs to a quarter.
So, that left nickles and gold completely out. So what they did was to run the discrimination up past nickles and pick the more solid signals (the easy finds).

The local park has been heavily hunted with detector like,
XLT's
V3i's
E-Trac's,
Fisher 1265's
ect...

But this park is near 100 years old,
its right at 110 acres, and well used.

but, just this summer my brother found a nice 14k gold mans wedding ring with a Tesoro Tejon right in the pull tab layer. (there is NO detector that can go around tabs and get gold! you leave a tabs, your leaving gold)

I think the silver coins and the Indian penny he got using his F75 and a small coil.
From talking with him he has dug a LOT of tabs verses a few good finds.
What's left in the park would be called 'The Hard To Find Items' What happens with these layered good signals is each tend to add or take away from the other because they are so close to each other, so two pull tabs and a silver quarter and the quarter two inches below the tabs will most likely pull the ID number down to maybe a screw cap range, or some other odd number. This is where people like me tend to mess up, us (me) tend to put to much stock in the ID numbers, when we do that we leave good stuff. That leaves the beep & dig people with patience some nice finds in what we think is a heavily hunted area (or hunted out area). My brother isn't going to find hand fulls of silver coins, but if he puts in his time he will get some! and he knows that they are TWO MANY TABS and NICKLES left to not be some gold. Until now the few pieces of gold that is left wasn't worth the trouble for most people, but that's a different story these days, two or three average gold rings in a month and its payday for a retired person. (plus a few nice silver coins for a bonus)

Mark