Wheat to silver ratio - Final tally :detecting:

[marcomo]

Several months ago I went through a period where I was finding a lot of wheat pennies but no silver.

It seemed to me that my ratio was much higher than Michael Chaplan's 6-1 ratio that he suggested was the average in his excellent book, the Urban Treasure Hunter.

When I actually counted my ratio was 7.06 to 1.

I started by asking on a couple forums I frequent what ratio others were finding.

Then I expanded it to several other forums.

Below is the average ratio from each forum I asked the question on. The total number of responses is in parenthesis.

I tried to use my best judgement on less than concrete responses. If someone said 7 or 8 to 1, I averaged it to 7.5 to 1. And I only tallied reponses where actual numbers were given.

This is by no means a scientific survey, since a lot of people, most people actually, were just making a best guess. And I didn't ask in every forum. But the final results were kind of interesting.

I put these in order with the forums with the most responses on top and the least on the bottom.



Minelab Explorer - 6.6 to 1 (10 responses)

Tesoro - 9.22 to 1 (9)

White's Main Forum - 6.9 to 1 (5)

Fisher F Series - 6.75 to 1 (4)

Teknetics - 10.3 to 1 (3)

Minelab E-Trac - 5.25 to 1 (2)

White's Spectra V3 - 7 to 1 (2)

White's MXT - 2.2 to 1 (1)

Garrett - no reponses

Bounty Hunter - no responses



When you put them all together the aggregate average of all responses is 7.41 to 1. Not too far off from Chapman's book, and real close to my own average.

 

[Jason in Enid]

That's very interesting data, thanks for sharing!

 

[coinnut]

Great data. I think most of the respondents were probably park, school or standing house hunters. If I were to respond, being a colonial cellar hole hunter, I would drop that average like a rock We don't get many silver pieces out there. I found about 27 large coppers (colonial or large cents), mostly at cellar holes and no silver. All of my silver came from picnic areas or standing houses. But my ratio is about 6:1 at the silver producing sites. I'm using an E Trac. I'm really amazed that in this day and age, we can still find the silver that easily.

 

[D&P-OR]

Marcomo, that's interesting data!--Thought I'd throw in my 2 zincs worth.----My wife & I almost always hunt together & I have metal detected for years but 7 1/2 yrs. ago, my wife started keeping exact records of our finds.---During that time span, we went on 1,020 hunts (many of those hunts were gold nugget hunting, not even looking for old coins, so the ratio in actuality would be even better than it looks).----Anyway, for that total number of hunts (1,020) we recovered 1,060 silver coins & 3,198 wheaties, for a ratio of 3.02 wheaties for ever silver.----This is interesting stuff as at times you will think (or it seems) that you are finding all wheaties and hardly any silver.---But at the end of EVERY year for those years our silver to wheat back ratio has been right at 3 to 1 (or VERY CLOSE).---Our best year was 2.45 wheaties for ever silver & our worst year was 3.73 wheaties for ever silver.---Most of these finds (but not all) were made useing the Explorer line of detectors (and now the Etrac).------Del