Which machine for trashy iron and tin discimination.......

[brickdaddy]

Hi, which machine does the best around old houses where there is a lot of tin can trash and so on. Rusty pieces of cans and medium ground mineralization. I welcome your experience and opinions.

 

[richetts]

Perhaps with a few more specifics, we could help a bit more.

Are you currently using or ever used a metal detector? This is important because some of the best detectors have an extreme learning curve.

What area of the country are you in?

What type of targets are you looking for in particular? (Relics, coins, gold, jewelry, etc.)

What kind of budget are you looking at? (detectors range from $100-$2000

Does the weight of the machine matter?

This will help with a better general idea of the machine you should be looking at. There are several dealers that support the forums and carry all lines of detectors.

 

[brickdaddy]

Good questions, my biography should be out soon. No but seriously lets just say USA, coins jewlwery, size and money are no object, I 've been hunting for years and have owned garretts( gtax 750, masterhunter cx plus),tesoro( silver umax), bnty hunter, and fisher ID Excel. I'm not impressed with any of them . Except the cx plus with a 5.5 inch hot head, great but not deep at all! I cant try them all so I was looking for opinions based on experince, not to be pimped a detector by a dealer. Just experiences and opinions is all.

Tnanks

 

[richetts]

That helps quite a bit. I myself have used machines from the big 6, Minelab, Fisher, Garrett, White's, Bounty Hunter, and Tesoro. All have very good machines. I can suggest several from each. By the sound of it, you are looking for a machine with the ability to notch the discrimination. That will put you into a machine with some sort of visual ID usually. Detecting style comes into play also. Some machines require a very slow deliberate sweep like the Minelab Explorer/Quattro, and some require a brisk sweep like White's DFX/XLT. If your main hunting will be for old deep coins, I would suggest the Explorer II from experience and from all the finds that people make, but you must take the weight and detecting style along with learning curve into account. I myself chose to purchase an X-Terra 70 from Minelab. It is a dream machine compared to most I have used. I am finding items at great depth, and the price was very reasonable. And to change to a new hunting style or to go back over an area that seems "picked" out, I can change to a different size/frequency coil and it's like a new machine. I did a boat load of research before making the plunge for a new detector. I have a closet full already. Now I have one detector in my bag and one backup for all my needs. And I didn't need to "learn" a whole new system. The X-terra 70 is very easy to use and I don't have to program it. That is probably the biggest reason for me to purchase. I'm not chasing forums looking for the "Ultimate Silver Program" to sit for an hour reprogramming my machine. Plus, it's really getting rave reviews as a prospecting machine. So I won't need a different machine to go prospecting, just change coils and away I go. If I lived close to ya, we could go beepin' sometime and I'd let ya swing my detectors a bit for a test drive. I think you'd be surprised at how well they work. You can read the forum for the X-Terra line and the others I mentioned, get a feel for what people are asking and what kinda answers they are getting. It's like having a personal service tech and pro right at your finger tips being on Find's Forums.

 

[Jackpine Savage]

Hard to say with the rusty cans and pieces of cans which would be best. I have seen the same detector perform great at a site pretty much ignoring them and then at another site seemingly hit on every one. I think it depends a lot on the depth of the trash and the current ground conditions (wet, damp, dry). Some early posts panned the C$ for poor handling of that type trash, but overall it was one of the better ones I used for seeing coins deeper in that kind of mess. May not work in your ground.

When and if ML comes out with a smaller 7.5Khz coil for the 70 it "may" work, but for now with the 9" stock coil it would not be my choice.

Most detectors allow you to easily size the target which saves digging the bigger shallow stuff. With the Fisher 1236X2 and some others you can tell by the audio if a target is coin size by the width of the audio response which helps.


Tom

 

[brickdaddy]

Hey awesome posts fellers, I appreciate the info! Experience is the best teacher.

 

[Mirage]

Any trashy/iorn site can be a challenge. I am thinking about those old home sites where there are lots of nails and misc iorn peceices in the ground. You need to know your machine well when attempting these sites. Of the 4 machines I have(DFX, Quattro, Coinstrike, Classic III) the Coinstrike probably does the best. The White's classic III is also very good. The Quattro is not a good choice and the DFX is ok. Usually at these old home sites there is not a lot of tin but iorn. Of coarse at my moms you had both but it was more dispersed. The aluminum is very easy for the Quattro to id even at good depths. The coinstike I still need a little more time to accuractly give a good opinion but It has a great recovery time. The DFX will handle these sites but it is very noisy(using the beach/jewelry settings) and all that information is not always easy to process. At these sites you have to dig a lot more junk just to make sure you don't miss anything.

Mirage

 

[jeff@middlesex]

The new Teknetics T2 would work good in those conditions. Cans and trash like that have special overload signal to tell you that it is large trash. Ground minerals are also no problem with a choice of manual or automatic ground balance. The ground balance works in disc mode as well as all metal.