Why'd That Coin Sound/ID So Bad? Tell Your Story...

[Critterhunter]

I'm interested in hearing stories from those who have dug an old coin that ID'd or sounded really bad or like some other target for some reason. The reason behind it doesn't have to be due to trash or iron. It could be mineral content, coin orientation, depth, or just some odd reason that you just can't figure out. Over the years I've dug silvers that read as low as copper or zinc cents, and even a few that read like a round pull tab due to soil make up. I'm seeing less targets doing this on my Sovereign thanks to it's BBS technology. ID's more true at depth than any machine I've ever owned, but that's not to say something at the extreme edge of it's detection depth might get a bit funky, or that iron or other junk mixed in the hole might mix things up a bit. I just like hearing stories about odd readings from good coins, in particular when nothing else was present in the hole to account for it. Heck, even worn silver dimes can read lower just due to that. Post your story!

While we're at it, I'd also like to hear any stories about people digging out a piece of trash like say a pull tab and finding an old coin under it. It gives me motivation to do that on some days, because it's been a while since that's happened for me. Once I dug three screw caps out of a whole and found a v-nickle under them. Another time that comes to mind was a scratchy coin signal that sounded like a bottle cap but turned out to be a merc with a hot rock laying on top of it, and another would be when I also got the same signal and it was a merc with a small galvonized roofing nail laying over it.

 

[Hombre]

Hey Critter

I'm more inclined to dig "iffy" signals if I'm finding older coins in the place I am hunting at. I like to find indicators of age like harmonica reeds, older brass pieces, wheat pennies, tokens or anything that is old. I don't mind digging old junk, but my tolerance for can slaw, or pull tabs gets thin. My favorite places to hunt are the old victorian yards around neighboring towns and I use a metered detector to cherry pick the good coin signals first, then go after the iffy ones. I do it this way as too much digging might cause the property owner some worry.

I was detecting in front of an old home that was having the old brick sidewalk removed, the owner said some guy had already detected the yard, but he let me go ahead and hunt it. Right off the bat I started finding wheat pennies dating from the teens, then a double nickle hole (V and a Buf) and decided to dig any thing reasonabley iffy, just then my coil went over a partially exposed rusty beer or coke cap and got sputter signal. I picked up the bottle cap and put it in my pouch and got a zinc penny signal right where the bottle cap had been... and about 5" deep was a pair of indian head pennies.It pays to remove the trash. Later on I got a pulltab signal and dug a barber dime, nothing else in the hole as I checked the hole with my UniProbe, never could figure that one out.

Then, in another old yard that used to be a mom & pop grocery store, I was finding alot of wheats and merc. dimes and I run into a small area that had 5 or 6 shallow copper memorial pennies and it gave me a penny signal that was larger than a coin would be making. So I got down on my knees and put the UniProbe to work, and pretty much cleaned the area out of pennies. I stood up and swept my coil over where the penny spill had been and got a deep sounding quarter signal. I dug up a 1905 barber quarter about 8 inches deep directly under where the pennies had been.

Randy

 

[boxofchocolates]

Good stories........hh...........Dan

 

[GooniePirate]

Last weekend I dug a nail that was completely rusted into a lump. as I was filling the hole and wondering why it sounded like a better target, I saw a penny in the dirt pile. It was an old Lincoln.

 

[Dan-Pa.]

Having cleaned a small old yard of silver coins(cherry picking) I decided to go for perhaps a gold ring...and got a good signal in the pulltab range and at two inches out came a cheapie gold filled ring. Covered the plug and by habit went over the area again and got a strong half dollar signal. At five inches recovered a 1836 large cent..So believe me we all have missed good targets
due to coin on side, worn coin,broken ring, partially masked targets all which give us a distorted audio or none at all. So those that dig get the goodies with poor audio or perhaps a bad meter reading as all part of the hobby and am sure the stories are endless...

 

[BarberBill]

Was swing under a park swing one time and got a scratchy, odd signal that I figured was junk. Went on a few steps, thought about it for a second or two and went back and retrieved a small, 1/4 inch or so long SILVER scotty dog charm from a bracelet. Just shows the only way to be sure is to dig.
BB

 

[Hombre]

I took the time to repond to this survey and it was doing good for awile. I like these kind of posts because you can learn different techniques from other hunters. Maybe some people are shy about posting, but I think it is a good subject to talk about. I have read alot about "iffy signals" and dug quite a few and I don't dig all of those types of signals while hunting the old victorian yards that I have worked hard to gain permisssion to hunt. Now in the old abandoned pioneer homesteads around here you can dig anything that you are willing to dig up, But right now with the drought conditions we have, you would have to chisel out a two inch coin, we need some moisture bad!

I know that detecting time is coming to a close in the near future for the colder climates in the country, so come on people, let hear about those "iffy signals". Here is thought about discrimination, who out there 'size up' a suspected "iffy signal" with coil techniques such as Monte's 'edge pass rejection' ? I have used this coil presentation technique for a long time......even before I read about it a couple of years ago. I also have detectors that have a threshold based true all-metal mode and use it to size up a 'iffy signal" with. Just a few random thoughts.

 

[Critterhunter]

I posted a few of mine, but I too would like to hear more of these stories. It's good inspiration for digging iffy signals as well as digging out tabs and such to find coins underneath.

 

[BarberBill]

One time I retrieved a nickel, started to move on, then realized the tid had indicated a quarter. Swung again over the area and retrieved a quarter. In this case the better target was sort of masked by the other even though it was a good target as well. Fairly often I've had tids that bounced around thru several coin indications and a junk or two that turned out to be coin spills, but this time I had a first, solid ID and ended up with the two coins.
BB

 

[Hombre]

This post has no pictures, so it will not interest some people.

Recently I hunted a yard that is located in the oldest part of my small home town, established in 1871. The old home is a two and a half story victorian with a wrap around front porch and the top of the roof has a "widows walk" room with a steeple for the roof of this room.........very cool looking old home. (wish I knew how to post pictures!!!). I know the owner of this house and gained permission to hunt it. I knew that it probably had been hunted in the past, being such an old house and situated on a corner lot. I also knew that it it still might have some keepers in the front yard. The detectors I was using this hunt, for those that are interested, was the excellent Tesoro Toltec ll & White's IDX Pro (Mr. Bill modified). I started off with Toltec ll with the 8 inch brown concentric for better coverage, the IDX Pro was equiped with the 6 &1/2 inch coil for the trashier parts.

I started detecting along the old brick side walk that was still visable bordering the old yard, and started picking up some shallow clad, I got several zinc pennys from shallow depths, gotta dig them zincs. Then a little later got deep quarter signal and it turned out to be a clad quarter at about six inches deep. Hummm, darn, this yard looked better than that, so I continued, then I got a deeper zinc signal, and from about five inches I came up with a very green indian head penny. By the time I started detecting into the front yard, I switched detectors and was using the IDX Pro with the small coil for more precise pinpointing abilities. Now I was in the high traffic part of the corner lot, right where the two sidewalks join at a 90 degree juncture... the IDX locked on to another deeper sounding zinc penny reading, this target turned out to be a 1908 indian head penny at about 8 inches deep, too bad it did'nt have the 'S' mint mark! The zinc signals were all over the yard and most of them were indeed crappy zincs

The front yard had varied soil conditions, some parts were very compacted and other parts were loose and loamy. I heard a very loud zinc penny signal and thought it might be a shallow zinc, I almost walked past this signal, but dug it anyway. This signal was in the very moist, loose and loamy part of the yard and the target ended up being another deep indian head, the only thing I could figure out was that the soil conditions produced a better (louder) signal. The givaway for this signal was even though the Disc. signal was loud, the pinpoint (all-metal) signal was noticably weaker. Then I got another loud zinc reading that pinpointed strong also, and dug a three inch plug and the target was much deeper than that as I was using my Uniprobe to chase it down. That signal ended up being a large brass mantle clock key at about 10 inches deep. That yard produced no silver coins but I ended up with 5 indian head pennies and some neat relics.

I covered the 'zinc' signals some,and before this post gets too long, I'll mention some pulltab signals that turned out to be some outstanding finds:

I started out my detecting hobby in 1994 with a White's XLT, did'nt know beans about the hobby and pretty much learned it all by myself. Then after about a couple months into it, I met up with a guy from work that was a small Tesoro dealer that operated from his house. We went hunting together, he used a Toltec ll, and me with the XLT. He took the time and shared some coil presentation techniques to me and what to listen for in the audio of detected targets. He got me up to speed very quickly and probably helped me jump up from novice status in a very short while.

He took me to a vacant lot that used to have an old house located on it, all that was left was a sidewalk in front and a walkway up to a depression in the yard where the old house once stood. I did not think that it would be very good hunting (pay attention to these kind of places) OH My!!!!!! how I was Wrong. We stated finding wheat pennies by the handfull, some indian head pennies, also mercury dimes and some barber dimes too. We had pounded this sight off and on for about a year, and no more coin signals were left. Then years later, he moved away..... and I had pretty much given up on the old yard as most all the signals left were pulltabs of the old beavertail variety, we dug up a bunch of them and Yup! They were pulltabs.

Now that I am more experienced at the neat things that come in at pulltab range.....I got to thinking about that old yard and the pulltab signals that we left behind. I took my old Totec ll that I had purchased from my buddy many moons ago, and went back to that old yard. I started finding the ring tail pulltabs right off the bat, but I said to myself to heck with it "I'm digging every pulltab in this yard". And it paid off, I finally got this really sweet sounding pulltab signal. There was something different about this signal, it just sounded more "mellow" than the harsher sounding pulltabs. The target turned out to be a US Cavalry Crossed Sabre hatpin that still had the pinback still attached........I was stunned. This hatpin had been on my wish list for many years and now I had found one!!!!

Whew! One more pultab story and I'm done........everybody clap

Another guy from work was wanting a detector to get started......so I suggested a non-metered detector and that I would help him get started. I found him a Tesoro 'original' Bandido for cheap $$$. and he took to it like a duck takes to water. In the couple of years that he has had the Bandido he has found numerous wheat backs some indian heads and several silver dimes. He had shown interest in finding a gold ring, and I told him about the old high school in town built in 1918. I had good luck there and told him that would be a good place to find a class ring. I told him about a place in the school grounds that I had not hit yet and that I thought it might produce a class ring. A couple of days later, I get an excited call from him stating he had just found a large men's gold classring, so I grabed my IDX Pro and get on down to the school ground. Sure enough he found a honker of a class ring maked Jostens,year 2002, with clearley marked initials. I told him to throw it on the ground, I ran the IDX over it and it read as pulltab. BTW he found the happy owner and returned it

 

[david bull]

The problem with relying on tid for identification,is that this is an average of what's under your coil.Bouncing ids are always worth further investigation,especially when the bounce is between known targets(ie;nickel&penny).I dug a 10k,6gram nugget ring on a small well-worked beach, that bounced between iron & pulltab, only after I had removed 3 small nails.When hunting older sites,I try to dig all positive signals.And yes,I'm a believer in the old adage"no site is ever hunted out".DBULL

 

[SloDave]

I recently found a 1887 Indian head penny and it sounded like a iron target and the target area was really small (unlike normal clad that is shallow).. It was really deep.. After i had gotten some dirt off it started hitting a mid tone and the deeper i dug it started hitting a high tone. (my CZ20 only has 3 tones) I have noticed that the further away a "good" target gets the more likely it will sound like a junk target. The difference is that i can tell its deep or not.. If it is deep ill dig a bit to see if the tone changes. etc.

The indian penny i found the other day was my first i have ever found .. Funny thing is i was talking to a fellow metal detectorist and had mentioned just a couple days before that i had never found one.. Hehe i like to think that it gave me luck.. (IDEA).. Hey btw.. I have never found a million $$ catch.. (now that i have mentioned it maybe it will happen )

 

[BarberBill]

I'm convinced the years of using a beep and dig machine before getting a machine with tid is a good thing. I find that I'm automatically not only listening for the sweeter, richer tone or the clicky, raspy trash tone, but also listening for the trash tone that seems a bit off. I can't say I hit 100%, but I'm fairly often right when the suspicious tone turns out to be a target that was worth retrieving. Of course, like most of us, I dig my share of can slaw and tabs and every so often what I expect to be a corroded zinc penny turns out to be something better.
BB

 

[ByroninTn]

Friday, December 3rd, I didn't have long to hunt, so I went to a site that supposed to have a Cherokee mission there in the 1830.

I was using a F75LTD that I have had for around 1 year and am still learning what it will really do. I had read that to get really good depth, run the discriminate at "6" and the sensitivity around 70. I had always ran the discriminate at 20 to 25.

I had made another fatal mistake. I paid too much attention to the digital readout instead of listening to the sound.

On this particular day I was listening to what the F75 was saying. I got a mixed signal that sounded partially good and bad, so I decided the best way was to dig it to see what it was. This site is infested with square nails that partially mask targets and that is what I heard on this target.

After I dug a few inches off the top, I re-checked the hole. I had dug the target out and now it was just a matter of locating it. I checked the dirt with my detector to get the location, then started checking a hand full of dirt at a time, I couldn't find it, so I checked the dirt pile again. It was a silver rivet around 1/4th inch long and faceted with 8 sided. The reason I call it a rivet is that's what it made like, the back is smaller.

I used these same hunting procedures to locate a small eagle cuff button and the back of another button.

The lesson I learned that day is pay attention to the sound, dig iffy targets and pay no attention to the digital readout.