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Zinc penny or??

B

BarberBill

New member
I think I may have posted on this before, but .... a year or so ago I read in one of the forums that jewelry often reads as zinc pennies. As it happened, the second zinc penny I dug after reading that, turned out to be a small gold ring. Fast forward to this morning. I got a zinc penny signal and looked into the grass and there's a small gold ring with stones right on the surface. Much as I hate'm I think I'll keep digging zincs.
BB
 
I hear ya Bill. Hunting beaches with my CZ, corroded zincs give off a nice solid mid tone, where lots of gold rings hit, and I gotta dig em. They are a pain since most times they aren't worth a damn due to them being so beat up and even pieces broke off

Too bad I can't buy anything for 3/4 cents since I threw lots of them away.

JC
 
It totally depends on what you're hunting with. If it's an Explorer you can skip 90% of them. If it's deep, it could be an Indian or a very small piece of jewelry. If it's shallow (or in the strata you know modern clad is in ... why dig them for the off chance it's tiny jewelry). If they've been in the ground for more than a year, their normally worthless from corrosion.

We do appreciate you picking them all up for us though :)
 
Not too long ago I hunted an old victorian yard in a historic old cow town here in southern Ks. The place was supposedly hunted out, but the abundance of zinc pennies suggested otherwise, it just was cherry picked in my opinion. Sure the obvious deep coins were non existant, but I kept digging the shallow zincs and after about a dozon or so dirty zincs were dug I popped a beautifle 1891 Indian head penny out at about the same depth of the zincs ( 2 or 3 inches). I'll dig the zinc signals everytime. I ended the day with a silver dime surrounded by nails at about 5 inches.

Randy
 
Well, it just goes to show that if you have the patience and persistence, the only sure thing is to dig pretty much everything. On another occasion I was checking under a park swing, got a scratchy, probably junk, signal and started to walk away. Decided that although it sounded like trash, it wasn't quite the typical trash signal I'd expect from that detector. So I turned back and retrieved the target which turned out out to be a scotty dog charm, considerably smaller than a dime, from a bracelet, When I checked it at home with the help of a magnifier, It was silver marked .925. I often wonder what I've missed by passing up the signals I'm pretty sure are trash, but after umpteen tabs and caps I begin to become fairly selective.
HH
BB
 
Well BARKER

This story should really make you cringe.

I have this one productive lot (not too much there now) that had a mom & pop grocery (pogy bait) store that sat on a corner lot. On almost every swing I would dig up a wheat penny from the teens through the 40's and they were about 5 to 6 inches deep. I kid you not they were everywhere! After digging about 30 of these suckers, I was thinking " Where's the silver?". Then I started to find some mercury dimes, thinking "this is more like it!". I got to one spot that had a bunch of copper memorials from the sixty's. I dug about six of them out of a small area of about 1 ft. square. They were shallow and loud.Then after I had cleaned out the shallow pennies, I got a faint deep mellow small signal that read quarter on the meter of my Toltec ll. I pinpointed the signal and the meter read about 6 inches deep. I dug down about 8 inches and found a 1905 Barber quarter. It was hiding underneath the memorial pennies.This lot also produced a 1939 10Kt. class ring that read as a zinc penny at about 5 inches deep. It is one of those places that you never forget about, I still go back once in awhile and find something good, although it is getting pretty thinned out and quiet.

Randy
 
chuck said:
how do you avoid digging the zincs on the explorer.
Click to expand...

Target ID on the smart screen. I can't tell you the last time I dug more than one zinc in an outing. It's been a while. Once you determine where stuff is in the strata, you can skip zinc's easily. Nothing else hits in that area except screw caps. An indian will on occasion but it bounces to a different area and depth gives them away. A lot of times, copper Memorials will hit in a good area and you have to dig those.
 
I'm just like RON. When I have more time I'll go back over a few of those places. Matter of fact have any of you ever just went and hunted nickle sounds? I could'nt believe the nickles. I don't know how I got off on that. HH:minelab:
 
Shambler said:
chuck said:
how do you avoid digging the zincs on the explorer.
Click to expand...

Target ID on the smart screen. I can't tell you the last time I dug more than one zinc in an outing. It's been a while. Once you determine where stuff is in the strata, you can skip zinc's easily. Nothing else hits in that area except screw caps. An indian will on occasion but it bounces to a different area and depth gives them away. A lot of times, copper Memorials will hit in a good area and you have to dig those.
Click to expand...

If you trust the "smart screen" I believe you are out smarting yourself. Someone will come along with a less smarter detector and dig up something nice on one of your passed up signals. The BEEP+DIG method is the only way your are going to know what is in the ground. A detecting buddy of mine has a friend that is new to the hobby and he says to me "I never dig up zinc penny signals anymore because they end up being junk". I just let the statement go on by and said " I suppose you don't dig pulltab signals either!" He said " Nope! those are junk Too".

To make a long story short this friend of a friend came over to my house and run his new E-Trac over my coin garden. This test plot (coin garden) is 15 years old and the targets are settled in with undisturbed soil around them. It is just like a real hunting scenario and it starts out with a gold ring with iron near by at 5 inches then a couple of bufalo nickles at 6 inches. then silver dimes starting at 6 inches and as you go farther into the test plot the targets get deeper. Anyway he went over the the gold ring with his E-Trac and declared it to be a pulltab, I told him "no, that is a gold ring" he had this puzzled look on his face, then looked at his friend and he was nodding his head "yes". He then took his E-Trac over the rest of the garden and proceded to call out the silver coins.........and he was right on those calls.

Todays detector technology is nice........but if you trust it you Will leave something 'nice' in the ground for somebody else to find.JMTC's
 
My whole point when I started this thread was that I'd picked up 2 gold rings that came in as zinc pennies on TID so I'm dubious of the "smart screen" post. At any rate, Hombre's post about the pennies really got me thinking. I'd never considered masking in relation to one coin masking another, older, more valuable coin. Always learning.
HH
BB
 
zinc penny reading at 5 inches with my Eagle Spectrum. Since it was an old area and I knew a zinc would not be that deep I dug it. I was rewarded with a 1893 cc eagle. My best gold coin to date.
 
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