Back to yesterday’s colonial era site where I pulled the 2 reale, and started working out out a tight grid near where I found the wheatie and the deep Chinese coins.
First decent target was a sterling hair clip or some sort. I don’t think it is all that old.
Second decent target was a silver spoon. The handle was dated 1863. Whohoo! Since the site is old, I figured I had something special, and it would be a matter of time that the seated silver would be flying out of the ground.
Well, it makes a good story and catchy title, but when I got it home and cleaned it up, it turned out to be a Gettysburg souvenir spoon. I don’t know how old it actually is; not very is my guess. Too bad, cause I was pretty excited about it at the time, and figured it was a great tell.
I dug only one coin today, a 1961 penny. Geez. These old house sites can be rough. I’ll bet there is always iron under the coil. Cut a random plug, put the pinpointer in, and it will go off for sure.
Alot of folks use TTF for this sort of site; I don’t and wonder if I should. Multi tone conductive with “see thru” always seems to work fine for me — both silver objects today were picked up that way. Its hard to describe what this sounds like — I think of the sound like the silver being trapped under ice, and screaming to get thru. Hard to describe really. I don’t bother to look at the numbers in these situations; they always show a high FE number that you would never dig, but you get a repeated trapped under ice high tone, dig it, cause sometimes it is silver. You also dig alot of iron tho, it is impossible, at least for me, to tell this from big “bulbous ferrous” targets.
Anyway, that’s how I do it at these sorts of sites. Maybe I should try TTF, tho. One coin is pretty lame.
Oh, and here is the spoon before I tried to straighten it out. Sort of lends some credence to the “freeze thaw cycle theory” that stuff gets pushed around from freezing and thawing, and targets you could not hear before may become visible after a few cycles of this. I’ve never bought into that — always seemed like a “just so” story of false hope to me. But, how else to explain how a spoon can get bent so sitting in the ground. Freeze thaw cycle theory must be true.
