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How To Detect As Good As A Beginner

More than once in this hobby, there come times of amazing insight and clarity. Sometimes it’s a matter of smacking yourself on the side of the head and saying, "Uh, duh-me." Other times, it’s something akin to Paul’s little excursion down the Road to Damascus, except you don’t go blind. Either way, it’s a wonderful event when that little cartoon light bulb over your head goes on. If you’re among the determined ones who keep grinding away even in the face of adversity when it seems the only things you’re finding lately are ticks, mosquitoes, and sunburn, the little light over your head will go on. In fact, it will happen more than once as the years pass.

One of those times, you might even realize you’re glad you’ve taken up metal detecting instead flying remote-controlled airplanes, a hobby in which you’ll have to replace several large piles of busted sticks and plastic at about $100 a pop before that little light flips on. When it comes to metal detecting, spouses and significant others are surprisingly tolerant of loved ones they believe to be nuts. But when it comes to flying model planes, they’re far less charitable toward nutty loved ones who often send C-notes zooming into the ground.

The beginning of the new year always means one thing on the metal detecting forums: Time to post your best finds from the past season. How many times do we see other peoples’ finds (which often seem to surpass our own in either quantity or quality) from parks and yards and woods and waters and think, "Wow. Either those people have old virgin sites or no competition. Lucky dogs." Or something similar, except in terms more familiar to those fine sailing men of the merchant marine. One such best-finds posted over the past week or two included some very tasty brooches which look like they were the cat’s pajamas among women who strolled the decks of the Titanic. All from local parks. All from someone who, along with his wife, had been detecting for only a year. Over the past five years or so, I’ve found my share of everything from silver coins to useless, formless lumps of corroded crap (still considered relics; just not very good ones), but finds of this sort of quality regularly coming from someone completely new to detecting made me just want to shuffle out to the garage, lock the door, and leave my cold, lifeless corpse dangling from a rafter. Then one of those Light Bulb Moments happened: Being a newcomer probably not only contributed to making such great finds, but also to making them time and again.

"I see," said the blind man as he picked up the hammer and saw.

As we grow over the years in this hobby, it’s easy to get a bit jaded. We learn more, find more things (although nowhere near what or how much we’d like), learn to read sites better, learn to dread the waste of time involved in resurrecting pulltabs and gnarly zinc Lincolns. At the same time, we can also develop some bad habits and personal preferences which can conspire against us and leave us with little more than lint in our aprons or pockets. My own demons of this nature are rooted in the fact that in the past two to three seasons since my last two children were born and my wife and I inherited a drafty-ass money pit of a house, I’ve rarely had the luxury of having more than an hour at a crack to hunt. And even there, it was usually time snuck in on days when the boss let everyone go home a little early. If there’s anything, I love, it’s a good public park which been around a good long while. However, when you have only an hour at best to start cracking all that acreage with an unmetered detector, I started taking the Overstuffed Sack Approach to detecting. In order to shove 50 pounds of detecting into a two-pound slice of hunting time, I started hunting quickly to cover the most ground possible, with my discrimination on the high side to just pick off the high-value stuff, like silver jewelry and coins, and clad dimes and quarters. Screw little gold rings and nickels, man; I’m burning daylight here.

Did it work? Sure. Did it work well? Crap, no. I know this because, in one particular several-hundred acre park which has been in existence since the turn of the century in the neighborhood in which I grew up, I have not dug a single piece of silver coinage or vintage jewelry. And the sorry thing is, given that expanse of real estate, those things are most certainly there.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it again: You don’t need to be a seasoned detectorist to find the good stuff. OK, well, maybe I never actually said it, but it’s true. Instead, you need to be someone who understands two things: 1) The discrimination dial spins backward, too, and 2) Why the sheer math involved in hunting even the smallest patch of ground, coupled with the natural shortcomings of coil mechanics, ensure that no site can ever be completely hunted out. The math and mechanics bit might sound like a bit of a yawn at this point, but when it comes to math and mechanics, I’m someone who can lop off a finger tightening a bolt. So you can stop your groaning now. It’ll be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Trust me.

Detecting always comes down to choices, and every single one of them involve give and take. It’s not much different than the pros and cons that come with being married to a celebrity. On one hand, the money’s good, and you get to move to a better neighborhood and begin treating total strangers like dirt. On the other hand, having scandal sheet photographers continually ruin the bushes outside your windows and watching your spouse suck face 30 feet tall with someone considerably better-looking than you is no cup of tea. For us, the choices are far more pedestrian but no less important: To discriminate or not to discriminate, and if so, by how much? When it comes to digging quality finds, believe me, wars have been won and lost on questions of far less importance.

Bottom line: If you’re absolutely, positively determined to find quality relics and all the gold and silver you possibly can, the only way to go about it is to go slow and set your discrimination to reject nothing higher than foil. This is one of detecting’s fundamental commandments, yet it’s one that’s most often broken. Come to think of it, thou not coveting your neighbor’s ass is a fundamental commandment, too, but lot good that one has worked out. By setting your discrimination just a notch over pull-tab level (or even higher to reject zinc Lincolns), you’re also rejecting a whole range of valuables, including thinner gold trinkets, brass items, even some half dollars. You say you don’t want to dig the useless trash you’ll certainly find with low or no discrimination? Fine. But don’t go crying to anyone that you’re not finding anything good. Go marry a rock star and see how difficult life can really be.

While setting your discrimination low is an answer, it’s not the only answer. Here’s where the math and mechanics come in. I’ll borrow one passage from a very enlightening article written for a recent Treasure Depot online magazine by Bill Reavis, a coinshooter who’s more adept than I to explain the math and means behind why the only way to completely hunt out any site you care to name is by digging it up with monster-donster excavation equipment. This explanation (edited slightly but not completely for clarity, so if there’s something in there you don’t get, I’m the wrong person to ask) was originally written for coinshooters, but the basic principle applies equally to hunting relics in the woods or jewelry in the surf and sand:

"The one failing grace of every coinshooter is the inability to comprehend the sheer logistics of coinshooting, and understanding these logistics will determine whether you go home with a full pouch or go home skunked. The average coin or ring will fit into a 1-inch by 1-inch space. If you are hunting a patch of only 20 feet by 20 feet, this equates to 57,600 square inches. That’s 57,600 potential targets. Let’s say your machine is equipped with an eight-inch coil and you make a four-foot pass with each scan. Let’s say it takes 50 passes to cover the 20 feet, then you make four more passes up and down to cover the 20-foot by 20-foot area for a total of five passes. On each pass, you sacrifice 48 square inches (or 48 potential targets) because even if you overlap each pass, you will more than likely miss a minimum one-inch strip on each scan. 50 passes times 48 square inches equals 2,400 square inches. Five trips up and down the site times 2,400 equals 12,000 square inches, or 12,000 possible targets you missed scanning this site. If only 1 percent of those 12,000 square inches actually contained a target, you’ve left 120 targets behind. Multiply that by every 20-foot by 20-foot patch contained within the area you are hunting (such as a park), and you begin to get the picture. Scary ain’t it?"

Actually, this equation is a massive underestimation given the inherent limitations caused by the way the typical concentric coil works. These coils radiate an inverted, cone-shaped field (picture an upside-down pyramid with the tip beneath the center of your coil) into the ground, not a solid and uniform, curtainlike field as wide as the coil. This is why, even when abiding by the widely-circulated but somewhat misleading advice of overlapping your sweeps by half your coil’s width, you and others before you who hunted the same exact patch of ground are leaving things in the ground. A detectorist using an 8-inch coil who overlaps his sweep by half the coil’s width will still leave four whole inches of ground unscanned. To thoroughly cover every inch of ground, you would have to overlap your sweep by nearly the entire width of your coil. And no matter how determined or retired you may be, nobody has that kind of time or that kind of expertise.

So if a lack of hunting time or your disdain for digging junk is the personal bugaboo keeping you from digging the great stuff you just know is out there, winter’s cold and gloom would be the perfect time to reassess which of all those "unproductive" parks, beaches, or wooded sites now hold the most promise in this new light once spring comes around. Then pick one of each (or just one, if it’s a huge site), research which areas are likely to be the most productive because they’ve seen the most amount of foot traffic (especially back in grandpa’s day), and then hunt them the same way you’d eat an elephant: One little piece at a time. Of course, by dialing down the discrimination and slowing yourself to a pace considered slow even by garden slugs, you’ll be dead long before you’re able to beat to death even a small fraction of the place. But you’ll leave behind a significantly better stash of stuff when you do croak. Guaranteed.

© 2002 Scott Buckner


 




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