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charliesgrave said:
I scoped out my church's playground today. 32 cents in riches plus several tabs off soda cans. Heck, at this rate I'll have gotten my money back on the detector in no time.
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In your will, leave it to me, and I'll honor your memory by continuing to find change to pay it off...
 
charliesgrave said:
I scoped out my church's playground today. 32 cents in riches plus several tabs off soda cans. Heck, at this rate I'll have gotten my money back on the detector in no time.
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This weekend I an on hitting a local middle school built in the 50s and a local park. I expect nothing but clad. I also plan on hitting a local church yard that dates back to 1807. Minelab released an update for the Equinox models that includes a new 4kHz frequency that is suppose to be awesome for silver
 
Went out this morning to the church yard to start trying to get a feel for my new detector. Got about 40 minutes in before it started raining. Didn't find anything but junk but did find another bullet (modern). Second one I have found. First one didn't surprise me. This one did since it was in a church yard.

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NCFubar said:
Another interesting hobby, but you don’t find a lot “good” valuable stuff, is magnet fishing. An 400-500lb rare earth magnet on the end of a 75-100ft of nylon rope and dock/pier/bridge and you never know what you’ll pull up. It won’t be gold or silver ... has to be made of a ferrous metal but you will pull up a rod & reel every so often.
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I started doing this before it was mainstream in highschool after a girlfriends dad told me about a woman who wrecked over a bridge near a local lake. The story was when the divers went down to retrieve the car/her, there were guns and motorcycles and all sorts of "ditched" stolen property. According to him, local police said screw it, and didn't want to go through the trouble of it so they left it all. The following week I was at the bridge with a giant retrieval magnet and a roll of 550 cord. Didn't pull up any guns but hooked a small gunsafe that took me and 4 friends to pull up. It had been cut open on a corner and later ditched in the lake. Also found a Mossberg 500 years later somewhere else that was so far gone the mag tube came apart in my hands.
 
I worked with a guy who said his brother in law stole a case of M16's from the Army. Said he got scared and dumped them off a bridge into a river. Later he got caught trying to steal uranium for the power company that he worked for and went to jail. The guy I worked with, died in 1996 and I only have a brief location where the rifles were dumped.
 
beamernc said:
I worked with a guy who said his brother in law stole a case of M16's from the Army. Said he got scared and dumped them off a bridge into a river. Later he got caught trying to steal uranium for the power company that he worked for and went to jail. The guy I worked with, died in 1996 and I only have a brief location where the rifles were dumped.
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Aluminum receivers don't rust.... Just saying lol.
 
Metal detecting is a lot of fun, just fill the holes back in when you are done. Some places out west looked like giant gophers attacked the ground from detectors not filling behind them.

My buddy and I were detecting in the desert and turned up some pre 1900s coins, square nails, and several cartridge cases. I found some .44 Colt cases and .40-72 cases.

When I was stuck at Camp Ripley MN for a month in the early 80s I came across some guys metal detecting a dump on the Fort property that went back to pre-1900s. When they decided I wasn't going to arrest them, they showed me a handful of uniform buttons and a couple of belt buckles that were pre 1900.
 
Went today for a couple of hours to get so more practice in with the Equinox. Went to the local middle school that use to be the high school years ago. Found several copper pennies, a couple of zinc, couple of dimes, a small piece of pipe and my first ring! Probably a trinket. Inside it says "Happiness is a warm hug." Still waiting to see my first silver coin pop up. Did learn that on park mode 2 the copper pennies usually show 19-20. Zinc pennies 15-17. Zincs don't do well in the ground. You can see the edges eaten away on some in the picture below. Modern dimes in the low 20's. I think the ring was showing 23-24. Also found the bottom of a hot wheels car. Couple of hours but it just got to be too hot. Needs to cool down some.
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Edit- Upon further review I know the ring is a trinket. It doesn't say Happiness is a warm hug. It says "Hapness is a warm hug." Oh and for anyone thinking of getting a metal detector a pin pointer is a great investment.
 
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Cool finds. That car looks like a Tootsie toy car. It will say on the underneath if it is.
 
I'll be glad for some cooler weather so I can get me detectors out. I want to go up to my property in Laurel Springs and detect around the old house and barns. I believe the house was abandoned in the early '40's and suspect it was built 30 0r 40 years prior.
 
I just received my Whites MX Sport back from the West Coast today. Nothing wrong with it, but it was one of the first run models that had issues with the housing leaking (suppose to be water proof up to certain depth) and needed a software update. Whites has closed up shop. I contacted Centreville Electronics in Virginia a couple of weeks ago about checking it out and they put me in touch with Todd Marshall who worked for Whites. I called him and he said he still goes into the the Whites facility and if I could get it to him soon he would carry it in and check it out. No charge and only had to pay to ship it there. He is going to be Centrevilles "West Coast branch." I had carried it with me to Nags Head and, being new to me, I was (and still am) getting use to it. Before using the Equinox 800 I watched several Youtube videos and I'm understanding the tones and numbers better on it. Will have to watch some MX Sport videos to get a feel for it.
 
easternnc4me said:
Went today for a couple of hours to get so more practice in with the Equinox. Went to the local middle school that use to be the high school years ago. Found several copper pennies, a couple of zinc, couple of dimes, a small piece of pipe and my first ring! Probably a trinket. Inside it says "Happiness is a warm hug." Still waiting to see my first silver coin pop up. Did learn that on park mode 2 the copper pennies usually show 19-20. Zinc pennies 15-17. Zincs don't do well in the ground. You can see the edges eaten away on some in the picture below. Modern dimes in the low 20's. I think the ring was showing 23-24. Also found the bottom of a hot wheels car. Couple of hours but it just got to be too hot. Needs to cool down some.
View attachment 236867

View attachment 236868

Edit- Upon further review I know the ring is a trinket. It doesn't say Happiness is a warm hug. It says "Hapness is a warm hug." Oh and for anyone thinking of getting a metal detector a pin pointer is a great investment.
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Please tell us about your Garrett pinpoint detector. I been looking at one of these but I don't trust online reviews. What is you oninion on it and how does it help in detecting?
thanks
 
charliesgrave said:
The metal detector will get you close. So you dig up a clump of ground. Great, now what? A small coin is hard to find in a bunch of dirt. Sometimes things are so corroded or so colored by the soil they aren't easy to see.

What I do is take loose soil in hand, use the pinpointer to rummage through it and you can tell pretty quickly if you have the item in your hand.
If you have dug up a bunch of loose soil, you can do the same while it's on top of the ground. If the pinpointer shows you still have a signal in the hole, keep digging. If it shows the signal is gone, it's on or in your spoil pile. Either way, the pinpointer makes the task of finding whatever your detector hit on a hundred times easier.

The Garrett pinpointer my setup came with is fantastic. Even has a light and an edge on it so you can use it like a trowel in a hole. When it gets a signal it beeps really loud and vibrates in hand, making it hard to miss something, even if you have headphones still on connected to the detector.
My only complaint with it thus far is that it uses 9v batteries.
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This! When I bought the Whites MX Sport last year it came with a Garrett AT Pinpointer Pro (Garrett carrot). As @charliesgrave said it makes pinpointing objects in dirt and the ground SO much easier. A lot of the time once I get a hit on a target with the metal detector, I then stick the pin pointer on the ground and move it around on the ground until I get a hit on it to tell me where to dig (this is if the object is not too far in the ground). The closer to the target you get the faster it beeps. So much so that I bought a used one out of South Carolina off of Facebook market place earlier this week so I would have one with each metal detector. Came in yesterday. $55 shipped and it was lightly used. There are other brands (Whites and Minelab are a couple). I agree with on the 9V battery. On a side note, and not related to metal detecting, but my wife walked out of Family Dollar yesterday and saw the tail side of a dime laying on the ground. She picked it up on and put it on the console in the truck. This morning I noticed it and knew it was an older one. Flipped it over and sure enough it's a 1939 Mercury dime. Still waiting to dig my first silver.

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charliesgrave said:
The metal detector will get you close. So you dig up a clump of ground. Great, now what? A small coin is hard to find in a bunch of dirt. Sometimes things are so corroded or so colored by the soil they aren't easy to see.

What I do is take loose soil in hand, use the pinpointer to rummage through it and you can tell pretty quickly if you have the item in your hand.
If you have dug up a bunch of loose soil, you can do the same while it's on top of the ground. If the pinpointer shows you still have a signal in the hole, keep digging. If it shows the signal is gone, it's on or in your spoil pile. Either way, the pinpointer makes the task of finding whatever your detector hit on a hundred times easier.

The Garrett pinpointer my setup came with is fantastic. Even has a light and an edge on it so you can use it like a trowel in a hole. When it gets a signal it beeps really loud and vibrates in hand, making it hard to miss something, even if you have headphones still on connected to the detector.
My only complaint with it thus far is that it uses 9v batteries.
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Thanks, you helped me make up my mind.
 
I think you'll love it. It also has a ruler on the side to tell you depth of the hole up to 6 inches and you can also set it for different depth (3 I believe) ranges (indicates the depth you set by the number of beeps) as well as vibrate setting.
 
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Was looking at Craigslist and saw an ad for an Equinox 800 metal detector for $500. Called and asked about it. He originally had it priced at $600 and dropped the price to $500. No accessories. Missing the charge cable, arm cuff and wireless headphones. No box either. Asked if the price was negotiable. He said he would take $450 for it since it was just the detector and was missing some things. Detector starts up and functions fine. Met in in Greenville and bought it. Came home to get the charging cable out of the box of the one I bought a couple of weeks ago. Discovered I had an extra arm cuff and charge cable with mine. Sweet! Updated it to the newest update. Reason I wanted another Equinox is because my youngest son wants to start detecting and I/we didn't want to have to learn two different machines.

Pic of how it looked when I bought it and Craigslist ad:
https://eastnc.craigslist.org/ele/d/chocowinity-metal-detector/7175995870.html20200816_150445[1].jpg
 
charliesgrave said:
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I decided to mark hits with paint rather than try to find and dig at the same time.
There's so much stuff in the area where the last finds I posted came from there has to have been a building there. You have plowed farm field to the left and woods to the right. Maybe an old tractor shed or something. These are mostly non-iron hits, but I did mark a couple iron finds that seemed to be large.
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I might suggest you also try survey marking flags https://www.amazon.com/ACE-Supply-M...1&keywords=Survey+flags&qid=1597752466&sr=8-5 . They are reusable and make pretty easy to make sure you dig see all the hits,
 
Dang , you're getting after it !

I really need to do this around my place.
 
Looks like junk but I would bet someone who does blacksmithing or knife making would love to have some of those larger chunks of metal. Some of the pieces I have seen rusted though they may be are actually pretty good metal.
 
Y’all know if you take the rusty iron bits you find, wash and scrub with stiff brush to get flaky stuff and dirt off, then spay with clear coat, you can trade for $or favors from suburban soccer moms, right? They love it for farm house look craft projects


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
That old door lock reminds me of the Victorian house I grew up in.
 
charliesgrave said:
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Had some AM hours to check out a local cow field.

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Another day, another pile of trash.
Notable finds include a 25-06 case, 223 case, and a 1944 wheat penny- my first one.

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After being unable to get someone to make a nice belt bag for my tools, I went ahead and did this. Just riveted my dig knife sheath to the pouch. The loops on it are a perfect fit for the pointer and the extra space is good for finds, extra batteries, and a couple small tools.
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You're flat getting after it !
 
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