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Detector To Sweep For Needles


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Hi people! I bought a new house recently, and have found a few old medical needles in the backyard. I want to sweep the entire yard before I start gardening. I want to know the cheapest detector I can use that will find me needles. Totally new to this whole thing, so any advice is greatly appreciated! 

-Grobs

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A strong rare earth magnet glued to the end of a broom or rake handle or mount several on the teeth of a leaf rake.

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The Home improvement stores sell a wide stick magnet that is used on construction sites to sweep for screws and nails! I'm sure you can find them online also!! This would be much more efficient for shallow sharps, than a detector!! 

Good Luck!👍👍

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I didn't mention it before but you would need a very sensitive detector running at higher frequency than most of the really cheap ones depending on the size of the needles you are encountering. Even if I was using one of these, I would still have a rare earth magnet or magnets attached to my digging tool.

I detect in one park that has hosted many high school cross country events and the prevailing target apart from modern aluminum trash are small safety pins. Most are open and still really stick me so I always use a magnet supplemented digging tool there.

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    It would also make a big difference if you were trying to recover sharps through top soil, or established sod! 

Sod would be very difficult for a magnet to pull through objects, unless right on surface!👍👍

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Will the needles stick to a magnet? Some stainless has too high nickel amount in them and won't stick. Just about any detector with a small coil should work fine.

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1 hour ago, kac said:

Will the needles stick to a magnet? Some stainless has too high nickel amount in them and won't stick. Just about any detector with a small coil should work fine.

That's what I was thinking-- some SS alloys are non-magnetic. I just tried two different sized medical needles (tiny insulin and a big scary one) and each was only weakly attracted to either a one inch cube (25mm) or a 8mm cube neodynium magnet... Certainly not attracted enough to yank it out of the soil, even roto-tilled soil! The magnets would pick them off the surface, surely; but at that point, you might as well use a pliers, if you can see 'em. I have metal detected pins and needles and tiny ball bearings before, so maybe OP could get by with just a pin-pointer? They could get a very good quality pin-pointer for the price of a craptastic metal detector...

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    May be a wiser investment to just purchase some puncture proof gardening gloves, if a magnet sweep does not produce reliable results!👍👍

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