schoolofhardNox

Of course we did. BUT.... I never expected so lack luster customer support when things went wrong. Also never dreamed a company would use the cheapest parts they could get. Engineered to fail 😄. I assumed that they meant that you could not work the machine as hard as you usually work a beach machine. Gentle is one thing, extreme bubble wrapped kit gloves is another thing. And not even a thank you to the people who volunteered to do this, just the same corporate bull we get from normally much bigger companies in other areas. I wonder if whoever had that broken shaft ever got the replacement yet? This is not the way to expect people to help you get a machine refined for production.

Apparently .... yes 😭 You and me and a bunch of others. Sad really. The least they could do is allow us a trade in for the final version.

Great hunts. The number of lead pieces tells me you were in the right areas. Nothing better than detecting for a week straight too! Sweet looking gold! I agree, if the targets aren't there in the first place, it doesn't matter what machine you are using or how good you are. Now you get to sit back and watch other beach guys hunt 😄

I think it would have had some pluses with the mute mode when the beaches were ripped up, and all that remained were the heavy non ferrous and of course a lot of iron. I missed my first chance to use it during one time, when the headphones gave out right as I was getting to the iron patches. I would have dug low conductors during that time all day long if it let me. 😄 The second time It was the battery cable I believe (?). It's been so long now I forgot 🙄 But either way, I missed out on that feature (really the reason I bought it in the first place). Once repaired, the beaches sanded in and never returned to those conditions. Reliability is not one of it's strong points 😆 Seriously though, I realize it was a work in progress, but I wasn't expecting it to be that unreliable. That's not the way to drum up pre-production support for an upcoming machine. Joe solved the battery problem, and I'm sure that if the machine had hit the full 100 (or more) machines sold, someone else would have made batteries for it. They probably would have copied Joe's battery to a tee. 🤬

The brass piece looks like a padlock face plate. The medal is way cool!

Some nice early buttons - early to mid 1800's. I don't know why the '83 Indian read so low, all i can think of is that it was very close to iron and that would drop the numbers a bit. Out of ground it should read proper. The fattie Indian almost looks like 1862 to me, but that's looking at a picture, so don't pay any attention to me 😄 Nice little spot you found in that field.

Here too, but only 6" That's why I love beaches.... snow will be gone in one high tide!

It is 😄 I guess the ring could have also been heavy plated (filled) perhaps 1/10 G.F but either way it's toasted.

Beach hunt # 17 is a continuation of hunting the same beach that I was getting a lot of copper cents from. Tide was high when I arrived, so dry sand hunting led to minimal good finds and more iron than usual from this spot. Once the tide receded, I was able to continue the coin line from the previous hunt. This time, Memorials beat the Wheats by a lot and that means less silver too. Zero zinc cents today - hurray! 😊 5 silvers for the day and a bonus tiny low karat ring. The ring popped out as I was digging a Memorial cent. Apparently, this beach is very acidic and that leads to thin copper cents and unfortunately for me, gold losing its copper base metal. There is no saving this ring as the only thing left is mostly gold. Never seen this kind of action on low karat material. I have seen copper leaching out of rings before, but not like this. Found a lead soldier, but can’t figure out what he is holding? Maybe a whip? IDK. It was a nice day at the beach, weather was still warm enough at 40 degrees, but snow was on the way. 7 hours of using a scoop was enough for me. 😶

I knew someone who always used channel 6 or channel 9 for deep silver. Now, I know that there is something to those claims. So, do you have any thoughts on which frequency on the Etrac may find deep, tiny, high conductors best?? Wondering if I can get a little more depth on a US silver dime (around 18mm). Great work analyzing the two tone frequencies. I assuming the channel selection would have to change if we use multi-tones, as the guy I knew always ran multi- tones

Thanks. Sorry about paying the weatherman to shift the snow down your way 🤭 I'm sure you can pay him to shift the next storm over us. I did get the wind though, you could see the flag waving fairly stiff. probably @ 15 MPH at times. One thing about finding coins deep in saturated salt water is they wipe clean rather easily. I just rub them with the gloves and whatever sand is on them, and they come clean. Works on copper and nickle and clad. Doesn't work on zincs or silver. When the ocean pulls all the light stuff away, you get a better ratio of good targets vs bad targets. It also lets the GPX discriminate out some of the iron better. I still get fooled from the broken pieces of lobster traps though. If the tides go low enough to get to that level, I'll see if the trend continues this Thursday.

You're correct. I read the wrong part of the write up in Breens. Although Breen has only 1944-45 listed as the ones with no tin in them. So maybe the Redbook revised that to include 1946 .The only thing that could be different is the % between the tin and zinc

Beach hunt # 16 is in the books. As much as I wanted to hunt my favorite beaches, I had to go somewhere else. So, I hit a beach where last time the GPX was acting up with the 12.5” coil, so I opted for the 11DD. This is a beach where the deep copper cents reign and it was no different this time around. No using a shovel here as the water fills in after about 12”, so I spent the day using the XTreme scoop. I got to say that scoop with the carbon fiber handle is unstoppable in the wet sand. The targets were all very deep, ranging mostly from 14 -20”. It took me a while to pinpoint them, but it was worth the time. A proper pinpoint in the wet sand at those depths is crucial for recovering the targets. Off by a couple of inches and you are digging a wider hole than you need to, and it will collapse in on you. No fun. 🙄 I hunted for 5 hours and this time I had no visitors as it was hovering around 30 degrees for the day. Once I found the area that I could reach the coins, I started pulling coin after coin. The Wheat to Memorial to Zinc cent ratio was awesome. Only 3 Zincs to keep me honest. Once the Wheats started to pop up, so did the silver dimes. One coin was kind of odd and turned out to be a 1920 UK Sixpence – silver I believe. The last hole I dug before going home played a bad joke on me, as I thought I just popped out a silver half dollar. Turns out it was the biggest hem weight I’ve ever found. 😄 I had to laugh so as not to cry!! Great day at the beach with not a lot of trash, and all the solitude I was looking for. It was nice to dig deep coins again.

I just looked at Breen's book and those two coins used "French Bronze" 95% copper 5% tin and zinc Wheat cents are 95% copper 5% zinc (no tin). So I'm going to assume that the lack of tin had something to do with it? But I have also found old Wheats that had that green, IDK. Soil probably has the most to do with it, but I still find a lot of 2 cent coins that have that green look vs wheat cents.

For some reason some Indians and 2 cent pieces can take on that beautiful dark emerald green patina. Nothing better than pulling a coin from 1865 and seeing that nice green.

WOW on the cob !!! Great find. Some early buttons too. Nice way to start the (almost) new year.

Fairly good since nothing was real deep. I dug a couple of #1's and all were foil unfortunately. I think nickels were 12. I was digging it all so I didn't pay much attention to the numbers. I was just happy the Equinox was making noise in that type of sand. The silence was killing me before I switched to gold 😄

I'll take a little global warming if I can hunt the beaches in January without three winter coats on 🥶 Nope it's really hunt #15 😄 If I run them from Labor day to Memorial day, it's one continuous season. If I do it by year, then I have a big gap during summer when it's off limits to detect (or not worth the long trip down for after hour hunting). Tomorrows hunt is going to be a cold one for sure 😬

It was better but both worked nicely. I just ran them at 20Khz.... seemed smoother than multi. Sensitivity around 20. A bit chirpy, but when you hit a target you know it. At least you can hunt since the beach modes don't work very well at all in that environment.

Beach hunt # 15 is done. Decided to do a very trashy town beach that I have done a couple of times briefly. Was a very low tide and I was hoping it would expose some lower sections that I haven’t seen before. No luck….. just more sand. I probably should have pulled out the GPX, but I decided I wanted to see if the Equinox can get some deep finds along with having the benefit of discrimination. I must say sometime the EQ does not do so well and this beach probably has the most concentration of tiniest black sand than any other beach I have done so far. Barely any signals down low so I decided to try the upper dry areas for older finds. This is an old beach that goes back to seated coins or earlier. I noticed right from the get-go, that I was not getting through the black sand with any of the beach programs. A dime at 2” barely read and this has happened before, so I tried the gold programs. Gold 1 worked well and got me around 5” on that dime but also hit hard on tiny aluminum. Gold 2 was a bit better, so I was happy with that. I didn’t have the day I was expecting to have target wise, as this beach should have more targets, but when I got home, I did notice that there is still some potential here for future hunts. I scored a buffalo nickel by default when I was digging a hole with 3 nails in it. Going over the pile I dug out to get those nails, I got that buffalo. But later on, I noticed one of the cents I found was a wheat cent along with an older spoon and 2 square nails. Square nails on a beach are rare for me and I think they probably come from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. I did manage to get a fresh drop with the silver earring. Only 1 junk ring that for a second made me hopeful They guy I ran into detecting had 2 rings, one being silver and told me they were deep. He was surprised how sanded in it was at low tide. The funny part was that I thought because it was going to be light rain, that I would be almost alone on the beach, but apparently every New Years Day they do a cold plunge into the water to celebrate the New Year. Yep, about 150+ people with kids all over the beach. 😬Hey, it wasn’t the best beach hunt, but I did get silver, a Buffalo and had a fun time out with pretty warm weather in January. Not too shabby!

I just tried using the EQ 800 with the gold programs at my last beach hunt. At least now I can get 5" on a clad dime instead of 2" in the black sand 😄 So I guess my choice of machine would be a PI on that beach 🙄

On my way to my next beach hunt tomorrow. It will be a cakewalk compared to that pond hunt 😄 Thanks. Without the ring, I would have just found a crusty Indian and a war nickel. The ring saved the day for sure.

He may be putting together a couple beach hunts as a lot of YT's will do. Or maybe he is lucky and has a target rich beach. My area is sanded in, so 2/3's of the lower beach is dead zone with just a couple targets showing up here and there. Even with a PI, it's sparse. The upper section still has targets since people still come out during our warm days. My choice in sparseness would be the PI.

Going behind some of those guys has huge benefits. they clear all the surface trash for you 😁

Hopefully I won' t run out of time and the deep freeze hits. I wanted to cross that small running water but chickened out. I didn't want to be that guy that gets stuck in the mud and has to call for help 😄 They already had one of those for the fire department to practice on 😆 I will go over to the better side next time. This hunt i just wanted to get used to what I was up against. I really didn't expect that many targets to be so shallow. The ring made it all worth it. Probably will be soar, since I didn't take anything to drink with me. 🙄 I opted to take a spare set of mini headphones with me in the spot usually reserved for a 16 oz electrolyte drink. I've had some headphone issues lately, so I didn't want to trudge back up that steep briar filled hill until I was done for the day. It did help that the targets were shallow and very close to one another. I could actually dig 2 or 3 targets without getting up if they were close enough.