schoolofhardNox

17 hours ago, Cal_Cobra said:

TomCA's been using those old surveyor map cabinets for storing and displaying his notable finds, it is a perfect setup for RIker case storage and display. 

It is. You can store a lot in them slim drawers. Now I just have to buy the right dimension Riker boxes to fit tighter. Those magnetic pieces do keep the display cases from moving though. 

On 12/16/2022 at 5:58 PM, Tometusns said:

That sure beats the sandwich bags and a box. lol

Sandwich bags work 😄 So do coffee cans.  I have so much stuff over the years that I have to bag and can most of them Riker boxes have become very expensive - not like when they first come out.

On 12/16/2022 at 6:56 PM, F350Platinum said:

Too cool, School! 👍 My Rikers are in a basket upstairs. 🤣

I used to stack them. You don't get to see much when they are one on to[p of the other. At least you could pull from the basket 😄

On 12/16/2022 at 7:01 PM, strick said:

Good work i've seen where guys have used those and i researched them but they are hard to find and expensive when listed....I'd like to make one out of wood some day. 

strick 

Thanks. Wood would look great but it takes a lot of effort to do that.  But repurposing old wood from desks and bed headboards would save some money. If you make some, please post it. 

22 hours ago, Rick N. MI said:

Wow that is incredible work. I like the cabinet they are in.

Thanks Rick.  I've wanted to do that for many years.

20 hours ago, Joe Beechnut OBN said:

Love the organizing and filing!

 

Thank You.  Now I can keep better track of all my junk 🙄

16 hours ago, Valens Legacy said:

Found a few of them a couple of years ago when a large company decided to move out of Illinois. When I heard of them moving I handed my card to one of the managers, a few months later got a call to come and pick up whatever I wanted. I went and picked up 6 of those and about 20 other file cabinets to finish loading my trailer.

Didn't cost a dime, and I was able to sell most of what I didn't want.

They said it saved them money to have them hauled off.

Yep, one thing I learned from my scrap and electronics recycling is that sometimes people just want stuff GONE!!!! I just received 2 nice modern color laser printers for the house, because someone bought new ones. I guess now I can print that Manticore manual in color🤭 Good for you in getting all of those cabinets. They usually sell for hundreds of dollars each.

12 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Thanks! Funny you should mention that, I noticed the hole today and cleaned it out with a pin. It's big and heavy, around 2" and that's about 2/3 the length of the side, and it is curved. Shoe buckle? I think the cast and pinned buckles were made in the latter part of the 18th century, or early 19th.

Couldn't find it in my buckle book. 🤔 

 

 

Here's a couple of similar shoe buckle pieces. I don't have a good, whole example of that style, but I have seen others dig similar ones. Generally most buckles come from the mid 1700's to the end of the 1700's. Earlier ones are rarer to find, but (I think) started somewhere in the very late 1600's

Hey, nice relic hunt. That may just be a buckle fragment you have. You can see what looks like the pin hole (filled with dirt). They do make buckles that have a similar design like that.

1 hour ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

That's awesome that you get to do archeological work and you made some cool finds! I agree with F350, it looks like there are some old bulletss in your trash pile. And since it's not of the period they were looking for, you got to keep them, so win-win. Well done! 

Thanks, Every once in a while I get a call from some great people I have worked with over the years. The text and say "interested in a war of 1812 fort???" How can I say no 😄 Seriously, just some fun time detecting on those kind of off limit sites. That's what metal detecting is supposed to be..... fun first.  I have the easy job, just find stuff. They have to GPS them, double bag them, write down information..... 🙄 Not my kind of fun.

You did well on a site that has been hit hard. Apparently people avoid the iron areas. That is a lot of non ferrous targets to be getting there. Hopefully, somewhere there is a tiny half dime or 3 cent silver hiding in that iron.

7 hours ago, rvpopeye said:

I think you've served your time digging zincolns.

There should be a limit on that  , then we get immunity or something ! 🙃

So much for the "there should be " line of thought..... 🙄

🥰IMMUNITY!!!! Can I get some of that on aluminum as well? 😄

6 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Even your trash is cool. 👍

It's nice to have a goal detecting, glad you could reach yours. What size is the ball you were looking for, or is that some sort of archaeological secret? I find them all the time, and wouldn't know a good or desirable one from crap.

Did they let you keep all those bullets? Some of them are pretty old too.

I had doubts we would find any round ball. This is a fairly small site and it took a while to find anything relevant. I think they wanted large caliber round ball, but I didn't know what caliber. I had no way of measuring them, but I think these are around 62 cal. The good thing is they are all consistent in size. The smaller ones were around 38 cal and also consistent in size. They were packed with one big shot and 3 smaller shot in one load. I didn't bother to take pictures of them. I'm surprised I remembered to take any pictures at all. Once I start finding something, I forget to take pictures. 😌. The non period items are junk, but I saved them just in case they wanted to show the unrelated items as well. They sit in a plastic bag on the shelf for now.

7 hours ago, rvpopeye said:

Good day detecting  ! 

and no zincolns.

 

 

 

 

I know 😄 I'll make up for it next time. Was a nice change not digging crusty zincs.

Beach hunt # 15 wasn’t a beach hunt after all.  🙄 I had a chance to do some metal detecting with archaeologists in an area that was assumed to have a War of 1812 fort on it. We wanted to determine if it actually was the fort and not some other type of structure. It was the second day of the project and the first day didn’t produce much. In my mind I assumed this place would have been hunted by other detectorists all through the years. It’s on old maps and even has a marker describing the fort. I really didn’t have much faith that we would get a lot of targets. We are looking for larger caliber round ball and of course military buttons. I ran the GPX and very quickly found out how quiet this site was. A little disappointed, but I decided to slow down and grid a small area. 22 casings and slugs were plentiful as were shot gun shells. Not a lot of modern trash though. The gridding paid off and I finally found a tiny round ball at about 7”, barely a squeak.  Probably around a 30-caliber ball, nice sprue, and casting line. That made me stop and wonder if the targets were just real deep and maybe the place wasn’t completely hunted out. It took me over an hour to find that one good target, but I knew what we are really looking for is large caliber round ball. Slowly, the large ball and medium ball started to show up. I was very relieved. ☺️ Then it happened….. I hit a hot spot and out popped 3 large and 6 medium ball, all within 20 square feet. I ended up with 18 or 19 total ball for the day. No military buttons, but that’s ok. Pictured are just a couple of the large round ball and the hot spot area I flagged. Not a beach hunt, but a great day relic hunting. Get out there while you can, as snow is starting to hit my neck of the woods.

On 12/7/2022 at 4:27 PM, F350Platinum said:

As usual, great stuff. 👍 And the gold substitute is a 400ish year old earring!

Is it copper, shell, stone? To my untrained eye it almost looks like Tombac 😀

The other question is whether it was worn by a man or a woman, it seems the men adorned themselves as much.

Thanks. The earring is most likely brass. The soil makes it look different, kind of like stone.  I'm assuming it could be worn by either. Kind of fun going from beach hunting one day to relic hunting the next day.

Beautiful work. Great idea using all found items to make a new one.

That will be great news for Axiom owners!! I use Detech coils on my 5000 for fields and beaches. Great coils.

White's Coinmaster V Supreme with G.E.B. (Ground Exclusion Balance) was the first detector for me that would ground balance hot rocks that previously read like coins. This changed everything for an amusement park we were the first to hunt circa 1969. The next detector is the Minelab GPX 5000. It allowed me to coin hunt and relic hunt like never before. I know gold guys had previous versions, so it may not be revolutionary for them, but that was the first GPX I had tried. An honorable mention (kinda revolutionary) was Minelab's E Trac for deep silver in parks. There are other great models, but not revolutionary in my experience.

21 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Heckuva haul! Nice that someone invited you to their digs, I've been hoping someone will bring along a PI to some of mine 🙄

From a '42 Walker half, to 10k. 👍 Ya got it all!

Thank You. I'm going back for round II soon. It's not often you get to go back to the spot after a first hunt like that. 😄 He's a nice guy and isn't worried about what I find. He did excellent on the last hunt as well. If you can move VA  up to CT or closer, I'll let you try the 5000. 😊

11 hours ago, Calmark said:

Nice haul on hunt #13 and great you got to meet up with a fellow member.  He led you to a great spot with coins and jewelry with good age.  Way to go!

Thanks. It was very nice of him to share his spot with me. It's always fun when you figure out there is stuff deep that is missed. It usually leads to silver and hopefully gold. What got me the most was the number of rings (silver and junk) that impressed me. It's unusual for me to get that many rings in one hunt.

7 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

Great finds and it looks like a much lower trash to treasure ratio than usual. Congrats on the silver and gold, well done!

Thanks. This spot gets hit by others when it's available, so the shallow finds are gone.  Also, it's kind of rough on VLF/Multi Frequency machines. Hard to get any depth because of the rocks and sand composition. EMI is about normal, maybe a bit higher than usual.

Great hunt and done in record time too. Nice gold!

59 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

A direct replacement for the Equinox 800 and 600. 800 at least. Manticore replaces the E-Trac.

oops I thought the topic was the manticore just being a nox II. Sorry about that..... I need more turkey!!!

My main interest is to see if the 2 D screen separates iron better, since they have split it up above and below the 12 line. If it acknowledges bottle caps, rusty tin shards (from cans) large solid iron and stainless steel from non ferrous items and has fast recovery, it will be a winner at relic sites. If it's just a Nox II, addressing the known flaws, they will have a huge public outcry. So far Minelab has always delivered something different, but limited, so I'm expecting a bit better than the Nox and most or all of what the E Trac/ CTX had to offer. We'll find out shortly, I'm sure.

3 minutes ago, phrunt said:

If it is a new improved lighter GPZ there will be a lot of disappointed 6000 owners.

Maybe, but will it find small gold better than the 6000? Seems like Minelab keeps there machines separate enough for people to not sell them 😄 Maybe it will be designed for something the 6000 is not.

I finally got around to putting on a carbon fiber shaft that steveg designed for my GPX 5000. Sorry for the long delay Steve 😶. I put it on the backup GPX and finally tried it out. The shaft breaks down in the center for easier travel. The 3rd section is a short shaft around 8" that connects to the coil. I wanted  to have short shafts on various coils so they would backpack easier when traveling deeper into the woods. We were worried about a clamp that would have to be located right next to the coil, and if that would interfere with the coil. It does not and it still pulled silver at 15+" at a beach site it was tried at. So no worries there. Design and weight of the shaft is top notch. Those of you considering this for a GPX, just remember the main 2 pieces have to be designed for your height, as there is no way to adjust them. The adjustment comes from the 8" coil shaft. So you will only have about 4-5" of usable adjustment. This is necessary to keep the shaft assembly strong. The stock Minelab handle moved slightly for me since, I'm chicken little with it due to breakage. I've cracked too many of them, and I was over cautious of tightening it fully. I will do so in the future. Even though I under tightened the handle it did not move much for the whole hunt. I'm pretty confident the handle fits on it when tightened.  Thanks Steve for the great job!

It's not just silver, the same goes for large coppers. I have only encountered one problem in 53+ years of detecting. It involved the E Trac and a stacked pile of colonial coppers (5, I think). I hit a signal that was terrible, barely registering, but was rather shallow. At colonial sites, this happens a lot with falsing iron. I reluctantly did not dig it and moved on. My buddy comes along and digs that signal a while later, and get 5 colonial coppers including the rarest Fugio variety known. Stacked on top of each other, the coppers in the middle only has side corrosion and minor surface edge corrosion. I asked him where he found them and he leads me to that same spot on a small slope. My heart sank 😞 but congratulated him none the less. Even though that happened, it is extremely rare. If I worried about that, I would never have fun detecting again. Most spills move sideways and are not stacked, so you should hit on part of the spill, otherwise no one would find coin spills. It's not a concern for me and certainly would not discourage a purchase of the machine. If one tries hard enough, you can make any machine fail a test.

Beach hunt #13 is done and the number 13 is a lucky number. I had a great invite from one of our forum members to try one of his productive beaches. How can you turn down an offer like that? 😄 It was very nice of him to offer that up. I started with the Nox and stuck with it for about 2 ½ hours. This beach had a lot of gravel type rocks showing and that made the Equinox unhappy. I finally figured out a way to hunt it by decreasing the sensitivity quite a bit lower, just to quiet it down. Things there are deep, and the Nox is not the machine for the job. So, for the last part of the hunt I used the GPX 5000. Night and day! A really good hunt with a decent amount of silver and some gold in the mix too. Also, always nice to meet up with forum members to do some hunting. Happy Thanksgiving to all. I hope you get to enjoy the day!