cuniagau

I spent a couple hours after my chiropractor appointment yesterday hitting the wet sand with a dropping tide. I did dig a .925 loop earring and a copper wire ring with beads but these lobster trap pieces were driving me crazy. Especially the more rounded one that is an unbroken more or less circle. I would have almost bet OBN's YTD ring finds that it was a ring or at least anything but a piece of vinyl coated wire. Small nails can be rejected easily but these pieces of vinyl coated (hence lack of rust) lobster traps are a different animal. I tried for a while to get the correct Rejection for them but thought that since I was being so unsuccessful I would appeal to higher power. Yep, that means the folks on the forum that have years and years of experience with these deep, great sounding pieces of "...." trash! I at first thought I could just dig them and get them off the beach but they seem to multiply. Are they alive and reproducing? Geez Louise, I can't tell you how much I hate these things. Ok, my rant is over! Now for some suggestions on settings that might help ID these damn things. I am open for any suggestions for settings on my AQ to give me a hint that these time and energy consuming little devils are under my coil. I have been running mostly just the presets but have run the reject all the way up and down the scale along with the ATS, Sensitivity, and swing speed. I cannot seem to find a crack in the combination that gives me any type of a hint that there is a nuance to ID these little piece of ferrous garbage. Help!!! thanks, Joe

Not even enough for a cheeseburger. ☹️

Finally after 13 days with the AQ, I struck gold. 2 grams of 18K to be exact. A nice little Hamas. The only hallmark is an 88 inside a circle but it test 18K with my tester. It also reads a solid 13 on my Equinox. With my beaches basically sanded in and unfavorable tides, I have just been hitting the high tide line with a bit of dry also mainly just getting used to the AQ. It is like a combination of my TDI Pro and Dual Field. Very quiet and stable too. My first hunt produced a silver ring as also did my second hunt. My third hunt gave me two silver earrings. The past couple of hunts was primarily junk with no precious metals. Today I just took my wife to her favorite beach and of course when she was ready to go we had a rising tide with strong wave action. LOL Thanks for looking! Joe

River Rat, Yea, I looked at the pictures just after I posted and said to myself, why don't you Google the thing. LOL Yep, about 3 seconds later I saw the Wireless Shutter Release. I guess sometimes we are challenged in other ways too! Oh well, it was still the first one of those that I have found on the beach. thanks anyway, Joe

It never ceases to amaze me at the things we dig up in the sand at the beach. I tend to call them "odd" unless I dig up another like it. That being said, I need one of you electronic specialist to ID my latest "oddity" that I dug yesterday while still looking for my first AG AU. I have attached 3 pictures and you can gage the size as I hold it in my fingers. It has 4 dip switches on one side and a 10 pin mail connector on the other. And it has a small antenna on it. This is a new one for me but by my own admission I am electronic connector challenged. Any good answers out there? RC, radio, drone? An inquiring mind wants to know. I am sure it is only a matter of time before I dig another as that seem to be the case on So Cal beaches. Thanks in advance. Joe

I used mine one time and that wasn't for very long. It was so heavy at the end of the rod that it almost caused me to hyperextend my arm. I had to swing it so slow to keep it from whipping that it took away any "coverage" advantage that the size might have given. When I sold my F75 a few years later, that coil was in "pristine" condition. The coil connector still had the cardboard protector on it. LOL

Joe, At two a week, you are about 4 times faster than the AQ production line. 🤣 Joe

Nice looking Claddagh ring!

Two days after I found the yellow gold Cartier I found the smaller white Cartier with the same serial number as the larger one from last year. The one last year acid tested 18K. So that was when I decided to buy the electronic tester. It tested both white Cartiers as non gold. The yellow one tested 18K. I then tested all of my gold finds with and without hallmarks. One of my large hallmarked 14Ks only test 10K. One non hallmarked ring that had tested 14K with the acid, tested 18K with the tester. It has been spot on on almost all of the hallmarked pieces. (and yes, I tested every piece of gold that I have.) LOL It sure takes the doubt away on some of those "suspect" pieces that we sometimes dig. Joe

Here are my 3 Cartiers from the past year. The white gold ones are counterfeit. The serial number on both is 52833A. The gold one has a different serial number and tested 18K. Both white gold ones failed the gold test with my electronic gold tester after the larger one passed the 18K acid test. Good luck on the test but if the serial number is 528833A it is fake. (test it anyway) Congrats on getting back up and running. I broke the ears off my 15 inch after a year on the beach but sent it back under warranty and got a new one. I also bought one of those 3D ear strengthens off ebay and it seems to be what the doctor ordered. LOL

About a year before I retired, I started getting rid of a lot of stuff. I sold 6 or 7 detectors at really good prices just to find them a new home. My CW relics, I gave to a good friend who is also a film maker, author and collector. Since most of my CW relics came from the areas that he had written about or filmed, they meant some to him. He deals with relics and books too, so I told him that what he doesn't want and decides to sell, I get half. LOL I gave one of the clubs that I belonged to, 6 or 8 boxes of books that they could either have as club library or raffle off at club meetings. My detecting buddy got all of the relics that he had express to me in the past that he really liked. Another friend got all of my research stuff as well as all of my Indian Heads, wheat cents, nickels and coins that he liked to collect. I had sold off a lot of silver coins a few years back so I didn't have that many and kept them. Gold I also kept and with the price of spot gold now, that was a good move. So basically I did what made me feel good. I knew my kids could care less about my "treasures", so I placed them with someone who would appreciate them which in turn made me feel good. So my advice is to place them where it pleases you most and be good with that. You can never please everyone but you can please yourself. Just my 2¢, Joe

Sweet dig on the 18K! My iPhone today just needed to be charged. It had a picture under the cover and a picture on the startup screen after charging but it is locked so finding the owner will be a challenge.

I would never have the patience to make anything like that. If it involves more than a hammer, vice grips, screwdriver, or duct tape, I'll just buy it. 🚫🚫🚫🚫

It's my new "middy" ring. Ha Ha😎

This is a very unique looking ring. Obviously it is hand made. Tightly wrapped silver wire with 14K gold wire securing the 4 amethyst stones. Not for everyone but it was for someone. LOL It rang up 23-25 on the Equinox. I am not sure what the core material is but it appears to be dark in color and has a piece on both sides. Anyway, just wanted to share this one. Pretty cool. Also dug a couple of 10K pendants and a really nice .925 ring with CZs all around it and a large center stone. Thanks for looking!

Sweet!

Mitchel, My take is that you don't always get what you want, but you got what you were supposed to get. There are way to many external forces that change how and why and we can't control them. Sure it may have been a good find, maybe it wasn't. All my finds are considered junk until I test them and they test out to be good. And I am a firm believer in Karma. He will get claim jumped sometime and won't like it but that is payback and at some point in time, he will get his. I think that we all feel a bit territorial on our detecting sites but in reality it is public property and everyone has the same rights to be there as we do. Is it bad etiquette to jump on our line? Yep, sure is. Was he an AH for doing it? Yep in our minds he was. From his point of view, he may have never been taught about detecting etiquette. Maybe just a rookie, maybe just a jerk. No we don't always get what we want, but we always get what we are supposed to. Good luck in the future with keep the nighthawks away! Joe

Let’s go for a 2fer. Back in 2018 before I retired, I had a co-worker tell me one day in the breakroom at work, that he had been doing some dozer work on the family property and that there were several old homesteads that I could detect if I wanted to. I told him that I love to detect old homesteads and he gave me locations and told me to have fun. I then told him that if anyone in the family had every lost anything that I would be happy to look for that too. He started laughing and then told me about his grandmother telling him about his Uncle Johnny losing a silver quarter when he was little and it had upset him so much that everybody in the family looked for it. He had lost it between the house and the barn. My co-worker moved into the house when his grandmother passed away. He said that it really bothered his grandmother that she couldn’t find that quarter and give it back to “Uncle Johnny”. I told him that I would come over on Saturday morning and see if I couldn’t find that quarter. He got a little more info in that it was in the mid to late 1950’s when it was lost and he thought that he knew the path to the barn from that time period. We decide it would have been dated no later than 1957 as his uncle was born in 1952. I spent over an hour and dug a lot of period nuts, bolt, plow sheers, etc but no silver quarter. I ask it there might have been another route from the house to the barn. He called his mother, Uncle Johnny’s sister, and she said maybe this other way might have been the path back then. I completed one gridline to the barn and on my way back I got a silver hit on my CTX 3030. Down 9 ½ inches I popped out a 1954 Franklyn half dollar. Right year but wrong denomination. I swung my coil back over the hole and got an iron grunt and another silver chirp just barely audible and to the side of the original plug. So I dug down and pulled out a tie rod end. So that was the iron grunt alright. I swung back over the hole and the silver sounded off loud and proud. I dug out a bit more soil and out popped a well worn 1920 Walking Liberty half dollar. Jeez, my first ever two half dollar coin spill. About that time my co-worker came out and ask how I was doing. I showed him the half dollars and then continued looking for the silver quarter for about another hour. Gee whiz, how could I dig two halves and miss that quarter? I talked to my co-worker on Monday at work and we talked more about the missing quarter and I ask him if he could talk to Uncle Johnny and find out if he remembered where he might have lost it because we must have been looking on the wrong path to the barn. He called me later that evening and was laughing. He had called Uncle Johnny as ask him if he remembered losing some money when he was little and if he remembered maybe where. Uncle Johnny said, “Yes, I lost two half dollars that my grandpa paid me for digging potatoes, between the house and barn. Grandma had the story wrong and had told it wrong for years. LOL So the next weekend, I met Uncle Johnny at my co-workers house and gave him back the two silver half dollars at the very spot that he had lost them somewhere between 55 and 60 years before. That is the only time I have ever been able to repatriate money to someone in my 51 years of metal detecting. The second part of the story is that along with the Uncle Johnny lost money was a class ring that was lost on a Halloween hayride on the family farm in 1990. It was church sponsored for the youth group of the church. A 16 year old girl took her mother’s class ring and wore it on the hayride. At one point someone jumped out from behind some trees to scare the kids on the hay wagon. She screamed and threw up her hands and off went the ring. My co-worker’s dad owned the land and search the field for several days after the hayride trying to find the ring. My co-worker was probably about 8 or 10 years old and grew up with that story. In 2000 the girl moved back home after being diagnosed with colon cancer and passed away just before Christmas 2000. My co-worker was in the youth group at church and they had gone to her house the night before she passed, to sing Christmas Carols. So, he grew up with the lost ring story and the girls passing and was hoping that I could find the ring 28 years after it was lost in a 20 acre cow pasture. His dad had told him of the approximate ½ mile route of the hayride zig zagging the pasture. Well two weeks after finding Uncle Johnny’s half dollars, I was back out detecting a 20 acre field for a ladies class ring. After finding out that someone had jumped out from behind a tree to scare the kids on the wagon, I had the search area narrowed down to one end of the field where the only trees were. But they were all along the whole ¼ mile end of the field. But after about 45 minutes, several musket balls and modern bullets, I got a good sounding hit on my 3030. Down about 8 inches, out comes a ring. Not only a ring but the blue class ring that had been hiding at that spot for 28 years. I called my co-worker and ask him if he was home and he was. I said, “I will be there in five minutes”. When he came to the door and I showed him the ring, he had a grin from ear to ear. We had to jump into his truck and go to his Mom and Dad’s house to show them. They were equally thrilled. It had really bothered everyone for years and especially after the girl has passed away. About a week later, at the church were all of them attended, I met them after the Sunday service. When I took the ring out of my pocket, I told the girl’s mother that the last person to touch that ring before I found it was her daughter. So from her daughter’s hand to my hand and from my hand to her hand. I can tell you that the waterworks were flowing that day from the girl’s mother and father to my co-worker and all of his family. It was such a great feeling to be part of a 28 year lost ring story.

I thought I was the only one who used the term butt-ugly when referring to some of my jewelry finds. LOL The gold colored ear hook is 14K and the silver colored one is NA like the rest of the crap that was modded to the hoops. I guess I should be happy that someone modded the broken real gold earrings, other wise they couldn't have lost them.🙂

And that one statement tells me volumes. I don't need to say it but, "And may the Force be with you!".

Nice double down!

That's pretty much the standard price at the places that carry it.

It reads as NA. If it is not gold, it reads NA. I had several rings (not hallmarked) that had passed as 18K with the acid test and this thing called them NA. I dug a big heavy (28.5g) chain today that was marked 14K and it tested NA. Then I saw the fine print above the 14K that said "plated". LOL I knew just from looking at it that it wasn't gold. My eyesight is not that good and I didn't see the fine print until I looked at it with a loupe. Ha Ha I have checked several of my rings with it and it found one that is hallmarked 14K but it test 10K. Good tester!

Joe, I don't have any old swimming spots or bays to hunt. I have to rely on fresh drops. LOL The tester was a present to myself after an epic 7 gold day that I had in July. It is pretty awesome I might add. Joe PS And I am always down for surprises!

Went to one of my beaches this morning and found a pair of junk earrings an hour and 20 feet apart. The first one I found on my way to the wet sand. An hour later I came back to hunt a different area of the beach and found the other one. They were obviously junk with gold plated wire and beads twisted on them that had seen better times. When I got home I rinsed the salt and sand off of my finds and staged them for a picture. The earrings were just not right. I calibrated my gold/platinum tester and of course the wire tested negative but the hoops and one of the hooks tested 14k. I got out my dikes and needle nose pliers and cut off all the crap that had been twisted onto them and cleaned them up a bit more and retested. Sure enough, they are 14K. They weigh 1.6 grams, which gives them a spot gold value of over $50. So today's life lesson is do not ASSUME that everything is junk until you test it. LOL I also found a .925 Tiffany & Co ring, copper cents and nickels, so I once again lived up to my CUNIAGAU handle. 🙂