Tom_in_CA

I don't argue with barber dimes.

I never get tired of seeing those charcoal grey silver disks in my sand scoop basket 😍

9 hours ago, rod-pa said:

yes, well you get all the "S" mint and "CC" mint drops.

Correct.  We do not allow any of our key date S mints to cross over the Mississippi.  Oh so sorry   😘

Congratz on your first silver.   Many more to come !

haha, great launching point for your post 😆   We have a HARD TIME matching you east coast guys on a date-by-dates basis.  So if I can even TIE any of you, I'll accept that, haha

And very few coppers of that era made it out here from the east, or up from Latin America, to Alta CA.  We get VERY few colonial coppers or fractional copper reales here.   We will get busts and early seateds, before we EVER get any LC's or colonial coppers.  The reason is, that since alta CA was at the remotest ends of the earth, in those days, that therefore, when anyone was getting ready to travel here (or send cargo, manufactured goods, etc...) , they had to be conscious of space & weight.  Therefore they tended to reach for a bust half, a gold coin, etc...  Instead of "50 LC's " or "500 LC's", etc....  when getting ready to move their life to the west coast.

4 hours ago, Tiftaaft said:

Awesome Reale Tom!   How on earth did you get a date off that Large Cent?   ~Tim.

Hey there Tim :  My camera is not good on dark objects like a dark-green-patina LC.   Unless I played around with tripod, lights, etc....  So I'm too lazy to take a better pix.   But it's clearly there:  1834.

There's a few different varieties of 1834 LC's.  And to be honest:  I haven't even studied to see which variety mine is.  One of them *might* merit some $$.  But ... not enough to fool with the distinction, the hole, the wear, etc.....

haha, yes:   Those bic pencils and zinc cents are *so* hard to find these days, as you know . 🤣

3 hours ago, ShintoSunrise said:

I wish I could tell an exciting tale of background research and lost homesteads, but honestly I was shocked at the location; seemingly a completely random spot in a floodplain forest so typical of Northern Virginia. The vast majority of the area is old shotgun shells, aluminum cans, and hot rocks galore. Truly wasn't expecting such a find. 

oh well gee :  Only on the east coast can someone go to a "random spot on a floodplain forest" and get a who's -who of early USA coins.   Sick sick sick.  But great report and great pix  🤪

Can you shed a little light as to the location itself ?   Eg.:  Stage stop ?  homestead (cellar-hole, or whatever) ?  etc...     Because machine-settings are one-thing.  But the bigger picture (of "tricks to find old coins) is:  Location location location.   Right ?

Wow, based on the description of the site (the modern junk you had to wade through) :  You have a LOT of patience !

Love the unfolding on-going story of this site.   Hopefully  you'll assemble a Riker shadow box, that is dedicated to finds from just-this-site.   Will make for a nice home museum display.   

Good show.  I never get tired of seeing those charcoal grey-ish-black silver coin disks in my sand-basket   😜

1 hour ago, Elbert said:

Ok Tom, I got a lead on the vehicle Chris and his family will be in heading to the Gold Country so have all the spies on the lookout for it.

http://comays.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/1/6/1816064/9213296.jpg

Yes El.    Thanx for planting that GPS tracking device on his vehicle.   👀 This will teach him not to avoid the 30% extortion tax on CA finds, eh ?    

CVIS-Chris :  Kindly leave every 3rd conductive signal un-dug and un-disturbed, so that there's some targets left for El & I.   No strip-mining allowed!  

Love the on-going story and tallies.   Is it possible, that the next time you're there, can you get some location shots so that we have a feel for type location ?

There's a pocket cove beach near me "Lover's Point", where the sand never goes up or down more than a few feet.  D/t the cove is protected from the normal beach/swell erosion (wind/tides/swells) that normally dictate erosion for our normal ocean-facing beaches.   So there is never any way to know when the sand will be "down"  or "up" .  

And the "bedrock" depth at this beach, varies from 6 ft. deep on one end, to only ~3 ft. deep on the other end.   So when the sand is "down", some enterprising fellows (including myself) have got there and shovels out areas.  About as big as a billiard table, and the requisite 3 to 4-ish ft. deep, to reach this "bottom" bedrock layer.  And when we reach that, we start tossing out barbers, V's, wheaties, old sinkers, etc....  But that is HARD work , doh !   Also, after many years of doing this , we began to forget exactly where we'd dug before (or others had dug).  So it became increasingly frequent to come down on "dry holes".  Doh !   Or if you didn't plan  your tides right, your hole would fill in with water, stopping you from digging any deeper.

Your story sort of reminds me of this beach of ours.

beautiful reale.

On 3/8/2021 at 5:13 PM, Sven1 said:

1985

Are you sure you're not confusing an earlier incarnation of the 6000 Di pro ?  We're talking the black box with the 950 loop, right ?  If so, I thought that didn't come out till 1989-ish ?

1 hour ago, Elbert said:

What can be said that has already been said.Keep it going and get into that brush to those possible new foundations.

El

El, have you planted the GPS tracking device on his vehicle yet ?   SSSssshhh , be stealthy so he doesn't see you planting it there tonight.   It'll be our little secret.   Right ? 👌

Oh my gosh, that reale is BEAUTIFUL !   And amazing that a ~75 yr. old coin was still circulating up to the time of the gold rush.   Great history !  Congratz.

There was multiple beach jetties put in, along southern CA beaches, back in the 1940s & 1950s.   To "trap" sand, in order to stem beach erosion or whatever.    And some put in to protect harbor entrances, etc....    As the sand backs up, and the beaches got wider and wider, this meant that even WHOPPER storm erosion would never reach back to the cliffs again.   And therefore some of the high-dry sand has never seen wet-salt since the 1940s & 50s.

An enterprising So. CA guy that I knew of, figured out that there was SUPER deep silver coins (albeit just whatever was in circulation back in the 1940s/50s), that were beyond the reach of regular machines.   Since the coins tended to sink down till they got to a firmer hard-packed layer, about 1.5 ft. down.   So he took a high-powered GPX nugget machine there (which, as you know, can get a coin to nearly 2 ft. deep), and started getting silver coins & wheaties that way.   Lot of hard work, but he eventually mined 100+ silver coins from these stretches doing this trick.    The reason it was a lot of hard work, is that unfortunately, using a high-powered nugget machine like that, then naturally every single little foil-turd will ALSO "ring the bells of Notre Dame" too,   🤪

20 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

Thanks. This spot has produced about 110 silvers in 6 or 7 hunts I think🤔. 

You are sick.  Sick sick sick .

15 minutes ago, Mike_Hillis said:

New CTX's with a $1200 price tag would be attractive to me.  The current price turned me off of it and the ETRAC does very well for me when I need its feature set.  I don't have any desire to spend more than that on a metal detector.   

As I've said before, the lack of enhanced discrimination turned me off the Equinox from the get go but even it they update the discrimination to the point where its actually useful for hunting non-ferrous objects in non-ferrous trash I'll turn it off if the price is over my threshold and $1200 is about my limit. 

I personally find it hard to justify standing in a park with something even that expensive digging trash and clad coins, no matter how much gold I find.

HH
Mike

Mike, I know that the "Nox faithful" would dispute what you are saying, but :  I agree.  The old school explorers were better for cherry-picking in junky-parks types of scenarios.   A better "grasp" at telling a potential coin apart from trash. 

HOWEVER, that's only a select niche of hunt style preferences.   A lot of hardcore guys simply do not troll junky inner-city turf for silver.   They are strictly relicky guys.  Who are just after anything conductive, and don't need nuanced tones that a cherry-picker needs.   In the case of iron-riddled zones, I've noticed that my equinox friends are indeed spanking my Exp. II.  However, in turf, I tend to spank them.    I know some Nox guys will dispute these results, and try to say that the Nox guy "just needs more experience", blah blah.   But ... so far ... I just haven't seen it.

Great show once again !

13 hours ago, kac said:

Didn't the content vary over the years? I have found IH with very low numbers and some with high numbers. Think I need to check and sort by year the ones I have and see what the differences are.

You know way more on the coins GB.

Updated, just looked it up and they had 2 different alloys over the years which may explain much of the variation on the IH's anyways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Head_cent

How accurate the mixes where are probably negligible on the machines ability to tell the difference other than the major change of alloying between the 1859-1864 and 1864-1909.

Don't forget that an ingredient like "copper" can vary in TID, depending on where it was mined.   Because of trace minerals that exist in various parts of the USA.  For example Rose gold vs yellow gold.  Each is equally gold, but they have slightly different make-up colors, d/t the trace minerals of where they were mined. 

So too is it the same with copper :  Uncle Sam might have been buying his copper on the open market (wherever was cheapest) in ... say... Montana during a few decades of the 1880s/90s.   But then switch to Idaho where a new mining strike of copper was the new source, etc.....  

Because notice that wheaties from the early teens sound different than wheaties from the '20s, vs wheaties from the 30/40s, etc.... (not to mention the sickly corrosion/color that 30s to 50s wheaties take on, while teens/20s wheaties take on a desirable green patina).   This is true even though all the wheaties and IH's supposedly had the exact same composition .   Thus it's apparently the trace minerals in the ingredients, that make for the differences we see, and our subtle TID differences.

12 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

....

I really like the green color Indian heads have when they come out of the ground.....

Nice photo-spread.  I never get tired of the emerald green patina that some IH's take on .