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SwiftSword
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Posts posted by SwiftSword
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It came! And I have a brand new permission to try it out on tomorrow. It's a wide open back yard, so this should work well. I'll bring the 9" along, too, just in case. One thing I noticed today when I just swung it around the backyard is that both size and weight are far greater than I had expected. Compared to the 9", it's almost comically large. But I expect the feeling of wearing clown shoes will dissipate with the first good find 😄
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Well, I pulled the trigger. It'll be here on Saturday.
I have the 9" coil right now but want to branch out into fields and pastures this spring. The extras coverage and thst little bit of extra depth will hopefully lead to good things.-
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22 hours ago, Compass said:
college class rings in the world
Incidentally, that's similar to "World Series" and "World-Famous Roast Beef" in that, despite the claim, class rings are a purely American thing that the rest of the world is mostly unaware of. I remember marveling at the absolute clonkers worn by high school exchange students when I still lived in Germany.
Congrats on the find and on the successful return!
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3 hours ago, Againstmywill said:
movement and case have separate serial numbers
Indeed! But unlike the movement serials, which were published liberally to assist watchmakers with repairs, the case serials were purely internal, and very few records survive.
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23 hours ago, JCR said:
Can you trace it back to a past owner of the property?
I'm trying! The last initial, R, matches with the family that would have lived there at the time. However, I can't find any member of the family who would have been an adult in 1928 with the first names F. A.
It may have been a member of the extended family that I'm yet to discover. Or I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely: The farm was used for an unrelated business with lots of traffic starting in the 1950s. So it could have belonged to a customer.
There are no less than seven service marks in the lid, one of them in form of a date: 7/14/40. Whoever F. A. R. was, they wore and cared for this watch for decades.
I have thought of restoring the watch, but that would entail significant expense, so I think I'll just clean it up as best I can and preserve it.
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5 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:
in a farm especially
It was about four feet from a barn, so it was spared the plow!
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3 minutes ago, matt said:
Was there a front cover?
No, the watch only has a front bezel, which is missing. The state of the dial and the presence of a lot of crud in the channel where the bezel sits makes me think it wasn't present. But of course I'll go back there and search for it!
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I rarely find anything worth posting here, but I think you might enjoy this.
I have a standing permission at an old farm yard here in eastern Massachusetts. I've been over this particular spot six or eight times, and found a Barber dime just before the end of last season. So that's where I started last night. Deus II, Sens FT, square tones. Settings probably wouldn't have mattered as this signal was pretty clear – low eighties, fairly clear tone with a slight scratch on the outswing, and a bit of an unctuous warble. So a bottle cap, or more likely a big screw top from a liquor bottle. I dug it anyway because I wanted to clear the trash out and hopefully find more coins. It was very dark already, so when I flipped the sod, I could barely tell that I had a pocket watch or compass, so on I went.
once I cleaned it off a bit at home, I explained to my son that this wasn't plated because there were no flakes coming off, but that silver sometimes comes out gold toned. At that point the back falls off. I got so excited about the inscription that I didn't read the case marks. So it took quite a while for me to realize that this was, in fact, a 14k gold watch!
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Thanks! Well, I'm going to order one right now!
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On 10/23/2022 at 5:52 PM, Jed in NC said:
easy to assemble and source the parts.
How does it fit at the top end? Does it have the same cross section as the OEM shaft, or did you have to modify anything there?
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I previously asked about the 13" and was dissuaded from buying one. I'd still like another coil option apart from the 9", but I think I'd prefer a 6", as it gets very trashy around here. On occasion I'd love to cover more ground quickly, but I'm not sure it's worth the investment.
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All,
I'm looking for some insight on my experience. This is totally anecdotal, I have done no scientific testing.
I find that my Deus II is getting great depth in open spaces, where there are no obvious sources of EMI, or only a single source (like an overland transmission line). As soon as I get into suburban backyards, my depth in any mode is greatly reduced. Yesterday, I detected across the street from a fire station (with a big radio tower on the roof) and found the Deus could barely see a penny lying on the ground. Even in single frequency mode I can't ever find a quiet one.
It seems to me that communication equipment (radio / cell / wifi) specifically causes these problems. My understanding is that all these things transmit on a wide variety of frequencies. I know there are some folks here with an engineering background – do you see a possibility that manufacturers will overcome this problem in the near term, or are we screwed until the next technological revolution in MD?
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On a side note, I recently started favoring the Sensitive FT program. At least in my soil/find conditions, I don't appear to be losing any depth over Deep HC, and it seems to discriminate better than Deep HC (at least I feel I dig less trash). I can go out for a max of ~2hrs at a time, so battery life isn't that critical to me.
That's purely anecdotal and non-scientific, of course.
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2 hours ago, Gary XP said:
I found it made a difference to my battery life.
That should just affect the battery life of the remote, though, no? The remote lasts forever for me, it's the coil and headphones that run out for me.
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The cars were not that uncommon, but the hood ornaments were sold as an option; this was one of a few styles to choose from. I expect most people stuck with the plain, flat cap.
Still, the ornament doesn't seem to be outrage rare, there's one on offer at ebay for $799, and another one sold there today for $106.
But I don't expect I'll find another hood ornament in my lifetime, so I'm over the moon with this one!
See my guy here:
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Hood ornament from a 1928 Hudson-Essex Special Six. About 3" under a former pasture in Eastern Massachusetts.Possibly my best find of the year. It's pot metal and terribly cracked. Not sure it'll hold together, but if it does, it'll get a display base and live on the shelf!
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Good to know, thank you, Dan!
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Not having used the original Deus, I'm a bit out of the loop – what's wrong with the DII full tones?
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I have the Deus II and hunt in multi and single frequency modes. The one thing that matters most is having the right ground to detect on. A fancy machine will not find treasure where there is none to be found, though it may reduce the amount of trash you dig.
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People go to car shows to see concept cars that are fun ideas but will never get made. I expect detector trade shows are no different.
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No doubt that you're correct, Chase. The Vanquish was my first detector, and I didn't ever use the wired headphones with it, so probably I just never knew any better (perhaps that's why the Deus II is such an amazing improvement for me).
I shall take the Vanquish out one of these days and see if I notice the latency now.
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Wow! Yeah, that never happened with the Vanquish/Airpod combination. I use the same technique as you to visualize the target location. I could flutter and rotate over a target just as fast as I pleased. It would hit the target on the in and out with no noticeable delay.
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On 7/2/2022 at 11:55 AM, Chase Goldman said:
Didn't know Airpods were low latency
I don't know that they are. But it didn't seem to make a difference with the Vanquish 540. Targets lined up nicely with the tones. If it was off by an inch this way or that, I didn't notice.
How I Ruined My First "historical" Find
in Metal Detecting For Coins & Relics
Posted
Two years ago, I found what I thought was my first musket ball on property near the road along which the Minutemen of my town march to join the Battle of Lexington and Concord. I was absolutely ecstatic. This was my first properly old find, History with a capital H, history I could touch! I imagined the last person to have handled this ball before me: knee breeches, buckled shoes – a tricorn hat, for sure!
It didn't bother me that the ball was much too small for an 18th century musket (maybe it was made for a pistol), nor that balls like this had been in use for a hundred years before and after that fateful April morning in 1775.
For the last two years, this ball had pride of place in my collection. But recently I returned to the spot, now a much more seasoned detectorist with better equipment and a more critical mindset. I found three more balls right away. I returned the next day and found five more, all very shallow finds, almost at the surface. A few inches beneath the balls, I found a toy car made in 1955.
This was puzzling. None of the balls had been shot from a gun, though some were clearly damaged by hitting something. Most didn't have the thick, white-brown patina that lead acquires after centuries in the ground. They were all grouped fairly close together on a steep slope, behind a subdivision built in the early sixties. The toy car was buried deeper in undisturbed ground, and therefore predated any of them. Then it dawned on me. These weren't musket balls at all. They were projectiles for a slingshot! Most likely from the sixties or seventies, a time when it was perfectly acceptable for kids to shoot their eyes out with weapons that flung toxic lead balls! I knew this because I had been a 70s kid, and ten-year old me had coveted a slingshot just like this. So here, some kid had set up a plinking range and was flinging lead balls at cans, perhaps, with many balls burying themselves in the slope behind the target.
Ugh, what a disappointment at first! But in the end, I was mostly happy that I figured out the puzzle. In fact, I think it makes a better story. One that illustrates why archeology is all about context, and how objects without context are almost always meaningless – something all metal detectorists should keep in mind! Of course it helps that I've found some real musket balls in the meantime, though not at the Battle Road. They are the larger balls at the top of the picture. These unfired balls were almost certainly dropped by hunters. But who knows – perhaps some of those hunters were also Minutemen?