fogrider

For me, some baking soda and a wet toothbrush does the trick, once I get them home.

I carry a small squirt bottle when I'm hunting so I don't scratch the silver coins. I cringe whenever I see someone wipe a nice old silver coin with their fingers as soon as it comes out of the ground...... 

1938 dime.

I've had some good luck in old parking areas, especially near old baseball diamonds.

Nice! One of the rarer dates/mint marks too.

Well done! Nice patina on that old quarter. I bet you were pretty pumped when you dug it up. It's always a thrill to see a vintage silver coin pop out of a plug.

Hopefully you'll find more like it......  😎👍

1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

The surface of that coin would serve as a pretty good fingernail file.

Try the water/CLR and toothbrush method on that Canadian large cent. You might have to work on it for several minutes. You might be pleasantly surprised.

The rust might be from an iron object that was near the coin. Typically, the old pennies don't rust.

I'm curious to see how it cleans up.....

2 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Since you dig Canadian coins, here's a datapoint for you, and a question.  I have a mid-teens Canadian large cent which I found in an old schoolyard near where a large tree had been removed.  (I've noticed that the chemicals in some decaying tree leaves can be really hard on some coins, particularly our 25% Ni, 75% Cu coins -- our 5 cent pieces and clad.)  This large cent has a lot of crusty buildup, seemingly worse than our Lincoln cents of the same time period.  Do you know the composition of those 19-teens large cents?

95.5% copper, 3% tin, 1.5% zinc. So, basically a bronze alloy.

That might explain why the older "copper" Canadian pennies seem to last fairly well in the ground.

Here's how I clean old pennies:

1. Hot soapy water and a tooth brush. Then:

2. A 5:1 mix of water and CLR with a tooth brush until the gunk is gone. Don't soak the penny in the water/CLR mix, as the metal may etch. The crusty build-up usually disappears.

3. Nasty black crud can be removed with a wooden toothpick dipped in the water/CLR solution.

I try to leave some patina on the coins.

12 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Although fertilizers can contribute, the problem with Zincolns is galvanic action.

I wonder what our UK friends experience with the old bronze coinage?

I dug a Victorian English penny a month ago, and it was beautiful (It's the one I use for my profile picture). Likely been in the ground for 80+ years.

Seems like copper and tin make a stable combination.

15 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

However, copper US pennies (1982 and earlier) usually come out of my ground looking very good with a nice patina, but no degrading.

Same is true in Canada. Pre-1996 copper pennies typically come out looking decent. I imagine the modern plated pennies won't fare well in the future.

Vintage Canadian 5 cent pieces are very difficult to discriminate with a detector. They are made of almost pure nickel (except for the wartime era 1944-1945 and 1951-1954 chrome plated steel, and the wartime tombacs). They show up as a choppy high signal when flat in the ground, or a solid -8 on-edge on my Nox 600. US 5 cent pieces are no problem.

I've likely missed a lot of Canadian 5 cent pieces over the years, thinking they were steel washers.....

I never thought of the effect of fertilizers before. Makes sense. The coins I hunted 40 years ago were mostly in urban areas. I now live in a farming community, where urea-based fertilizer is commonly used. That stuff will rot most metals.

6 hours ago, Valens Legacy said:

Very nice finds and I can tell that you had a lot of hard work finding them. There is no telling just how much trash you had to dig up to find what you got.

Good luck and good hunting.

Oddly enough, I don't remember digging too much trash. The old detector was pretty good at discriminating the junk. A coin gave a very distinct tone. I probably missed a lot of deeper targets and coins-on-edge though. 

Coins were more plentiful back then. I remember an old country church that gave up nearly 100 pennies from the 30s-50s, and I was only able to do half the area due to tall grass. There were many sites that had never been detected back then. It wasn't unusual to find 25 or more old coins on a single outing. The boulevards in the older part of the river valley neighbourhoods were full of old coins.

The soil around Edmonton was very easy on copper coins. I pulled an 1896 penny out of the ground (maybe 85 years in the soil) and it only required a basic scrubbing with a toothbrush and soapy water to clean it up nicely. Almost no visible corrosion. Likewise the George V necklace was ilikely in the ground for 60+ years, and it cleaned up well (it still had some original lustre). A few of the pennies in the photo may be from coins I pulled from my pocket change. Silver coins were still circulating back then, and it wasn't odd to find an old coin in your change. Half my Canadian nickel collection was from pocket change.

Obviously, as the years go by, more and more of the older copper coins are going to be in rough shape.

The area I live in now absolutely destroys copper. Brass and silver items are ok. Copper coins that have been in the ground as little as 20 years tend to be noticeably corroded. I've done some pH tests on my rainwater, and it's quite acidic; almost too acidic for many houseplants. There are a lot of oil and gas operations west of my place (the prevailing winds are from the west), and I have a theory that H2S gas might be the culprit.

I'm curious about the opinions on the soil in other areas that folks on this site hunt.

Longwinded, as usual........... 😲

I pulled the trigger on the Coiltek 10x5. Should be here by the end of the week. If I'm lucky, I'll have 3 weeks of detecting before the snow hits. I'm looking forward to next years adventures.

Nicely done. A dime at 11 inches down is impressive. 

17 hours ago, Againstmywill said:

So as not to be redundant and have the same people repeat their excellent insights, here is a very recent thread asking the same thing: https://www.detectorprospector.com/forums/topic/19828-equinox-trashy-parks-coiltek-10-x-5-or-minelab-6/

Oops, my bad.

I searched for previous posts on the topic before I posted, but I typed "5x10" instead of "10x5" in the search window.

Thanks nonetheless for the responses. I think I'll go with the Coiltek 10x5 due to its ability to penetrate bush. We have a lot of alfalfa up here in the fields. Caragana was planted around many old homesteads in the past to act as a wind break. It really makes detecting challenging. I know in my heart that I'm missing targets with the stock 11 inch coil.

I'm looking for opinions on the Minelab 6 inch vs the Coiltek 10x5 for my Nox 600. I search a lot of trashy and brushy sites.

Anybody have any experience with both coils? Any opinions?

Thanks.

It's always a thrill to find a coin from the 1800's. Congratulations.

Good advice from the others here.

Old bottle caps and other personal trash are a good sign to me. It means folks rested or ate in the area. The hillside you detected may have been an area where people took a break between trains.

Another technique that works for me when working around an old building is to think, "where would people have parked their buggies/cars?" Once I start hitting the old trashy stuff, I know I'm in a potentially good area.

Up here, it was common to keep children busy at social events by having them "hunt for treasure". Coins (usually pennies or nickels) were mixed in a pile of dirt, and the kids spent many happy hours digging with their hands for the coins.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered about 100 pennies from the mid-1990's in a 10 foot circle in the far corner of a park in the centre of town. So many coins, that I simply stopped digging them. The coins were all at least 3 inches down. I suspect this was a "treasure pile" from some past get-together. I've included a picture of some of the coins.

If only I could find a "treasure pile" from earlier times!

Always pays to do your research. Nicely done. You created a lasting memory for that young lady.

Hello. My name is Craig. I live in a rural area in Northern Alberta, Canada. I'm 63 years old.

Back in the early 1980's I enjoyed many hours detecting in Edmonton Alberta with my trusty Whites Coinmaster 5000D. I would hunt the parks, playgrounds and boulevards of the river valley area, as well as some of the surrounding towns.

I was an avid coin collector in my youth. I still remember finding an 1896 large cent as well as a 1910 quarter, along with lots of other old coins.

Flash forward to today. I decided to reboot my old hobby, so I scooped a Minelab Equinox 600 for a great price from Cabela's Canada, as well as a Garrett pinpointer. 

The area I live isn't that old; mostly post-1900 communties. That being said, I've had some good finds in my first month detecting this year. Please see my post in the "coins and relics" forum for more details. 

I still get a thrill when I see the edge of a silver coin pop out of the dirt, and I hope to enjoy many more years of detecting and collecting.

I look forward to hearing of your experiences, and sharing stories of those great finds.

Cheers!

23 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

Is that a Master Hunter? I had one of those for a couple of days. Never clicked with it, so it went back to Kellyco.  The Equinox is a good machine. It has a lot of pluses but some minuses as well. But it does work well.

Yup. A 1984 Master Hunter 7 Olympic Limited Edition. It came with the owner's manual, 4 inch coil, and 12 inch coil. It actual works very well, but tends to respond to a bottle caps a lot. Still, it detected a 1918 10 cent piece at 6 inches using the large coil. It's ponderously heavy and it uses several 9 volt batteries, but I like to drag it out now and then for some old-school moments. 🙂

Check out the price in 1984!!

Nice to be here. Thanks for the warm welcomes.

It's good to hear positive reviews of the Coiltek coils. I've been eyeballing one for awhile.

I was lucky to get my hands on a 600 this summer for a very good price. I stumbled upon the Cabela's Canada website where they were blowing them out at a price of $600.00 CDN (about $450.00 US), with free shipping. There were 2 left in Edmonton, so I grabbed one right away.

I also bought a Garrett Propointer AT from Canadian Treasure Seekers in Ontario for a very good price (with free shipping).

I find the pinpointer to be a very valuable tool. Coins give a distinctly "tight" signal as opposed to the broader signals of the bullet casings and older bottle caps that sometimes appear.

I like the way the 600 signals a coin, with its steady readings as I do a 90 degree sweep over a target.

Between the 600 and the pinpointer, I rarely dig up any junk.

I've locate some historic sites on public land in a small village nearby. I can't wait to explore them this weekend.

Cheers!

I like the 600. It does everything quite well. Now that I've learned it's "voice", I can often exactly tell what I'm detecting. It works well for coins-on-edge (it hit a dime on-edge at 6 inches deep).

Yes, imagine if I had this machine back in the 80's! How many coins did I miss?!

The settings that seem to work best up here are Park1. Accepting 20-40, 12, -8 (The 12 is for gold and the -8 is for Canadian 5 cent pieces on-edge). 5 Tones, Sensitivity 25, 15 kHz, Recovery 2. 

I found an old Garrett for 20 bucks at a garage sale a month ago. It's pleasantly nostalgic, but quite the "beast".