Geologyhound

Yep, no silly questions, but we might have some silly answers!?

You’ll get some good help here - there are a lot of knowledgeable people.

So, do you have a detector yet or are you still looking?

Looks like it might be a piece of blue lace agate.  There is a wide variety to the color and pattern, but a picture of a typical piece is attached.  If your stone scratches glass, that would be a good indicator of agate.  Agate will be much harder than calcite, but not as hard as ruby, sapphire or diamond.  Agate is relatively tough – I have dropped an agate slab on a concrete floor before without it breaking. I wouldn’t advise trying it too often...

Agate will be best if shaped and polished - don’t try to facet it.  I would try to make sure that the finished stone doesn’t have any fractures.  You’ll either need to go to a jeweler to have a ring custom-made to fit the stones, or you’ll have to have the stones cut to a predetermined size and shape to fit a standard ring.

Were you planning on turning this into a finished product yourself or were you going to take it to a jeweler or lapidary?  If you are planning on turning this into two rings, be aware that it will have to be cut in half, and the trim saw blade thickness will take a chunk out of the size.   Depending on what you envision for the final rings, you might need to find a larger piece.  There are Internet maps available of rock hounding locations in Arizona and what can be found at those locations.

You could always buy some rough stones online, but I am guessing you want the stone to be something he found and would prefer it to be out of a single piece, correct?

Now if only we could ask it where to go to find gold coins, valuable rings, or stashes with a metal detector...

Alberta does have geodes and it looks like you are close to British Columbia. British Columbia has thundereggs.  What you have has a little more filling then a typical geode, but less filling than a typical thunderegg.  So, I would say it is sort of a gradation between the two. Just be careful of picking anything like that up on public lands. I understand that is against the law up there.

Unfortunately, gold does not cleave into sheets or flat flakes.  Shiny flakes sound like mica to me. That would be a sheet silicate (phyllosilicate).  Muscovite can occur in a range of colors (including orangey and goldish) depending on the impurities.  I imagine when you swish the water in your pan, those flakes move fairly easily?  Gold, being dense, would settle into the bottom crease of your pan and not move very easily.

A portion of the lower part of the broken surface appears to have the scalloped appearance typical of conchoidial fracturing.  This is something I would expect to find in fine grained silicates (like a agate, chert, or obsidian).  Yet, the top portion very definitely appears to have grains weathering out of the groundmass.

It scratches porcelain, so that rules out the typical hematite and ironstone nodules, but is the hard portion the grains?  I concur with Jasong the little streak color you got was from surface residue/oxidation.

Let’s rule out some other possibilities.  If you have any dilute hydrochloric acid, drip some one some of the surfaces.  If it fizzes, you have some calcite cementation. In that case, try to figure out exactly what fizzes.

Only place in my life I’ve ever seen the central bulge of the Milky Way - camping out in Rabbit Basin.  A long way from city lights…

The older I get the more I’m convinced the less I know. I’m a geologist but I have never heard of gogottes before.  So, nice post there Jasong!

If it is some sort of gogotte, the density is puzzling.  Those should be made of silica sand and calcium carbonate. That should not be that heavy.  Heb, any chance you could do an Archimedes density test on it?  Fill a basin with water clear full, immerse the object, measure the volume of water that overflows, weigh the object and calculate the density.

Can you get a close-up of the matrix of the rock? Does it appear sandy or is it crystalline but too small make out the crystal size?

Yes, a close-up of the crystal would be interesting too.

Born in the valley, raised in Coos County, OSU grad (go Beavers!), married and moved to Ohio.   Still have a bunch of Madras thunder eggs and Rabbit Basin sun stones as well as some Holly blue.  So, I still have a bit of Oregon with me.?

Welcome back from a White’s XLT now an XP Deus 2 user!

Nice! The only 1909S I ever found was at an old school on the southern Oregon coast.  It wasn’t in very good condition either…

Were these all found in the same location?

I concur most of them look like slag or clinker.  The green banded one without lots of air bubbles looks like some jasper I have in the back shed.

3 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

The thin metal piece looks like a concertina or similar squeeze box type instrument reed.

Someone in a different forum sent me a picture of a pump organ reed.  That is exactly what it looks like.  Thanks!

The knife grip is plastic.  I was guessing at mid 1900s.  Looks like there was a small oval plate affixed to one of the grips. But only a fragment of the plate is still present.

I guess I need to start a bucket of “possible” Civil War items.  ?

Anybody know what range a Civil War bullet would ring up for the D2?

When you say it has some sort of quartz embedded, do you mean it looks like it has sand fused onto it, or do you mean light transmits through it like an agate?

There are several things that come to mind.  Determining which is correct would be difficult without seeing the stone in person.  The surface looks almost like pahoehoe (a kind of lava flow with a billowy or ropey surface).  But, I would not expect that on both sides. The shape of it could be a sort of volcanic spatter bomb.  However, those usually have air pockets.

I concur with Ddancer that the surface morphology does appear roughly akin to some agates.  But, you can also get some interesting surface textures with hematite nodules and ironstone nodules as VicR suggested.  Since you said it is heavy, this makes me think it may be a nodule.  If you scrape one edge of the broken part on a piece of unglazed porcelain and it leaves a red streak, then it is hematite.  If the streak is more yellowy brown, then it could be limonite (a hydrated iron oxide).  If it scratches the porcelain and doesn’t leave color behind, then it is a silicate (e.g. agate).

Something to consider – the French did set off several nuclear devices in the Sahara when they were developing nuclear weapons.  I understand they were lava blobs and fused sand blobs found, but I haven’t seen pictures.  It does not look like any of the nuclear fused glass discovered after the American nuclear tests.  Were you, by any chance, anywhere near where the nuclear testing was conducted?

Whatever it turns out to be, it certainly appears striking and I certainly would’ve picked it up!  Of course, if it’s radioactive I would then also drop it.  ?

1 hour ago, F350Platinum said:

Have you looked at Historic Aerials topos to see if any houses were in the farm? They would appear as square dots on the older ones. Might zero you in on better stuff.

I have an 1898 topo and a period diagram of the area.  But better than that, the owner had a high quality layout and legend of the camp itself.  That combined with the topo (which matches nicely), and I have a very good idea of where all the buildings were located and their use.  My scouting confirmed two buildings.  I about froze my tail off, and didn’t pin the others down yet.
 

It has been hunted in the past, but not for years per the owner.  The guy that came through in the past found a CW belt buckle on a nearby property and some bullets and a crushed canteen - also on nearby properties.  The bullets were all at the same depth.  Apparently, sentries had no safe/easy way of unloading the guns after guard duty, and would discharge them into the ground. So the bullet depths were not a function of burial over time so much as the power of the rifle and round.  The canteen had been apparently intentionally crushed by a wagon wheel.  Apparently, parts of the camp could get marshy to the point that the tent stakes would not hold, and they would stake the tents through the crushed canteen - sort of a stake footer.

The crown is about the right size for the Haitian Phoenix, but the bird shape looks wrong from the ones I can find.  The wings are about the right shape for some US Marine buttons I have seen, but there is no globe (let alone the crown issue...). 

Hopefully someone can figure it out.  

Oh, the container is actually intact but jammed shut.  The logo/drawing on the surface looks like a couple of palm trees, two pyramids, and what might be a human figure with a headdress (Mayan?).

4 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

The fork, brass plate and brass ring could be CW period. If you can find the maker's name on the fork, you may be able to narrow that date down.

Also check that shotgun cap before you toss it out, some of those can be really old.

The shotgun shell is a western super X number 12 paper case circa 1927 to 1964.
I won’t swear to it, but I think the fork says TOBY.  If so, that would be FW & WE Oates circa 1877 as per the Trademarks on Base-Metal Tableware catalog at sha.org.

1 hour ago, Gold Seeker said:

you need to measure the diameter to be certain...

I don’t have calipers but the casing looks like 11 mm.

4 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

I know it can be daunting to hear so many sounds at once, but listen for the really good sounding targets between the noise. Good Hunting!

When I am in the thick of the nails, I keep getting a random unclipped good tone - generally at the end of a swing.  Try as I might, I can’t find it again.  I figure it’s probably just a matter of too many targets averaging out wrong, which is why I try to keep my swings short in the machine gun iron.  But this seems to happen frequently - well, at least frequently for the few times I’ve been out with the D2.  I assume this is normal for the D2?

If I don’t find any good targets in a couple spots, I may get industrious and clean out a couple test patches of nails.  Given the history and maps, there has to be something good there, and anybody who might have come through with an older detector had to of missed something with that many nails.

I called the XP America’s number and initially got a message that they had been sold and the phone system was temporally not being answered.  I called back several days later, reached a nice lady, and explained the situation about the cracked cap.  They said it was a known issue, and sent me a new cap. I didn’t have to provide purchase documentation.   That is good, because every time I have tried to register my unit, the website tells me that mailing list is no longer active.

I’m sure I’m one of the newer members here.  But as you might be able to deduce from my handle, the rock and mineral section is one of the reasons I joined.  From beach combing as a kid, I’ve always loved rocks and lapidary.  If questions/answers here can kindle a life interest in a couple truly curious people, I am willing to put up with a lack of a polite response from some drive-by posters.

Thank you! A lot to digest here. Coming from the Spectrum XLT, I figure the audio response setting is similar to the XLT’s pre-amp gain.  But, the preamp gain setting tended to make the detector unstable with medium to high settings.  This does not seem to be the case with the D2, at least with the low to medium audio response settings with which I have been tinkering.

Square pitch seems a lot more like the XLT’s tones.  I think what I will do is do is set up two custom programs side-by-side with the same tone settings - one PWM, and one square.  I have read multiple times that an experienced user can hear the sharp edges of can slaw with PWM, and I would love to dig less of that!

Tones and audio options seem to be the most confusing part of the D2.  The XP manual needs to take a couple extra pages to explain the options and especially the interactions between tone options and audio options. If I am understanding this correctly, then I think I might have the tone section figured out. Full tones = Pitch change according to TID, but no volume change. Multi tones essentially like Full tones but you get to select how many tone bins and the range of TIDs to which the pitch applies. Pitch tones = pitch and volume of signal varies according to target size and depth.

But, here is where I get more confused.  How do these tone options interact with the audio type? For example, as per the XP manual, square and pitch theoretically wouldn’t be compatible because as per the square explanation, the harmonics don’t vary with the signal amplitude - only the volume changes. But, pitch says the tone and pitch varies with signal strength.  Likewise, if the volume is stable for full or multi tones regardless of target strength, then how does that react with square since the volume should change based on depth or size?

For PWM, is it just essentially the opposite of square? The tone varies with the signal strength to give an indication of depth or size whereas with square the volume changes? And again, how would that react with the Full/multi/pitch tone options?

It really appears like there may be six audio options (PWM and square with the three discrimination-tone sub-options of full, multi, and pitch). However I did notice that none of the stock programs utilize PWM with pitch, although the machine will let me select those together for a custom program. Are these audio/tone options just a matter of taste, or in what situation would each of these options be most beneficial? With all these options, I am still trying to figure out what I am hearing and why.  I keep shuffling between programs trying to discern differences every time I find a decent target.  But, I’m digging more can slaw and tinfoil wads than with my 30-year old detector (yes, it was time for an upgrade). ?

I expected a dig-everything phase with a new detector.  But, if I can understand what’s going on with the interactions between tones and audio settings, I might be able to shorten the length of that phase...  Anybody can dig a strong repeatable well focused 94 - it’s understanding all of the nuances and interactions that make the difference on everything else, and I want to understand those nuances!  If a response to this subject is too complex for a post, and there is an aftermarket handbook you can point me towards which addresses this subject, that would be great.

Thank you again for any light you can shed on the situation!

Hello all!

I am a bit new to the D2 here. I have a couple questions regarding tone settings.  In the menu system, it appears that multi tones are different from pitch tones.  If you set up four tones (with the low tone corresponding to the discrimination setting), and leave it at four tones when you save the program, will that act differently than pitch tones?  Conversely, if you set up your tone bins and switch back to pitch tones to save that program, will you still get the same tone bins while hunting?

Along the same lines, when you set up your tone bins, there is no gap for the notched out areas. I am guessing that when hunting, any tone in a notched out area will be suppressed. But does that work differently between multi tones and pitch tones - if there is a difference?

Thanks!