Collections

It is funny how collections of different items start to emerge the longer you metal detect.

Zipper Pulls

Pins, barrettes, junk jewelry

Button

Keys

Junk Rings

Tokens

Big coins, foreign and smashed coins

Cars

Lead objects

Bullets and cartridges

My personal favorite: silver and GOLD jewelry

Year-to-date Totals

Quarters = $81.50
Dimes = $55.50
Nickels = $8.50
Pennies = $7.47
============
Total = $132.97

Now if you take that amount and divide it by my hourly average of $.50, you can see how much time I have waisted (about 266 hours?).

Variety of Finds from Memorial Day

The weather on Memorial Day did not turn out to be the best.  We had snow, hail, and rain off and on throughout the day, but the finding was good.  I found a good stack of coins, including the mercury dime, a whistle, watch, keys, buttons, brass fittings, a sacagawea dollar, a pirates island game token, hello kitty charm, and a small silver CTR ring.  Does that look like 8 hours of work?  I had a hard time quitting.

And the Pull-Tab award goes to Dad

Dad's finds are left of the big nail and mine are to the right.

Okay, there is some competition between me and my dad to see who can find the coolest thing.  As you can see from the picture, we also dig a lot of garbage.  We could opt to just dig up quarters, dimes, and pennies because our metal detectors indicate what kind of target it has found, but here is the dilemma: if you want to find the gold rings and nickels, you have to dig pull-tabs.  For some reason nickels, gold rings and pull-tabs all sound the same.

As you can see from the picture, my dad dug a lot of pull-tabs trying to find something cool.  He did find a ring, but it wasn't made of gold or silver.  He also found the biggest lead slide sinker I have ever seen.

My best finds were a couple wheat pennies and a watch.

First Mercury Dime

Finding a mercury head dime may be no big deal for many detectorists (one who metal detects), but for me it was a BIG deal.  For all the time I have search and all the coins I have dug, I have never found one until yesterday.
I could tell mother nature did not want me to go metal detecting as I backed out of the garage and saw the little snowballs hitting the windshield.  I knew it was not suppose to be a good day, but I had the day off work and was going to try anyway.  I met a few other people at the park at 8 am and we started searching the park, stopping several times to let the more intense rain and snow showers pass over.  It was not all that successful, only managing to find a small silver ring and some modern clad coins.
Lunch time came and I offered to buy lunch at JDawg's for a couple of the detectorists who are also BYU students before they left to do homework.
Me and the remaining hunters decided to search an area on the south side of the BYU campus next to the duck pond.  They had removed some dirt preparing to install a paved path.  I found the coin where they had removed the grass and some dirt.  With the grass and some of the dirt removed my XLT was able to locate the dime.  As the dime fell out of a clump of dirt I did an little yell and them looked around to see who was watching.  Turned out to be a good day after all.

Fossil Found With Metal Detector

Okay, so it is not the kind of fossil you were thinking about. I was a little surprised when I dug this out of the ground. I wonder if I replaced the battery would it work?

Idaho Treasure Hunt - Uncle Bill

Earlier this year I drove with my Dad up to his childhood home in Idaho, and to visit his brother.  Of course I brought the metal detectors.  While my Dad would visit with uncle Bill, I would go down to the city park with the hope of finding something old. My grandpa moved to Emmett when Bill was 4 years old, that would make it 1917.  Bill is probably the longest resident of the town and he said that city park has been there as long as he could remember.  I know the park has been hunted before, but I still had hope of finding a treasure.

I remember with fondness the trips to Grandpa's house and visiting the park, walking down to the store to buy penny candy, crossing the street to climb on the old tank in front of the county building.  This part of town is pretty much as I remember it, other than the candy store is gone.  Although, I imagine that it has changed a lot since my Grandpa moved there. 

I searched the park for hours and only managed to find a pile of modern clad and some tokens from the city carnival.

Before we left, Uncle Bill showed me a box of coins he had been saving for his grandkids.  Here was all the treasure I had been looking for: a high school class ring, an elk tooth, a roll of morgan and peace silver dollars, and a couple hand fulls of miscellaneous other old coins.  I wish I could have spent more time searching, but it was great to hear the stories about how things used to be,