Anyone Ever Take A Pulse Induction Machine To A Pounded Out Area?

[CoilFisher]

Curious if any of you diehards ever did this?
And, wondering if you could get through the trash to find anything?

 

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[Tom_in_CA]

well......

Curious if any of you diehards ever did this?
And, wondering if you could get through the trash to find anything?

Well...... it's no secret that pulse machines can easily get a coin to a foot deep (so too can some all-metal VLF modes on standard machines, for that matter). And there's some specialty nugget pulse machines that can probably approach 2 ft. on some coins!

And yes, I've heard of a friend who tried this at a particular park where the deepest we could go (9 or 10" with standard coin machines) only got us down to turn-of-century losses (barbers, and seateds that were slightly more worn, etc...). Yet the park dated to the 1870s, so it stood to reason there were older coins, deeper than we could reach

But the effort only last about 20 targets, before he gave up. It might sound easy, but it's not. The pulse machine litteraly sounded off on the teensiest of cr*p, with no rhyme or reason as to target ID's, etc.... Birdshot, staples, teensy surface foil, pushpins, paperclips, blah blah blah. It simply wasn't worth it. The average person simply has no idea how many targets are in the average turfed park. That's why pulse machines have typically only found their niche in beach and nugget hunting. It's next to impossible to do in the average junky park.

 

[Terry Soloman]

I have done this many times. Tom is absolutely right. Unless you go into it understanding you are going to dig 95-bad targets for every 5-good ones, don't bother. If an area is giving up a ton of clad back to the mid-1960s, I'll clean it out with my Cibola, then go back through with my Lobo Super Traq in All Metal. If I am finding more coins at 11"-12", that is when I bring out the Sand Shark. I have recovered V-nickles at 15"+, and got a Franklin silver half at around 18" in one city park with the Sand Shark. I have used my Minelab GPX 5000 in farm fields, but digging ballpeen hammer heads at 33" is a drag..

 

[Tom_in_CA]

reply

I have done this many times. Tom is absolutely right. Unless you go into it understanding you are going to dig 95-bad targets for every 5-good ones, don't bother. If an area is giving up a ton of clad back to the mid-1960s, I'll clean it out with my Cibola, then go back through with my Lobo Super Traq in All Metal. If I am finding more coins at 11"-12", that is when I bring out the Sand Shark. I have recovered V-nickles at 15"+, and got a Franklin silver half at around 18" in one city park with the Sand Shark. I have used my Minelab GPX 5000 in farm fields, but digging ballpeen hammer heads at 33" is a drag..

Terry, I'm not personally into nugget hunting (no nuggets in our region of CA), and I don't use pulse machines on the beach where I'm at (as I prefer something to pass nails). But I have had a few experiences swinging a borrowed pulse on the beach.

And another time, a friend and I teamed up to help the police locate a spent/fired bullet, at the scene of a crime. The shooter had fired several bullets point blank at the victim, in a dirt driveway, one of two of which they suspected were fired while the victim was on the ground, so that, in essence the shooter would have been firing downward (instead of straight ahead). If the latter was true, then it would make his "self-defense" argument fall apart, if it could be shown that bullets were fired downward, rather than in front of him. So the sherriffs called us out, and we searched all over this dirt driveway. I know what a lead projectile reads, as I've found thousands of them over the years. And we didn't think it could've penetrated very far into the hard-pan earth, so we weren't too worried about depth.

But try as we could, we couldn't find the bullet(s). So my friend whipped out his Minelab nugget machine. We figured we would "clean out all the targets", because we thought perhaps teensy iron in the ground (since it was by a covered carport, where cars had parked for years), might be masking the bullet. I will NEVER forget the time it took for that minelab nugget machine, to clear out a mere 1 ft. square area! We were getting humongous signals on even the teensiest of cr*p (that a standard coin machine would effortlessly have passed). I'm talking about things like those little teeny wires that you use to hang christmas ornaments, staples, pin-heads, straight-pins, flecks of diff. sorts, etc.... After about a 1/2 hour with that thing, we put it back away!!

We resumed our search with our standard machines, and I eventually did find the bullet Mushroomed out, d/t fired straight into the ground. The man didn't have much room to plead "self defense" after that

 

[cudamark]

How deep did the bullet end up being? What caliber? Just standard ball ammo or hollow point?

 

[Frankn]

Well, this is a slight bit off, but might add something. About 15 years ago, I left a spring tooth cultivator in a field. This field is now covered with vines and briars to the height of 5' average. I took the loader to where I thought it was and carefully cleared a 20' circle. No plow appeared!! I took my PI and tried to check the edges of the circle, but it was to thick. I then got the Hays 2 Box and walked slowly around the circle. I hit it on the North side of the clearing. It was 6' from the clearing and gave a loud signal . There's nothing like a 2 Box when you need one. Frank

 

[Tom_in_CA]

How deep did the bullet end up being? What caliber? Just standard ball ammo or hollow point?

Mark, it was about 2 or 3" deep, amidst iron (so I had to move real slow to get the conductive beep). Don't remember the caliber, or whether hollow-point, etc.... But there is NO bullet that is going to travel through solid ground more than a few inches. I mean, it's just like shooting through a phone book test: even a high powered gun is stopped by trying to travel through a bigger city sized phone book, right?

 

[CoilFisher]

Thanks for the replies.

I just got done reading a book in which the author claims that he could tell "coin-size" objects with a PI machine.
Thus, he narrowed down the search.
So, I wondered how well it was employed by the users here.

**Nice job on those hunts Terry. Very interesting stories you have there.**

 

[cudamark]

Mark, it was about 2 or 3" deep, amidst iron (so I had to move real slow to get the conductive beep). Don't remember the caliber, or whether hollow-point, etc.... But there is NO bullet that is going to travel through solid ground more than a few inches. I mean, it's just like shooting through a phone book test: even a high powered gun is stopped by trying to travel through a bigger city sized phone book, right?

That sure doesn't seem very deep. I've found many bullets much deeper than that and always wondered if they were shot down that deep or settled that deep after time. I would imagine that a lot will depend on bullet shape, weight, and type of metal as well as the amount of gunpowder behind it. I figured a hollow point .22 would only go a few inches down but an armour piercing round or magnum/+P ammo would go much deeper. I'm sure the forensic scientists have done some studies on it. Just a curiousity.....I've seen the results of some tests where different handgun bullets were shot into a car. Some rounds didn't even get through one door where others went throught the whole car! Very few were able to penetrate a cast iron engine block. The .44 Magnum would and so would the .357 with the +P ammo but the smaller calibers wouldn't. I'm sure some rifle ammo would too but I haven't seen the results of those.

 

[Frankn]

There are two factors that effect penetration "as far as the actual bullet is concerned. Speed and mass. Speed effects penetration and mass effects shock power. I have taken the new ballistic armor plating of the Hum V and at 50 yards penetrated it with a .22 cal bullet from my 22/250. A 30/06 would not penetrate it. It was the 4000FPS speed that made the difference. I have seen a steel plate used in the test on the army 9mm. The 9mm went thru while the .45 just put a large dent in it. As far as penetration in the ground, the composition of the ground makes all the difference. Frank