BENEATH THE MASK - excellent reading

[Coin Digger]

Hope this OK but I found this article on another site and it makes for some eye opening reading.

http://detectorstuff.com/articles.php?article_id=18

 

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[BuckleBoy]

This is why my buddies and I ALWAYS dig out the BIG iron! The article is 100% true! And to be honest, nobody wants to be digging nails all over the place, but BIG iron is a BIG problem--until it is out of the hole. So far, I've found some Great finds that were Completely masked by big iron--including a tiny 1774 Half Real.

So it doesn't matter who you are, or what machine you're using...if you are on a site that is producing Great finds, early coins and buttons, etc., DIG OUT THE BIG IRON.

Price of metal used to be 1/2 cent per pound on scrap iron--but now it's around $150/ton--this works out to about $7.50 per 100 lbs. We are about to recycle another 200 lbs of big iron next week, which will bring our total to close to or a little over 400 lbs recycled since March. $30 for all of it--plus some Fantastic finds hiding underneath it... Yeah, it IS worth it.

-Buckleboy

 

[Weasel_Loader]

Hope this OK but I found this article on another site and it makes for some eye opening reading.

http://detectorstuff.com/articles.php?article_id=18

That's a really good article. NASA Tom has put a lot of research that most do not delve into. His articles have opened my eyes several times. I think masking is the next leap in detecting technology that needs improvement. Imagine how much is being missed out there by masking.

 

[Coin Digger]

This is why my buddies and I ALWAYS dig out the BIG iron! The article is 100% true! And to be honest, nobody wants to be digging nails all over the place, but BIG iron is a BIG problem--until it is out of the hole. So far, I've found some Great finds that were Completely masked by big iron--including a tiny 1774 Half Real.

So it doesn't matter who you are, or what machine you're using...if you are on a site that is producing Great finds, early coins and buttons, etc., DIG OUT THE BIG IRON.

Price of metal used to be 1/2 cent per pound on scrap iron--but now it's around $150/ton--this works out to about $7.50 per 100 lbs. We are about to recycle another 200 lbs of big iron next week, which will bring our total to close to or a little over 400 lbs recycled since March. $30 for all of it--plus some Fantastic finds hiding underneath it... Yeah, it IS worth it.

-Buckleboy

What on earth are you digging up that you accumulate so much iron.

 

[BuckleBoy]

What on earth are you digging up that you accumulate so much iron.

The amount of junk iron around cellar holes in Kentucky boggles the mind.

 

[The-Bone]

really great eye opening article

 

[Mirage]

I love reading NASA Tom's articles. It was funny about how he lost his sanity digging up over 1000 items from that field.

All I have to do is dig about half dozen of those itty bitty items and I start to loose it.

My son did a similar "experiment"..... He went to a site that has a blanket of pull tabs. The area that is very highly concentrated with pull tabs is not that big, most of the tabs are shallow (1-2") and we have cherry picked it. He went and started digging all the tabs. In an hour he had dug about 20-30 pull tabs. He didn't find any silver being masked but a few wheat pennies.

Sometimes the "dig" it all works and is worth it and other times it's not. All depends on the site, how bad you want something and how much energy you have!

Bob

 

[Michigan Badger]

Yup, 100% true blue!

I proved this to myself back in 1983. I marked off an area at the entrance of carnaval grounds and dug everything. Before I started I couldn't get any good signals. By the time I had finished digging everything I had a pocket full of Indian cents, Buff's, and Barber & Merc dimes! Oh--and one solid gold antique wedding ring!

All of these finds were less than 6 inches deep! I was using the Fisher 1260-X and Wilson Neuman GBIII (all-metal mode).

But I did learn something new after 40 years of detecting, I learned that even a staple down a few inches could mask a deep coin. I must admit I didn't know that.

But I've know for a very long time about tiny rusted-away nails and bitty little pieces of tin/zinc.

When I 1st received my Explorer I put a wheatie 2 inches away from a large (about 6 inch) square nail and no setting or direction would produce a signal of any sort. This bothered me so I wrote to a detecting pro and he told me this was common.

Almost any VLF can detect a penny laying over or under a medium sized nail (even my $60 Chinese detector can do this). But when iron gets a little too large or the target is a little too deep under the iron object--the target will not be seen.

This is the beauty of the smaller coil. I used the 6" DD on my Explorer and it was tight and deep. Actually smaller coils are often as deep or even deeper than large coils due to the reasons the author shared.

Great article by someone who knows the right words.

 

[dirtdigr]

Interesting article, thanks for posting.

 

[BIG61AL]

This is a great article...this should be in the magazine asap.

 

[Weasel_Loader]

I believe it was in a past W&ET magazine. Not sure how long ago though.

 

[The.Boomer]

One thing I never see anyone else talking about is what I call undermasking. This is where a large peice of long ago rusted away Iron leaves a deposit that's deep like twelve inhes or more. Then any thing lost above this area can be masked completely. I once dug down about two feet to find an iron object that measured approximately 2'x4' at the surface. What I found was that typically orange colored soil mixed in with a regularly darker soil. This was only about an 8"x14" area, but that told me the target spreads in size as it moves up through the soil. I went back to find a modern nickle and one wheatie using a pinpointer on the discarded soil pile.

 

[beaverdigger]

I believe it was in a past W&ET magazine. Not sure how long ago though.

March 2000 W&ET