My 1st Nickel!

I am serious. Till this morning, I have not detected a nickel of any age. All my 50's numbers have turned out to be pull tabs, screws, rivets or the like. I didn't take a pic of it, because most all of you have one in your pocket.:grin: Maybe when I get used to the sounds in Pro Mode, I can tell the difference between nickels and trash.

I surprisingly don't nab that many nickels either. I am surprised when some of these guys pull out buffaloes however at places I know are old enough to have shield nickels I get nothing. I still get an occasional pull tab but I took note of what numbers nickels fall under. Pull tabs are either slightly higher or slightly lower depending on what type. Some other types fool me thinking they are pennies.

Congrats on your first nickel. There are many more to come I am sure. I have found that the trick with nickels is not so much what the numbers are on the display but how they sound. A nickel is a nice round object of even thickness and mass. It makes a very clean signal that starts and stops with no stutters or warbles. Pulltabs on the other hand are not nice round objects of even thickness and mass. They tend to be jumpy and uneven signals with a bit of a warble at the end. Granted this is not 100% the case every time but I think it works most of the time. When I get a nickel/pulltab signal I try to determine how it sounded in my ear. Nice and smooth, I dig it. Jumpy and not smooth, I skip it. Best wishes and HH, Dave.

I'm with DaddyDigger on sound being the way to determine weather or not to dig. Any warbling and I pass but every once in a great while I'll dig one of those signals to reconfirm what I already know.

DaddyDigger said:

I have found that the trick with nickels is not so much what the numbers are on the display but how they sound.

Click to expand...

I can only contest that both of our machines are different, and proabaly different than his. I have never dug a nickel that didn't read between 23 and 27 on my machine. They do give steady readings I agree, but the tone for my machine is the same for nickels, pull tabs, and the thin gold rings regardless. 19 to 21 is either the ring portion or the tab portion. I have taken two gold rings and checked manually to see 17 is a small ring and 21 is a slightly larger ring. Between 29 to 31 is the full ring tab, not in pieces. Around 89, literally just 1 count higher than a penny, are the new aluminum tabs. I have pulled out nickels as early as 1954, too late of date for a buffalo. Maybe in the all metal mode my ears are untrained to tell if the signal warbles while pinpointing the signal, but I never get to that step because I have already bypassed it knowing if it wasn't within 23 and 27 that I wasn't gonna dig it and verify it wasn't a nickel. I can only tell your machine, Al, but the V3i is a very different machine and gives significantly different tones for targets as well as three bar graphs as to expected metal content in the target and gives a histogram plot. That's why your machine I understand the sound being a factor.