One more silver

Yesterday in the course of one of my jobs, I found a small park in a tiny town about 15 miles from my house. Sooooo I had to go check it out today. I will have to research to see if I can find out how old the park is. There are a row of old trees along the road, but there could have been houses there long ago. I spent about 3 hours in the park, carefully working a patch and then the sanded kids lot. I didn't realize how much I had dug until I dumped it all out!

Total clad count was:

7 quarters
9 nickels
15 dimes
30 cents

I also found one wheatie (44) and one merc (1918), highly worn but I'll still keep it! Unfortunately this means I have to keep going back and working the whole park in different directions. At least it's quiet there.

Trash was mostly the usualy mix. Dang nail tips are still tricking me, they come in as perfect dimes. The 4 shotgun bases were unusual, but not as much as the un-fired 12ga round. My son keeps all the cars I dig up!

thanks for looking.

That merc has seen many hands, but a sweet find it is just the same. :grin: On the nails, are they pinpointing shallow and offside? That's usually a good sign that you are dealing with iron. It's trickier with the deeper nails, but the same works on those as well. After a while you will find yourself digging just the occasional nail. :yes:

All these nails were 4 - 6 inches deep. Every one I have dug always pinpoints right at the tip or just in front of the tip. I dig the hole and scan, and get the junky signal and pinpoints in the side of the hole. But after I start digging, I'm going to get it out so I don't get fooled by it again.

Nice finds!! One positive on the old worn silver is a person can wonder of all the items the dime purchased through it's life... and based on that wear, looks like it bought quite a bit.

The park seems like it might have some great potential. You might just find that one section that holds a very nice amount of old treasures.

Although we don't use the same machine, one thing that helps me weed out a lot of the rusty nail false signals is to sweep over the target from all directions. If the good signal goes away quickly from other directions... there's a very good chance it is a nail. A coin for me almost always gives me a good repeatable signal as I walk around the target scanning.

Also, if the threshold blanks quickly off one side of the target... that's another possible indicator that it is a piece of rusty iron.

I am pretty new with the Minelab, but these two techniques have reduced the amount of questionable targets I am digging. For a while I tried to decide if it was an iron false before I dug it, but dug anyway to see if I was correct. Now I pass most those targets up. However, I still dig some rusty iron because the signal might just give me enough repeatability or interest to check it out. Hope some of this helps.

Congrats on your oldies.

As much as anyone hates digging up rusted iron, I'm OK with those that I dig. I use the established technique of checking for pinpoint corresponding with signal location. If it still sounds good, or is even close to good I will dig. There is no such thing as virgin ground unless you are on private property, so many of the remaining silver out there are hiding next to iron.

I'm sure this park has been hunted, but that crushed can (from about 5-6 inches deep), and the amount of clad tell me it hasn't been searched in quite a while. Only downside is that this park is in a town with a poplation of about 300. It has always been a small town, so not a lot of people dropping things.

Looks like a great place to hunt. Congrats on the silver. I don't mind if Del digs nails either lol They fool me a lot when I first get to a site or when targets are slow and I try and manufacture a good target. After digging a couple, I try and rely more on the basics that we have discussed already. But I feel it's a good thing to dig some iron like that. After all, how would you know if there was a coin with the nail if you didn't dig some very questional signals?? As for the population of that town, it certainly doesn't help things, but one never knows what may have taken place back then. Maybe it was part of the next town over originally and they used to hold their fairs there lol You never know :thinkingabout: