A Few Of Guessologists Finds

[LAZY L1KE Treevin]

Sweet find mate gotta love new sites . ??
Keep up the posts
Lazy

 

[Guessologist]

Tried to get onto some gold with the GMT over the last few days and have found little but shotgun pellets. Cutting my losses early tonight, I whipped out the go find for a flutter on some tucked away crown land with half an hour of sunlight left and snagged my first cricket buckle! Had me scrambling to download the book and get up to speed with them, it's in there.

I've got a bit of a technique going with recovery at the moment, for 90% of things, the screwdriver / plastic scoop is doing the job. The pick doesn't leave the car much these days unless I know I've got tough ground to get through.

Also snagged 1891, 1950 and 1952 pennies nearby, the 52 was a sunbaker. Everything's still grotty because I'm a couple of days away from my Andre's pencils, I don't want to rub off the best part of the patina like I've managed with a lot of my earlier finds. The kangaroo pennies are almost too modern to tickle my fancies, but beggars can't be choosers. Sorry about the potato quality photos, I'm using a $150 ebay chinaphone for a couple of months while I save for something better and it cannot take a decent photograph to save itself. The object in the back is a lump of melted lead, it made a nice sound.

 

[ctxkid]

awesome cricket buckles are on top of the bycatch list :Y: arty:

 

[Goldpick]

Did well to get the cricket buckle out in one piece, great find. :Y:

 

[Sandta]

Congratulations :Y:
Cricket buckle is always a nice surprise

 

[Wally69]

Looks like the ball hit the bat for six nice hunt

 

[Guessologist]

Cheers, it was certainly a welcome surprise! 2/3 of the coins came up good with cleaning, although the date of the 1897 penny has completely altered to patina and chipped off a bit with cleaning. I'll have to change my method a bit to see if I can loosen up the dirt a little before using the steel wool pencil.

Went for another quick swing yesterday at a different site but just turned up cupboard knobs, 30's spark plugs and a crushed metal teaspoon/tablespoon measuring cup with R T & Co. embossed on it, which I assume is Rocke, Tompsitt & Co chemists. Good potential for better finds if I can pick through the iron trash.

 

[Guessologist]

A good one today! I finally found the mother in law's 40 year old gold necklace pendant (wedding day present) that has been in their front lawn for the last twenty years. I've been having swings here on and off all year, the lawn is littered with aluminium and brass rubbish (and an exploded sprinkler head?) so it's a slog with the GMT but I got there in the end. There's still a gold earring to find in there as well if I'm going to maintain that #1 son in law position!

 

[ctxkid]

Cheers, it was certainly a welcome surprise! 2/3 of the coins came up good with cleaning, although the date of the 1897 penny has completely altered to patina and chipped off a bit with cleaning. I'll have to change my method a bit to see if I can loosen up the dirt a little before using the steel wool pencil.

grab one of these, and foof the coin as soon as it comes out , if ya leave the dirt on till ya get home it's 10 X harder to get of :Y:

 

[Sandta]

You should be good for a while yet
Well done :Y:

 

[golddiggerart]

Well done on persisting with finding the Mother Inlaws pendant. Maybe she'll bake you a :cake: :Y:

 

[LonelySilver]

Nice finds!

 

[Guessologist]

Nothing super interesting this time, spent a bit of time deliberately taking out beaver tail pull tabs from the old's lawn so I can hone in on weaker signals a little better in the future. A little time chasing very weak repeatable signals got me a couple more silvers and a .303 bullet ... I'm having to use the Go Find for these although I suspect it's not too sensitive to these little guys, the GMT is too far the other way and sounds off on every small bit of foil almost the same (sometimes the iron ID will read out at about 20% on the first swing, dropping to minimum on the second, almost always foil in this case).

 

[Smoky bandit]

They must have been new when dropped. Very nice find. :Y:

 

[Guessologist]

A few interesting things today, had half an hours reccy swing over a part of a permission that I hadn't covered yet which has been previously giving up 1890's to WW1 era junk for the most part. Dug my second token, a Parkers penny within 5 minutes which was a welcome change to yesterdays effort of 3 hours for nothing of interest at all (in a different spot). I knew there must be older stuff here, there's structures recorded in the vicinity on 1864 maps. The good relics are down pretty deep so it's going to be a challenge to lock onto stuff (go find will probably be kind of poxy going forward, GMT is probably too high frequency to do well at depth?), but thankfully it's a light loamy soil so not too much work to get down to them.

Looks like I got the facade off some kind of clockwork a pocket watch backing (looking too close to see the big picture!), "Made in USA". Has faint almost illegible initials scratched into the back, WP , what looks like a signature and R(or K?)R. Brass rings, buckles and rivets as always, a handle off a broken pair of super old iron scissors?, a decorative piece of gilt copper and an oil lamp burner, Holmes Booth & Haydens on the thumb wheel, "Patented Sept.16.186(cut off, internet reckons 2) around the wick area.

I think the token should be salvageable, it hasn't grown that much, the patina has incorporated a bunch of organic crud though and probably needs to be stripped right back to look any good.

 

[Goldpick]

The token looks to be a good contender for a clean up with Andre's crayons, should remove most of that gunk whilst retaining the original patina, nice find. :Y:

 

[Guessologist]

The token looks to be a good contender for a clean up with Andre's crayons, should remove most of that gunk whilst retaining the original patina, nice find. :Y:

Cheers, I was kind of hoping that it was one of the older bronze pennies when it came out of the hole since they seem to last better in the ground and are more durable when cleaning up. I thought about using the Andre's crayons on it but I didn't get great results on the Holloway token I found earlier, the patina was super fragile (tried to be careful) and flaked off in some obvious areas so I kind of had to take it right back to get it looking OK again. The tokens still seem to hold up better than roo pennies under the crayons! For now, I used a combination of just rubbing it with my fingers and a pencil eraser and I'm pretty happy with the results, although I usually can't leave good enough alone and will probably give the crayons a whirl when I forget why I left it like it is. I'm not sure if this is the case for others but I found that the eraser didn't work well on the dirt by itself, but getting finger grease on the crud first by rubbing enabled the eraser to take it straight off, and gently as well.

Had a crack at tracing out the writing on the back of the watch as well, I'll have to go digging on Trove to see if I can find some contemporary names that might fit the initials...

 

[Guessologist]

Lunch break silver:

Learned a lesson in chemistry too, I've been using the galvanic method to clean my silvers and didn't have bicarb on hand right this second, so stupid me decided that salt is an excellent electrolyte! Forgot there was a reason I went to trouble of getting the bicarb in the first place... The back of the coin went from as good as the front to semi-toasted in about thirty seconds. Oops!

 

[Guessologist]

Lunch break copper, my second oldest true penny so far:

It was a pretty dodgy signal being masked by iron but I'm glad I persevered. Got a contemporary belt buckle in more or less the same hole, needs a decent clean before it's worth a picture.

 

[Guessologist]

Back to the same site again to really work over where the penny came from, jagged a Holloway's half-penny token straight away, got the set now! I started chasing a fairly solid signal that was giving me a nice tone one way, and iron if I swung at right angles to it. The ink bottle and two buttons came out of the foot-deep hole that I ended up digging in baked clay with just a plastic trowel and screw driver. The signal was still there when I gave up, and I gave the bottom of the hole a good probe before I filled it in and didn't hit anything, I guess whatever it is won't be going anywhere in a hurry anyway...