A Few Of Guessologists Finds

[Guessologist]

Neat! I recognised it immediately when it popped out; from the other sports section of the cricket buckles PDF over on the other forum, but I had no idea that they were less common than your average cricket buckle. Unfortunately the ground was stony and I damaged it a bit with the screwdriver, thinking I was trying to push through a rock to wedge it up but it was the middle of the buckle...

Had storms overnight so back out this morning to take advantage of the damp ground - settled the detector right down and immediately paid dividends on ground that I thought was fairly done over by myself, but it never is is it?

Sunbaker 1910, cooked 1916 and a gilded brooch.

 

[Dave79]

That's a good condition brit penny. All mine are green and crusty. No one gets everything. When something changes there's always more there

 

[Guessologist]

An hour around an old reservoir gave up plenty of lead in the form of bullets, sinkers and the usual rectangular offcuts that seem to be everywhere. Also featured are a suspender button, a lump of star metal and a pinfire shotgun cartridge end. I've never seen a pin fire cartridge before, so that's kind of cool even if it's somewhat mangulated. Definitely more potential here.

 

[Guessologist]

My first find with my spanking new Equinox 600, an interesting take on the omnipresent harmonica reed:

As far as I can deduce, this is a reed from a circular tuner / pitch pipe. The Nox sure is a different beast, it just eats up the highly mineralised ground compared to my other detectors. I haven't got the pinpointing on iffy targets sorted yet, and I've dug a few iron falses so far, just rusted nail fragments. Dug to China on a faint but repeatable 12 and never got to it in the tough ground, I'm not used to digging deep holes due to the lack of depth on the other machine! I've just been running Park 1 to find targets, then switching to Park 2 to try and get a decent ID and pinpoint since the tracking balances out the target some times.

The single-setting backlight on the 600 is way too bright for my early morning hunts, I'll have to give it some sunnies! I'm just leaving it off for now.

 

[Wally69]

I picked up a similar one off the goldfields a couple of months ago, it is nice to find the unusual

 

[Guessologist]

Sure is, I thought it was an aluminium lid off the old style cans when it popped out of the hole!

My mind is at ease now, the Equinox's ability to find targets pretty much outstrips my ability to dig the damn things! There's a good solid 20 sitting beyond a now eight inch deep hole at my favourite 1860s-90s site, and four of those inches were through compacted clay and rubble that I've levered out with a screwdriver. And my pinpointer decided to flatten itself at the same time so I have no idea if it's just in the wall or what. Sounds larger than I would expect a penny to be so I'm prepared for it to turn out to be a big nail or something. A quick walk over the site that I've done to death with the GMT and the Go Find revealed plenty of now obvious new targets, and it's happily resolving individual nails in the nail bed portion.

The button says "VICTORIA MOLE" and the stopper came out of the big hole mentioned above.

 

[Guessologist]

The new detector has been a busy little bee:

https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/REL41893/

I thought I'd give it a swing this morning over one of my heavily iron contaminated sites (dozed house) with extremely mineralised soil; tons of ferriginous lag pebbles coating the ground typical of central Vic. Dropped the nox's sensitivity back down to about 15 and ran Park 1 with the iron bias wound right up and it started kicking butt. The pinpointing kind of sucks though but I'm sure I'll get used to it; there's been a few targets in real hard ground I've had to walk away from as I just couldn't find them even with the pinpointer. Slowly getting a feel for what a good target sounds like in this machine though.

 

[Sandta]

That badge is a beauty
Congrats :Y:
Hopefully you can go back to these sites in a few months when ground conditions are more favourable for digging

 

[Guessologist]

Finally got the nox onto some coins! Jagged this 1913 half penny on a site that I just haven't bothered hunting before due to iron. I spent a lot of time chasing weak jumpy signals here amongst the iron for no result, need more practice before I can really do it justice.

Went back to an old dwelling site that's given me an 1840's penny before and not much else, and started working around the edges of the iron bed to avoid going crazy like at the previous site. The nox suddenly made the best noise I've heard in ages, locked on to a beaut isolated, round target that just wouldn't budge off 20-21. About five inches down in the hard silty soil (carefully dug, knew it was going to be good), a bullhead shilling popped out!

It's heavily encrusted with horn silver and I can't quite get the date, it's 181x and if I had to call it, it's probably 1819. I'll give lemon juice and olive oil a whirl and try to get the chloride off. I doubt the galvanic method with foil will work, probably not enough metal exposed. It's definitely less worn than the other bullhead I found, which was about this time last year. Come to think about it, that bullhead was the second coin that the Go Find ever found (Penny > Bullhead shilling), history is repeating itself! To be fair I could have easily grabbed this with my older detectors, but I have noticed that the nox has a great ability to "pull in" targets that aren't quite under the coil versus the others, it's just more likely that I'm going to get signals with it than the others for sure.

 

[Guessologist]

Here's a neat mineral trick - the silver chloride (chlorargyrite) went completely black in just a couple of minutes of sunlight:

 

[Dave79]

Woo hoo, go the nox! I reckon it really 'locks on' to a good solid signal better than any detector I've seen in action. Keep your ears out for those sweet sounds and try to ignore anything with a jumpy ID or a dirty sound layful:

 

[Sandta]

sounds like a well deserved find for your persistence
Congratulations :Y:

 

[Goldpick]

Lovely coin in any condition, top stuff! arty:

 

[Guessologist]

I've been working on this coin for the last two days, cooking it in lemon juice and olive oil repeatedly and taking down the crust bit by bit which worked quite well. I got impatient half way through and switched to a foil and bicarb paste rub which sped things up a lot but also reduced the top layer of horn silver to actual silver and armoured the stuff! Luckily there's a boundary layer of crud between the silvers most of the time so I was able to crack most of that off. Should of kept going with the lemon for a couple more days.

It turned out to be an 1816 in the end:

 

[Guessologist]

Couple more items of note over the last two days; 1896 half penny, 1921 threepence and a .925 cufflink that looks like it's got a 1914 date letter (almost worn off):

 

[Jaros]

Nice finds.

 

[Guessologist]

A whole hour spent without a decent signal in an area I'd not walked before, save for a few obvious .22 bullets, so started to head back to the car. Then this happened:

I've never seen a signal quite like it yet, pretty solid but it was flopping about between 33-36 so I didn't get my hopes up too much. Figured maybe a big nugget of aluminium. Anyway about two inches down:

My first big silver! I've been hanging for a florin for ages, now that I have around 70+ predecimals under my belt it just had to be a matter of time. I've nailed plenty of threepences, but just two shillings and a single sixpence. My sites are just so sparse due to low population densities I guess. Today's a good day though.

 

[Sandta]

Good stuff Guesso, 100% 925 (actually 92.5%):Y:
Congrats

 

[DetectingSA]

Good on ya mate, she looks in pretty good nic too! :drooling:

 

[Guessologist]

Cheers guys, can't wait to get some bicarb onto it and get it shiny. Had a bit more of a swing around just before and locked onto a solid 35 within about 10m of the florin and thought for a minute that lightning had struck twice; turned out to be that solid aluminium or alloy chunk that I had the florin pegged as! Did manage a guilded pocket watch winder as a consolation prize, not worth it's own photo though.