It's not gold, but...
Zot
Posts: 825 ✭✭✭
Here we go again, back to my favorite beach!
I was immediately punished for my overly optimistic thoughts (gold) and got a steady feed of iron targets. These included several big, near fist-sized ones. My trash pouch was filling up and weighed a ton.
To give you an idea – if my pants had pockets big enough to hold these targets, a single set of suspenders might not have been enough to hold them up. You should definitely not attempt to visualize this!
I’m really looking forward to trying the Minelab Excalibur here. Just by filtering out iron I should be able to avoid >50% of targets. Some of them are really deep too (being detectable as they’re so big) and take some time to dig.
After a few hours I got a promising ring. Surely this has to be silver with that unmistakable crust on it?
It also felt much more "solid" than those junk rings I mostly get.
With crust this thick I felt that electrolysis was the only useful way to get results. Need to loosen it up some.
This seemed to be working, as the smell was like a dozen English Bulldogs with bad gas
After a while I pulled it out and poked at the crust, which was coming off. Sure looks like silver. Nice!
An ultrasonic cleaner should get the job done from here
Turns out I have a 0.813 silver ring.
The fineness stamp isn’t very useful for determining age, as it only narrows it down to 1895-1972. My guesstimate is somewhere in the 1920s range.
I was immediately punished for my overly optimistic thoughts (gold) and got a steady feed of iron targets. These included several big, near fist-sized ones. My trash pouch was filling up and weighed a ton.
To give you an idea – if my pants had pockets big enough to hold these targets, a single set of suspenders might not have been enough to hold them up. You should definitely not attempt to visualize this!
I’m really looking forward to trying the Minelab Excalibur here. Just by filtering out iron I should be able to avoid >50% of targets. Some of them are really deep too (being detectable as they’re so big) and take some time to dig.
After a few hours I got a promising ring. Surely this has to be silver with that unmistakable crust on it?
It also felt much more "solid" than those junk rings I mostly get.
With crust this thick I felt that electrolysis was the only useful way to get results. Need to loosen it up some.
This seemed to be working, as the smell was like a dozen English Bulldogs with bad gas
After a while I pulled it out and poked at the crust, which was coming off. Sure looks like silver. Nice!
An ultrasonic cleaner should get the job done from here
Turns out I have a 0.813 silver ring.
The fineness stamp isn’t very useful for determining age, as it only narrows it down to 1895-1972. My guesstimate is somewhere in the 1920s range.
Minelab: GPX 5000, Excalibur II, Explorer SE. White's: MXT, PI Pro
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Comments
You can see it a bit better than in the picture when the light catches it just right. Still, I'm not 100% sure.
As for the iron: some of it is clearly from boats (example: oarlock horns), then there's random construction- and misc wartime activity-related junk.
For about half I can't tell what it is, as they look just like black potatoes.
It's a strange world. The other day I found a spark plug way out in quite deep water, for example. A strong throw might get it that far from shore, barely.
Throwing junk into the water seems to be a popular thing that goes back a long way
I'm not aware of a single historical fact/event that would be the source of it all.
Would be curious to see how well the Excal performs. Do you follow the tide out, or do you actually wade in?
Tidal movements are very small over here (about an inch I think), so that's not much of a factor.
There are short term water level variations, but these are mainly wind and air pressure related.
I wade in. Most of the stuff is from between knee and waist deep water. The ring was from knee deep at the most.
bob