Pocketspill of Silver!

It's been a few days since I uncovered that silver diamond ring and things had been slow. I've been pretty busy lately, so I haven't had too much time to scope out good places to go metal detecting. I have only been able to slip in short hour-long hunts in the grassy patches near my apartment complex and it seems all I ever find is thin metal plates from when they constructed it. They always ring up as different coins so I can't even disc them out! But some things changed as I dug one of my better finds to date!

More after the jump!

I decided to take a trip over to the house where I grew up which is now owned by my uncle. The house itself was constructed  back in the 1950's and the construction involved a fill process where they relocated dirt from other locations to fill in for the lawn. In addition, the home had been a place for many children to grow up -- pretty much every member of my family had lived there at one point or another.

Like all hunts, things started out pretty slowly with only finding a handful of clad now and then at about 2 inches down. A couple of times I'd get deeper signals, but when I dug them they would up being a nail or something that was positioned in such a way to continue ringing up in different conductivities. After digging all of the signals (the area was not incredibly trashy so you can do this), I eventually hit some near unreadable wheat pennies at like 7"+. The dates seemed to be 1940's, which is great since the 40's were still silver years in the other coinage. Wheat pennies are like timestamps for what sorts of years you can expect the other coins you find to be. This was definitely an omen.

I focused pretty heavily on the single tree in the yard. I remember that tree being one of favorite places to play when I was growing up, so it was probably the previous owners' as well. The soil was raised against the trunk of the tree. I slipped my coil in by the trunk and got a pretty good dime signal at around 2". I used the built in pinpointer and was able to locate the object to a 3" wide area, with a very sharp dropoff in signal once I moved my coil away from the target. This means it was probably going to be a coin! I plunged my digger down and quickly found 2 white coins looking back at me!




I took them inside and ran water over them (NEVER rub a silver coin since they scratch really easily) and was able to read the dates as 1941 and 1944. I don't remember the marks on them, but they were common dates. You can see the one on the right has a lot more detail left in the coin. It even has full bars on the fasces, so it was probably didn't see very much circulation before laying in ground for 60+ years. Still, silver is silver!