Another beautiful day in Ohio! Temps up to 50F, clear blue sky and virtually no wind. So I went back there and hit it again!
This kind of hunting is very slow. Working around saplings and burning bushes and old tree stumps is a very painstaking task so I'm not going to elaborate much.
That photo of the woods is where I start and nowhere near the target area. But it gives you a gist of what kind of area I am hunting.
No field photos of these either because I was more worried about poking my eye out on a wayward branch than taking pics.
I noted the weight difference in the photos between what I think is a pretty worn 1928-29 Merc and a 1944. The difference is pretty substantial from the standpoint of coins produced for the year. The difference being .16 grams. So if your bored, multiply 12 million coins times the loss of .16 grams and see what you come up with. And if you have it in your heart, send me half the total! (It's about a million $ at current melt value!)
The small sterling piece is what I believe to be a clasp from either a bracelet or a necklace. It's pretty teeny but rang up at 76 to 81 in a weed infested area at 2 inches deep. The wheat was in the same general area.
Have fun out there and HAPPY HUNTING!
Ed
Great finds Ed! How much of the weight difference could be attributed to the wear on the older coin?
Your woods looks like a great place to spend some time in even without finding silver , but I have to wonder if deer season is encroaching on your time there. I don't mind
finding fired bullets , but I am a little shy about freshly fired ones
.
I hope you get in more dirt fishing before that nasty cold front comes through.
Pat
More nice finds from Ohio to start my day. Good work again Ed. The woodland picture is a beauty. Pat is right about enjoying the surroundings, even if no coins come to light. Around here so many of our hardwood forests have been harvested and replanted in densely packed pines with thick undergrowth. Hard to walk through, impossible to detect in.
The super worn Merc caught my eye and I wondered if it had been altered purposely in some way. Then I went through several packs of dimes from the 20's-30's I had accumulated over the years and found many older coins with exactly the same wear patterns. I could place mine by yours and you would never know the difference. Your calculations about all the silver dust floating around is mind boggling and quite true. I wish Santa would bring me a silver dust attracting vacuum for Christmas!
(12-02-2017 09:58 AM)Digsit Wrote: [ -> ]Great finds Ed! How much of the weight difference could be attributed to the wear on the older coin?
Your woods looks like a great place to spend some time in even without finding silver , but I have to wonder if deer season is encroaching on your time there. I don't mind
finding fired bullets , but I am a little shy about freshly fired ones .
I hope you get in more dirt fishing before that nasty cold front comes through.
Pat
Thanks Pat!
I think it's all wear. Silver is a pretty soft metal even at 90%. If you think about it, all the silver coins that were manufactured eventually had some wear if they were in circulation. That's why when I come across a clean Barber or Seated I consider myself pretty lucky because I know it was dropped close to it's date of make; in years that is. But I forgot to mention that both coins were essentially at the same depth and only around 3 feet from each other which leads me to believe that they were lost there in the late 40's because of the condition of the 44 Merc. And the 44 rang up like a silver dime holding a 81>83 digital while the worn 28/29 Merc was in the 76>79 range with only an occasional 81/82. I actually thought it may be a wheat cent before I dug it. Tones for both are about the same.
I don't need to worry about being shot as these are municipal parks tucked away in suburbia. The Rangers occasionally have at it with a deer cull program but they cordon off entire sections for a few days first and they leave their .243 Winchester casings all over the place.
I have been down to farm country with my brother and it sounds like a war zone most of the Fall season so I know what you mean. But blaze orange clothes are in the order for the day in that scenario and even then the crack of nearby gunfire makes you nervous.
Have a great weekend!
Ed
(12-02-2017 11:25 AM)shadeseeker Wrote: [ -> ]More nice finds from Ohio to start my day. Good work again Ed. The woodland picture is a beauty. Pat is right about enjoying the surroundings, even if no coins come to light. Around here so many of our hardwood forests have been harvested and replanted in densely packed pines with thick undergrowth. Hard to walk through, impossible to detect in.
The super worn Merc caught my eye and I wondered if it had been altered purposely in some way. Then I went through several packs of dimes from the 20's-30's I had accumulated over the years and found many older coins with exactly the same wear patterns. I could place mine by yours and you would never know the difference. Your calculations about all the silver dust floating around is mind boggling and quite true. I wish Santa would bring me a silver dust attracting vacuum for Christmas!
Thanks Shade!
I can say that the picturesque nature of the places I hunt sometimes makes the whole trip worth it regardless of the finds. I remember a while back when I was in an old forest that hadn't been touched for centuries of how awed I was at the dynamic beauty of nature. And on that day all I found was a lonely Indian Head after 6 hours of tromping about. But in the back of the old coconut I placed a memory of a serene place I could go if I ever had to really think things over. It's a shame that progress has done to our forests what we as detectorists now regret. Even farmland from the middle 19th century which have been let back to nature. I often wonder what the forests really looked like before we settled this continent. It must have been a heaven on Earth or something the Hollywood crowd shows in some of their movies. Of which the opening scenes of, "The Last of the Mohican's", with Daniel Day Lewis, represents while they chase a Moose, on foot, through Carolina's forests. One of my most favorite movies.
The silver dust we have is now FRN's and cheap clad coins that corrode. Pretty sad epitaph to a great society. They all dust away as well with inflation one way or another. And when I sometimes clean an old worn coin with toothpaste and my thumb, I'm reminded that some of that silver is staining my skin with the blue green remnant of days gone by.
Ed
Nice finds and pictures! Thanks for bringing up the missing silver. Lol I recall hearing about people shaving silvers coins and collecting the precious metals back in the day. I heard that is why coins were made with ridges on them to determine if they were shaved.
I do not think that is a clasp. Does not seem like it would function as a clasp. I think was a permanent pendant on a necklace. Regardless it is a nice find!
Anyway, congrats and truly a awesome day.
(12-07-2017 03:56 PM)updownup Wrote: [ -> ]Nice finds and pictures! Thanks for bringing up the missing silver. Lol I recall hearing about people shaving silvers coins and collecting the precious metals back in the day. I heard that is why coins were made with ridges on them to determine if they were shaved.
I do not think that is a clasp. Does not seem like it would function as a clasp. I think was a permanent pendant on a necklace. Regardless it is a nice find!
Anyway, congrats and truly a awesome day.
Up, you could be correct about the clasp idea. My wife says its a pendant or charm as well. It does have a rectangle of silver encased within and I suspect it held a tiny photo or something that was kept as a keepsake. It can't be opened by any method I know of so must have been made as a one time memento.
Ed