Treasure Hunting
This page is dedicated to treasure hunting (or, more appropriately, coin shooting) on an extreme budget using the Garrett Ace 150 metal detector. It’s a starter detector that one store owner refers to as the “kids model”. I thought it would be fun to get one and see what could be found with this cheaper model. I am convinced that you don’t need to spend $1,100 on a “midline” detector to have a good time treasure hunting and finding coins. This page will journal my treasure hunts, with the most recent at the top. I ordered this detector online from Kellycodetectors.com and paid $152.95 for it. It came with a few extras, like headphones, a shovel, and a couple of pouches, not to mention the instructional DVD and a magazine about treasure hunting. So, if you think it’s possible to have fun treasure hunting on a tight budget, keep reading and we will find out.
The Outer Banks
We finally got to the outer banks in North Carolina for Thanksgiving 2008. I took my metal detector and was very excited about getting down to the beach and do some treasure hunting. Our rental house was only a few hundred feet from the beach. But there was bad news when I arrived. My mother-in-law told me, shortly after my arrival, that it was illegal to treasure hunt on the beach with a metal detector because it was considered a National Park (National Beach). I would have to go about 30 miles down the road in order to do some good treasure hunting. Ugh. Well, it looked like I wouldn’t be able to do any quick after-dinner coin shooting, but at least there was somewhere I could go.
A couple days into our vacation, I decided to go to the beach and do some hunting. I got in the car with my wife and brother-in-law and we headed down to where (we thought) we could do some metal detecting. We parked, checked for ‘no metal detectors’ signs (there weren’t any) and went and did some hunting. It was quite fun, and we got a lot of hits right away, and for good reason. After a few minutes of sweeping the beach, someone pulled up in a truck and said that we were still in illegal metal-detecting country. Rats! We would have to go further down the beach.
We jumped back in the car and headed to where we were sure was legal. By this time it was almost dark and pretty cold, so we didn’t spend a whole lot of time at the last place. But, in the end, we did end up with a few coins and a bunch of nails. The best part was that I proved I could use the metal detector around salt water, and it worked pretty well. There is one trick to keep in mind though, when dealing with the salty sand. You must be very careful not to ’sweep’ the coil upwards at the outside motion of the sweep. This will cause a false hit.
Out to the GSL
My wife and I are thinking about going back to the Outer Banks for the holidays this year. We went a couple of years ago and stayed with her family right on the beach. I swore I would never go back because of the noreaster that trapped us on the island for three days, but now that I have my metal detector, I really want to do some beach hunting! The only problem is that you usually need a detector that’s specifically made for beach combing on the shores of the oceans. The salt in the water and sand can cause the detector to freak out since salt water conducts electricity so well. In a moment of extremely delayed genius I figured out that the Great Salt Lake had salty beaches as well! And, most of the time, the salt content is greater than the oceans. So it was time to go down to the GSL and test the detector on those beaches and water. I’ve read in other blogs that the Ace 150 can be used for beach hunting if outfitted with the 4.5″ sniper coil, which is my exact setup. So I was hoping for the best.
The test was a success. The salty sand was quiet as could be. The water itself gave a few beeps here and there, but I couldn’t determine if it was false hits or actually something in the water under the sand. I didn’t dig. If you’ve ever been to the GSL you would understand. The water near the shore is absolutely disgusting. I was also unsure of the laws when it comes to digging and taking stuff out of the area since it’s a state park. I did, however, get a couple of hits on the beach and decided to “semi-dig” one of them. Since the sand was very soft, I just put my foot down and scooped away a small bit with my heel. Lo-and-behold, there was a 1965 quarter. Score one for the GSL!
Third trip to Dad’s House
My wife and I usually stop by one of our parents’ houses on the weekend. This weekend we went to my parent’s house and I decided to do some coin shooting again in the back yard. I keep my Ace 150 in the trunk of my car, so I can do some treasure hunting whenever I pass a good spot. Again with the 4.5″ sniper coil I went down and inspected the two small patios in the back yard. One of them is a landing at the base of some stairs that come down from a carport. The other is a small patio just outside of a sliding glass door in the basement. I hit a bunch of targets near the landing, including a penny. I also found the rear-end of a matchbox car, as well as a few unidentified “blobs” of metal that I can only assume are melted matchbox cars. My brothers and I used to pour gasoline on some of our toys and light them on fire (surprise mom and dad!). They would usually melt pretty good. My wife joined me at this point and we headed over to the other small patio. We got tons of hits right around the patio. Digging revealed (yes, I will admit that my wife is better at pinpointing with the detector than I am) a bunch of pennies, and a bunch of trash. Most of the trash was pieces of tin that was obviously cut with tin snips. My dad does many after-work projects and sometimes uses that area to set up his work bench. I expected to find a lot of trash of this sort in the area, and I did. By the time the sun went down, it was too dark and I was too tired to carry on. We left a lot of hits there around that patio for another time.
Quick jaunt to a School
I received my 4.5″ sniper coil in the mail and wanted to give it a try. I took my niece to a school near her house. I immediately noticed that the sniper coil didn’t do as well around playground equipment as some other blogs made me think. It still dinged when pulling away from the metal posts, and I had to keep at least 6″ away from all the metal equipment. Bummer. I did hit on a few items, and had my mandatory single “phantom” hole. We found a quarter (yay!), a penny, and a bunch of garbage, including my first pop can buried about 8″ below the surface near the slides.
Finally!
After a strange brush with coincidence I found a quarter! I was beginning to think that pennies were the only thing I would find. Someone else thought so too, and left a comment for me (read below). I approved the comment, then went right home and did a little coin hunting in my neighborhood. Lo and behold, there was my first quarter. It’s a 1995. At this rate, the detector will pay itself off in just under 84 years!
Lunch Hour at the Park
OK, so it wasn’t actually an hour. I drove around for a while, looking for a good park for treasure hunting. I ended up at a park I’ve never seen before that looked to be fairly new. I only had about 15 minutes to kill, but I tried anyway. I decided to scan the perimeter where the sidewalk meets the playground. The ground turned out to be very, very quiet. It was so quiet, I ran my shovel over the coil a couple of times just to make sure my batteries were still alive. They were. I got three hits at this park. Not bad for 15 minutes. The first hole turned up a penny (at least year 2000). The second hole was my “phantom” hole. I dug and dug, and nothing. Although, the detector showed 6″+ on the readout, I hit the hard surface below the dirt on the playground after about 7″, so it could have been something below that. I moved on. The third hole produced a large torx bolt. Good enough for my short jaunt. I passed another park on the way back to work that looks older and with more potential for a larger crowd, thus, more coins (hopefully).
Fifth Outing — Dad’s house again
Since I didn’t have long to go over my dad’s yard the first time, I decided to go back. In reality, it will take me quite a few visits to sweep his entire yard, so back I went. It was very overcast and I was afraid that it would rain/snow before I got a chance to do anything. I decided to go into the back yard and do a little hunting where our old sandbox used to be. As a child, I remember digging numerous holes and playing with lots of toys back there in the sandbox. It’s about 10′ X 10′ and has since been overgrown with grass. Also, during the winter/spring months, it is frequented by deer, so there’s somewhat of a “minefield” in the back yard. This would be an interesting hunt indeed.
I hurried the first hole, like I always do, and ended up with nothing. I always forget that it takes patience to pinpoint something with the elliptical coil that I have on my detector. I got a hit and immediately started digging. Big mistake. I dug a huge hole and never found anything. By the time I was done with that hole, it was still repairable, but I had tired of trying. So I filled the hole and moved on, this time remembering to go slow and spend an extra 30 seconds pinpointing. It is really worth it.
Here’s how I do my pinpointing:
Sweep arcs with the detector’s sensitivity setting on 3 of 4. When I get a signal, drop the sensitivity down to 2 and make shorter swings, narrowing down the search area. When I find the approximate area that the object is under, I lower the sensitivity to 1 and make even shorter swings. Once I have the object within a confined area inside the coil, I make very, very short swings and narrow it down to about a 2″ X 2″ area in the center of the coil. These last swings are very short, maybe only 3″ in length, and still quite fast. I call it the “waggle” and it works pretty well.
So, with more careful pinpointing, the second hole was narrowed down to a small area. I dug and immediately found a broken off hose head. Garbage, but at least I was refining my pinpointing technique.
The third hole was also pinpointed quite well. It produced a die-cast fighter jet plane, about 3″ long, that I used to play with as a kid. One wing was broken off, lying right next to the jet. Score!
The fourth hole was also pinpointed well and revealed a strange piece of plumbing that I never identified. More garbage.
The fifth hole was quite odd, and my strangest find to date. My detector was going nuts over the hole throughout a large area. I concluded that the object was either very large, or a bunch of small items. I was quite excited at the possibility that maybe I had buried a bunch of coins as a youngster and was now finding them again. I decided, since the hit area was so large, that I would dig a very large hole. So with a large shovel, I punched out a U-shaped hole in the sod about 14″ across. I put the shovel under the sod and heaved it upward. Just under the sod, directly in the center of my large hole, was a steel weight that my brothers used to use for their dumb-bell weightlifting bench. It was about 5 pounds and measured approximately 8″ in diameter. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when I saw this thing unearthed. It immediately brought back memories of my scrawny brothers trying to bench press these weights. Though very nostalgic, I tagged this one as junk and disposed of it. Still a good outing.
By this time it was raining quite hard. I had already covered the non-waterproof parts of my detector with plastic, but the headphones, as well as my entire body, was getting wet. I decided to call it a successful hunt and packed it in.
Fourth Outing — Dad’s house
It was a long drive to get to dad’s house, so there was only about an hour of sunlight left for hunting. I showed my dad how the Garrett worked and he let me go do my thing. The first two feet I swept gave me a coin reading, so I started to dig. My dad noticed the small gardening shovel I was trying to dig with and brought out a shovel of his own from under the carport. He sunk his shovel into the ground and pushed over a chunk of sod about the size of a Toyota Corolla. So our first hole at dad’s house, albeit a very large hole, came up with a 1979 penny that my dad was fairly impressed with (at least I hope so). So we filled that hole, and with his shovel in hand, he followed me around the yard while I took swipes with my metal detector. Then I would find something and take smaller swipes, then smaller swipes. Once I was convinced that I had pinpointed the object to within 3 or 4 square inches of its location, I told my dad to dig. My dad then stuck his shovel into the ground and tore up enough grass to fabricate a miniature golf course with. I found the metal, it was an old piece of copper plumbing buried just below the sod. I dug about three more holes in the yard and found another penny and a piece of garbage. The second-to-last last hole was a ‘phantom’ hole. I got a lot of hits on it, but once I dug up the dirt and placed it around the hole, the detector was silent on both the dirt and the hole. It doesn’t make much sense to me yet. The last hole I dug, before the sunlight faded away, turned up another penny with an odd texture to it. I still haven’t been able to clean it enough to determine how old it is, though it does have the Lincoln Memorial on the back.
Third Outing — A different park
I went to a different park for my third outing. I was a little over-confident at my newfound pinpointing abilities after finding the penny in the grass (see below). I thought for sure I had the mad skills to find boatloads of coins in a different park. Though I have only hunted about 1/50th of the park in my first outing, most of it is still covered in snow and the ground is very hard and nearly impossible to penetrate.
This park immediately started hitting on all sorts of things. I was getting readings everywhere and just wasn’t sure where to start digging. I dug the first hole, and was stopped by the root of a large tree that was nearby. I moved on to another spot. After a while, I had turned up a lot of pull tabs and other trash, but no coins. This park had an exceptionally large amount of trash, even trash that you could see just standing there. Also, the concrete around the picnic area had re-bar in it that wasn’t hitting on the iron setting, but was hitting on the jewelry setting, which made it almost impossible to hunt in that perfect area which is where the concrete meets the grass outside the picnic area.
My wife and nieces were with me on this hunt, and the 7-year-old was getting pretty frustrated at our lack of finding coins. I decided to dig one last hole near a different tree. From what I’ve read, there’s a good area around large trees about 10 feet away that is prime for coins to collect. So I picked a spot about that far from the tree and started digging. Again I hit a root. I decided to dig around the root, then SNAP. The free shovel that came with my detector (a $19.95 value) snapped like a twig, and only on its third hole! Needless to say, I was not a happy coiner. So we packed it all into the car and drove down to our local hardware store. I picked up a nice aluminum garden shovel for about $8 that seems nearly indestructible, as well as a long, narrow screwdriver for probing.
My free shovel — a $19.95 value!
We decided to go back to the park where we did out first outing and give it a show there, but only for a short amount of time. My father had called and gave me permission to dig in his yard, where I had grown up, and I didn’t want to waste too much sunlight. So a quick jaunt through the original park turned up another penny and some pull tabs. Then it was off to dad’s house.
Second Outing — Practice
I decided to stay at home and do a little practice on the second day. I buried a penny in some dirt outside of my apartment and went over it about a dozen times with my Ace 150. I was a little surprised at just how well the coin beeped on the inside of the coil. I learned quickly that if you find something, take down the sensitivity, then go over it again, you can keep doing that and get a pretty good pinpoint on your object. If you can get the object to register on the lowest sensitivity setting, you can pinpoint down to the inside of the inner coil, which isn’t bad for such an entry-level detector. I left the coin in the dirt because I knew my 7-year-old niece would be coming to visit and I wanted her to see how it worked. Once my niece arrived, I took her out and let her dig up the coin after I found it. Then I decided to go out onto the grass and see if I could locate anything. I wasn’t going to dig because I technically didn’t own the land. In the first two passes of the detector I heard the intonation of a piece of metal. I dropped my sensitivity from three bars to two and got another ding. Then I dropped the sensitivity to one bar and still got a reading. Then I ‘waggled’ the detector back and forth to find out where the most consistent reading was, and thought I had pinpointed the object pretty well. Just for fun, I got down and stuck a philips screwdriver straight down into the grass where I felt was the best pinpoint location. I felt some resistance, so I wiggled the screwdriver just enough to make a hole large enough to get my index finger down. I stuck my finger down the hole and felt a coin about 3 inches down! I wiggled the coin up to the surface. It was a 1968 penny. Wow! I couldn’t believe that I was able to pinpoint a single target so well, though I’m sure it was pure luck after narrowing the field down to about a 2″ by 2″ square with the detector. Unfortunately, I had scraped the surface of the coin with the screwdriver pretty badly. I’m lucky it wasn’t a valuable coin, or I would be kicking myself for damaging it.
First Outing
So I decided to buy something I always wanted as a kid: a metal detector. I’ve seen a few online videos regarding treasure hunting that have re-sparked my interest in looking for old coins and/or various other types of treasures that could be buried underground. I also read a lot of blogs and forums regarding the activity and was quite surprised at how many different types of metal detectors there are and how varied the features are that come with them. There are detectors made for coin shooting (mostly the inexpensive models) and detectors that specialize in hunting for gold nuggets. There are also detectors that specialize in hunting at the beach, since the salt in the water and the sand can send a normal detector into a frenzy. After reading up as much as I could, I decided that I would try and get the best possible results with the most inexpensive detector that I could find from a reputable company. I ended up ordering the Garrett Ace 150 online. It’s Garrett’s least expensive detector, but got really good reviews, especially after buying the Super Sniper coil (which I don’t have yet). I will go into the features about the detectors as I learn about them, but for now I will write an overview of how my first few experiences were.
When I got my detector delivered via UPS, I was very excited to open it up and get cracking. The Ace 150 is notorious for being an out-of-the-box model that you can just throw together and go hunting. I did read the small manual and watched the DVD that came with it, as well as looked over the “free” items that were included with my order: A digging shovel, a carrying-case, a two-pocket tool belt, a two pocket apron to keep your “finds” in (though the web site said it would be a 3-pocket), and a couple of other small items not worth mentioning here. Anyway, after putting a few things together and watching the DVD, this particular detector (my first) did not disappoint when it came to turning on and hunting. I live in an all-concrete apartment, so the floor immediately started giving signals from the re-bar. I changed the discrimination to ‘jewelry’ and it shut up pretty quick. Since the re-bar qualifies as iron, the detector simply ignored it. Swinging the detector while keeping the coil close to the ground was a little more difficult than I expected it to be. I have a feeling that I will be working on that technique for quite some time before it becomes second nature. I also have back problems, so I need to find a way to compensate for the twisting of my spine. I try and do both left and right-handed detection so I can switch it up if I start getting tired. Anyway, on to my first hunt.
My first hunt was at a local park. There was still a lot of snow on the ground, so I decided to stick to the grassy areas first. Luckily, the grassy areas were the places that people were the most: around a covered picnic area, under the play equipment, and under the trees. I started with the picnic area.
I immediately got a few hits near the picnic area. But since it’s basically a giant slab of concrete surrounded by a large grassy field, I thought it was the re-bar in the concrete that was giving the signal, briefly forgetting that re-bar wasn’t giving hits in Jewelry mode. Since the rule for beginners is ‘dig everything’, I dug it and found a penny. Not a particularly old penny, but a penny none the less. This was actually good news that made me very excited. In the world of metal detecting, the more expensive of a model you buy, the better it is at detecting and pinpointing things like coins. Since I’m using an intro model, finding this penny was a sign that this park may not be hunted by many other coin hunters, since almost every detector would have picked up this coin. This is extra good news considering I live in the county with the highest population of children per capita in the entire country! And, as every coin hunter knows, where there are lots of kids playing, there are lots of coins falling out of pockets. Hopefully, parks and schools in this area will be good for coin hunting.
I hunted on. I soon found that the ‘dig everything if you’re a beginner’ thing didn’t work out so well for someone who is impatient and needs their detector NOW!, even in the ending days of winter. It turned out that most of the ground at the park was too frozen for my shovel to penetrate, and I simply couldn’t dig most targets. I ended up digging about 8 holes and, if my memory serves, only came up with one “phantom” hole. That is, a hole that the detector showed a lot of activity for, but nothing actually IN the hole.
All said and done I am very happy with my Garrett. The first dig turned up four pennies, one of which was corroded almost in half. None of the pennies was particularly old, though one was a 1973 — the year I was born. I also turned up a lot of trash consisting of pull tab(s), foil wrappers, and a plastic spoon that I just happened upon:
The play area was a little more difficult because I got a lot of beeps that I thought may have been from the play equipment itself. I will go back and try again, most definitely after I get the Sniper coil.
As you can see, not a great take, but good enough for my first hunt. And, as I said before, the ground was really cold and I couldn’t dig on most of the stuff that I hit on. My holes ended up being rather large, and I filled them all, but I need to hone my pinpointing technique, as the 6.5″ X 9″ elliptical-shaped coil on the Ace 150 is a little awkward.