Well a hunting buddy and I went to another old lot in West Texas today. We had a full audience with about 20 prarie dogs skirting around the lot from hole to hole while we detected. I was not having much luck, but of course my hunting buddy had already found a couple of wheat pennies that were older than us and a couple of marbles by the time we took our first water break. Next time out, I felt luck to eyeball a marble and put that in my bag. Then I went out by the main street and got a good signal and dug it up. First I saw wings and was thinking some military wings......NOT...it was a eagle badge from I believe a Harley shovelhead motorcycle. Still pretty neat being an eagle and all. Well we went to get a drink again and then went back out for our last time. I managed to finally find a couple of wheat pennies...1935D and a 1948D....both older than me, so I had at least succeeded in our quest, which is to find something older than ourselves. The wheats, especially the 1935 normally will hit between 65 and 70 VDI's on the V3i that I am using with my 6x10 eclipse coil. These hit about 80, I thought I had found silver dimes on both of them....but not. Then I worked my way over another area that I know we both had searched and got a 91 VDI and it pinpointed GREEN. Man, I am thinking silver half or silver dollar. Well, I dug the hole and dumped the dirt and ran my coil over the dumped dirt, but the target was still in the hole. I looked down and if it would have been one of those idiots on tv, I would have been doing cartwheels....lol. Instead, I just knelt down and picked the "roundness" out of the hole. First, I was disappointed, because it had a hole in it at the top, second....I told myself...who cares, and then when I started looking at it, it had a design on it.....but it wasn't a coin. It was really kind of crusty looking and my hunting buddy said it looked like a token. We cleaned it a little and saw that it said something about Reaper on it and centennial. When I got home I googled it and found that it was a token created by International Harvester Company in 1931 to commemorate the invention of The Reaper by Cyrus Hall McCormick. They only made 25000 of these bronze tokens and I have one of them!!! I love finding coins, but tokens, tags, badges and artifacts of the time era really bring a piece of history into my collection.
The pics that I have are not real good, but we removed some of the crusty out at the site and I got enough off of it to see the 1831 - 1931 on the backside....that is good enough for me, the patina stays. A little long winded description, but things like this make me want to find more and more.
The pics that I have are not real good, but we removed some of the crusty out at the site and I got enough off of it to see the 1831 - 1931 on the backside....that is good enough for me, the patina stays. A little long winded description, but things like this make me want to find more and more.