As far as I know I'm the first to write this about nickles, but I have found them to be more of a problem then just falling into single populated junk zone!
Ready!
Story time.
Me and my brother both have Fisher 1266's and in trying to increase our nickle finds we starting working on a way to get the nickles to fall in between the two discrimination controls, well one thing led to another.
I started air testing the nickle and I found that the farther from the coil the more discrimination it took to reject the nickle
So then I decided to make a nickle test garden, which would be added to my one year old coin gardens. My coin garden's go's like this,
3" garden, has a clad dime, a nickle, and a clad quarter.
6" garden, has a copper penny, a nickle, and a silver quarter.
Now the added nickle garden goes like this,
Nickle @ 4"
Nickle @ 5"
Nickle @ 6"
So, out I go with the 1266 to see if in the ground at different depths if I could adjust the nickles within the two disc controls. Well I did but it took a much wider range of the two controls
My first thought was that it had something to do with the old electronics of the 1266's.
Well, I got to thinking???? if the nickles at depth move up in discrimination level then wouldn't they move up into higher ID levels on another detector?
Now it gets interesting!
I take my Coinstrike out with the Sunray CS-5 coil thinking a nickle was a nickle at any depth that the detector would get a good report on, right?
Not so! here is the numbers I got, (the Coinstrike's numeric range for nickles is 9-11)
Nickel's
3" ID= 10
4" ID= 12
5" ID= 20
6" ID= 26-27 (and a bit jumpy) (Clad dimes and copper cents come in around 2
Now that's two detectors! but I'm not done!
I got out my Whites 5900 Di Pro/sl and tried it!
The nickles went right up the scale just like the the other two detectors.
Then I thought maybe its because they are fresh buried??
So then I decided to do some more test, I looked at what I had in my coin gardens,
The 3"had a one year buried nickle and the 6" had a nickle buried at the same time! Well I tried both of those and got the same results
Now, I was thinking that the same thing should happen to other coins right? Wrong!
My 3" garden also has a quarter and so does the 6" garden, so I did the test on the two different quarters. (the coinstrike's range for quarters is 30-34)
the 3" quarter ID= 33
the 6" quarter ID= 35 (a little jumpy) (Nothing like the spread as the nickles)
Okay, were almost up to date (where I'm at now)
Lets look at the 5" nickle at a meter reading of 20, at first I couldn't get any audio report on it at all??
so then I studied that problem for awhile and then it hit me,
The Zinc range for the coinstrike is!!! ?? you got it 20-22, I had Zinc's notched out!
Now the 6" nickle with meter reading of 26-27 that's the edge of the high tone range for copper pennies and dimes and it was a bit jumpy, so a 6" plus nickle can read like a penny!
That's why cherry picking nickles is pretty easy down to around 3" or so, they read like nickles, but they get more evasive the deeper they get. And if you work through the different depths down to about 5.5" they pass though several other junk zones
Now, my thinking at this point about finding more nickles gets a little difficult.
Nickles down to 3" will ID @ nickles. But at 5" they come in more like a Zinc, that means for me I would have to ID the target, then read the depth, if its a 20 and 5" deep then its a little more likely to be a nickle because Zinc's are not that deep around here.
So, go bury some nickles and get some numbers and let us know what you find. An early test is to just do some air testing at different measured points from the coil and see if the nickles don't go up the scale?
I'm still looking at some more testing of nickles,
WV62 (one of my brothers) has a Fisher F75 and I want to get him to see how the F75 respones to my nickle garden. Also, my other brother has my CZ-7a Pro on loan and I want to try it out on the nickles as well.
The Elusive,
The Evasive,
Nickles
Mark
