I had a decent hunt yesterday at my favorite honey hole. Looking for a silver coin or two and all I managed was 9 wheats. I met a fellow detectorist there and he told me he had seem me there several times and wanted to say hello. I asked how many times he had been there and he guessed 5 or 6. He asked if I had ever found silver there and I said yes and asked if he had. He said no. He asked what I had found and I told him a few mercs. That was a true answer but not complete. No sense telling him about some of the better silver. He told me he had found over twenty bucks in modern change there. Again I clammed up. I must have taken at least 200 bucks from there. He also told me he doesn't dig penny or nickel signals. I really wanted to thank him for the three gold items I found there and the wheat cents and small silver rings but once again I was mute. He told me about his best ever find a Connecticut copper. I agreed it was a really great find. He asked what my best find was and I told him about my $2.50 gold coin. He began to argue with me that there was no such thing. He told me I was probably confusing one of the new gold dollar coins with a real gold coin. I suggested that he should look at his Red Book when he gets home. He asked what was on the coin and when I said an Indian he said that's a penny. I told him he was a very nice man and that it was fruitless to continue talking about it. I then asked him to join me and we could compare finds. He said he was going to hit another spot. On my drive home I swung by a nearby field and saw him. I hunted there once and decided to save it for 2010. I expect there will be loads for me to find when I finally get there.
Went to a clambake last night where all was fine until I found a bottle of Irish Whiskey. Got mighty blurry after that. I was in bed early and rose early. The cobwebs cleared out about noon time and the temperature was nearly 70! I had to go out. I've been visiting my favorite sites one by one figuring I won't be seeing them again until spring so I picked my most distant regular spot. An OK silver producer too. Got skunked for silver again and found 9 wheats again. Getting close to 250 wheats for the year which is a lot for me. Also scored a George VI Canadian cent. Met a nice old timer who went to the school who was interested in getting started detecting. He gave me some details about the school when he went there and I pointed him toward an Ace 250 should he want to try out the hobby. I told him that when I started to detect there I expected a lot of older silver coins, and while I had found a few, the numbers were low for the number of wheats. He said, "Sonny, we're poor mountain folk. I don't know if I ever had a dime in my pocket when I went to school here." Makes sense. UW has said this before too. My head was still a little fuzzy but I stopped at maybe my best clad coin site on the way home. I'm trying to match my 2008 quarter total which is the only denomination I haven't passed in 2009. I hit it hard for exactly one hour and found 66 coins including 27 quarters. Yes I was stupidly skipping a lot of other coins. They'll be there in the spring. Also dug a 1 Baht coin from Thailand. My last two foreign coins were found 80 miles apart and were both Thai 1 Baht coins. Weird.
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Two weeks ago I read a post from John in West VA and I broke down and bought a bottle of H2O2. I have collected coins for 35 years and when I was about 8 I cleaned a coin. Ruined it. Since then I have never cleaned a coin. I had a cruddy old wheat and tried it out. While I never did get the whole date to appear I did see the last digit and that it had an S mint mark. The coin looked no worse when I was done than it did when I started and because the coin was never going to be collectible I judged my experiment a success. Of the 18 wheats 3 had unreadable dates. I popped them in Peroxide for an hour and checked their progress. One now had a complete date (1917) and the others were getting there. Now for my questions. If leave a coin in the peroxide for too long will it reach a point where it's condition gets worse? How long do you leave them in? Do you change out the solution after some period of time? I'd like those answered and any other tips would be appreciated.
Closing in on 50K lifetime coins. (Not really but hopefully some time in 2011.)
Chris
If you've read this far I'd like to say thanks for looking!
Went to a clambake last night where all was fine until I found a bottle of Irish Whiskey. Got mighty blurry after that. I was in bed early and rose early. The cobwebs cleared out about noon time and the temperature was nearly 70! I had to go out. I've been visiting my favorite sites one by one figuring I won't be seeing them again until spring so I picked my most distant regular spot. An OK silver producer too. Got skunked for silver again and found 9 wheats again. Getting close to 250 wheats for the year which is a lot for me. Also scored a George VI Canadian cent. Met a nice old timer who went to the school who was interested in getting started detecting. He gave me some details about the school when he went there and I pointed him toward an Ace 250 should he want to try out the hobby. I told him that when I started to detect there I expected a lot of older silver coins, and while I had found a few, the numbers were low for the number of wheats. He said, "Sonny, we're poor mountain folk. I don't know if I ever had a dime in my pocket when I went to school here." Makes sense. UW has said this before too. My head was still a little fuzzy but I stopped at maybe my best clad coin site on the way home. I'm trying to match my 2008 quarter total which is the only denomination I haven't passed in 2009. I hit it hard for exactly one hour and found 66 coins including 27 quarters. Yes I was stupidly skipping a lot of other coins. They'll be there in the spring. Also dug a 1 Baht coin from Thailand. My last two foreign coins were found 80 miles apart and were both Thai 1 Baht coins. Weird.
[attachment 144404 110809-1.JPG]
Two weeks ago I read a post from John in West VA and I broke down and bought a bottle of H2O2. I have collected coins for 35 years and when I was about 8 I cleaned a coin. Ruined it. Since then I have never cleaned a coin. I had a cruddy old wheat and tried it out. While I never did get the whole date to appear I did see the last digit and that it had an S mint mark. The coin looked no worse when I was done than it did when I started and because the coin was never going to be collectible I judged my experiment a success. Of the 18 wheats 3 had unreadable dates. I popped them in Peroxide for an hour and checked their progress. One now had a complete date (1917) and the others were getting there. Now for my questions. If leave a coin in the peroxide for too long will it reach a point where it's condition gets worse? How long do you leave them in? Do you change out the solution after some period of time? I'd like those answered and any other tips would be appreciated.
Closing in on 50K lifetime coins. (Not really but hopefully some time in 2011.)
Chris
If you've read this far I'd like to say thanks for looking!