DIGGER27
12-19-2015, 09:38 AM
This is a long one but I hope you will be entertained if you care to read this novel.
There are so many great things about this coin and this hunt to tell you I don't know where to start. It is my first seated ever, and I have never found a Barber anything yet so I skipped right over that one.
It was found in an old park that goes back to the mid 20's but I never suspected anything like this could even exist in this park which I am now looking at with new eyes.
It was found near the entrance, one of the oldest and most popular places in this park where every hunter with a detector in this area has surely been over and over for decades but all missed it. I have been over this area countless times too but I also missed it every time...till now. It was surrounded by iron and masked to the hilt which is why it was never found to the present day.
The only reason I found it is because I am experimenting with new settings and techniques for hunting in mineralized soil with an unusual and extremely high iron content and a ridiculous amount if iron objects masking most everything buried around here.This thing was 6" deep, strange as it may seem a depth level that most cannot get to with any recognizable signals using any machine except a PI around here in this very difficult soil.
There were iron objects close on 3 sides, some deep iron underneath and a good sized rusty nail in the same hole that I believe might have been laying a few inches directly above it.
The fact that I heard something in this signal that made me stop and examine it more thoroughly and observed behavior that triggered my digging instinct still boggles my mind. I quit digging everything long ago and at this park in this site it would be an impossible task because of the amount of existing iron signals anyway.
I hope I can continue to learn and repeat this feat, if I can there might be untold riches still hanging around this very park that are yet to be discovered.
When I got it out of the ground I saw a silver rim but the coin was covered in dirt. I was hoping for a merc, a rosey would have been fine, I cleaned the dirt off the the back first and saw the words one dime and though fantastic, my first Barber. When I turned it over, cleaned it off and saw that sitting lady I almost fell over.
It is not impossible to find a seated coin here in the south in the state of Alabama, maybe at civil war camps and very old homesteads, but it is rare. To find one here inside the Birmingham city limits even more rare. A coin like this was on my bucket list but not very high up due to the numbers. Numbers and percentages rule my life in this hobby. Shock and awe do not come close to what I felt at the moment I realized I was holding in my hand at that moment. As funny as it seems I found 2 other things on this hunt that might turn out to make this relatively short hunt one for the ages.
The first target I dug was a 76 cent coin spill...the second was a beautiful nice sized sterling St. Christopher pendant.
As they say on all those late night tv ads..."But wait...there's more!"
After I dug the dime I continued to hunt a bit more and near the same area, in the mud and muck right at the edge of a small runoff stream that runs through this part of the park that has been saturated for over 80 years except in times of drought I dug the back of an old pocket watch. It was dark and dirty and covered with a thick layer of a hard black tar like substance. I thought it was just the back of an old cheaply made watch...interesting but not a stellar find by any means. However I do have some experience digging precious metals that have been laying in moist dirt for decades.
Most think that all silver and gold that comes up out of the ground will be clean and obvious but I know this is not true. Silver will tarnish to black in that environment quickly, gold might get covered with exactly this sort of tar and only heavy scrubbing will reveal the truth.I innocently threw this watch part into my tumbler just to see if some numbers would emerge on the inside so I could track down the age.A short time later I pulled it out to see the progress and instead of a silver or steel colored metal around the edges I saw small bits of a different colored metal that was revealed...a golden colored metal.That is when the process of scraping and scrubbing and more tumbling began.I worked on this thing most of the day on and off and over time something great emerged.No numbers or marks that I can see so far on the inside,still a little more cleaning to do and I still hope to find a clue. It isn't heavy enough to be solid gold but I cut into it deep most of the way through and that yellow color stayed true all the way.I believe it is rolled gold...1/20th gold content which would account for the lesser weight.I am asking for an acid test kit for Christmas, a present to myself that is long overdue and hopefully will solve this little mystery. If it is gold on this hunt I actually managed to find silver jewelry, a bucket list silver coin and a rare gold pocket watch piece. Like I said, this might turn out to be a very special hunt indeed.
Thanks for slogging through this long tome but I hope I passed on just a bit of the excitement I felt and still do.
I will update this thread when I test the watch part.
There are so many great things about this coin and this hunt to tell you I don't know where to start. It is my first seated ever, and I have never found a Barber anything yet so I skipped right over that one.
It was found in an old park that goes back to the mid 20's but I never suspected anything like this could even exist in this park which I am now looking at with new eyes.
It was found near the entrance, one of the oldest and most popular places in this park where every hunter with a detector in this area has surely been over and over for decades but all missed it. I have been over this area countless times too but I also missed it every time...till now. It was surrounded by iron and masked to the hilt which is why it was never found to the present day.
The only reason I found it is because I am experimenting with new settings and techniques for hunting in mineralized soil with an unusual and extremely high iron content and a ridiculous amount if iron objects masking most everything buried around here.This thing was 6" deep, strange as it may seem a depth level that most cannot get to with any recognizable signals using any machine except a PI around here in this very difficult soil.
There were iron objects close on 3 sides, some deep iron underneath and a good sized rusty nail in the same hole that I believe might have been laying a few inches directly above it.
The fact that I heard something in this signal that made me stop and examine it more thoroughly and observed behavior that triggered my digging instinct still boggles my mind. I quit digging everything long ago and at this park in this site it would be an impossible task because of the amount of existing iron signals anyway.
I hope I can continue to learn and repeat this feat, if I can there might be untold riches still hanging around this very park that are yet to be discovered.
When I got it out of the ground I saw a silver rim but the coin was covered in dirt. I was hoping for a merc, a rosey would have been fine, I cleaned the dirt off the the back first and saw the words one dime and though fantastic, my first Barber. When I turned it over, cleaned it off and saw that sitting lady I almost fell over.
It is not impossible to find a seated coin here in the south in the state of Alabama, maybe at civil war camps and very old homesteads, but it is rare. To find one here inside the Birmingham city limits even more rare. A coin like this was on my bucket list but not very high up due to the numbers. Numbers and percentages rule my life in this hobby. Shock and awe do not come close to what I felt at the moment I realized I was holding in my hand at that moment. As funny as it seems I found 2 other things on this hunt that might turn out to make this relatively short hunt one for the ages.
The first target I dug was a 76 cent coin spill...the second was a beautiful nice sized sterling St. Christopher pendant.
As they say on all those late night tv ads..."But wait...there's more!"
After I dug the dime I continued to hunt a bit more and near the same area, in the mud and muck right at the edge of a small runoff stream that runs through this part of the park that has been saturated for over 80 years except in times of drought I dug the back of an old pocket watch. It was dark and dirty and covered with a thick layer of a hard black tar like substance. I thought it was just the back of an old cheaply made watch...interesting but not a stellar find by any means. However I do have some experience digging precious metals that have been laying in moist dirt for decades.
Most think that all silver and gold that comes up out of the ground will be clean and obvious but I know this is not true. Silver will tarnish to black in that environment quickly, gold might get covered with exactly this sort of tar and only heavy scrubbing will reveal the truth.I innocently threw this watch part into my tumbler just to see if some numbers would emerge on the inside so I could track down the age.A short time later I pulled it out to see the progress and instead of a silver or steel colored metal around the edges I saw small bits of a different colored metal that was revealed...a golden colored metal.That is when the process of scraping and scrubbing and more tumbling began.I worked on this thing most of the day on and off and over time something great emerged.No numbers or marks that I can see so far on the inside,still a little more cleaning to do and I still hope to find a clue. It isn't heavy enough to be solid gold but I cut into it deep most of the way through and that yellow color stayed true all the way.I believe it is rolled gold...1/20th gold content which would account for the lesser weight.I am asking for an acid test kit for Christmas, a present to myself that is long overdue and hopefully will solve this little mystery. If it is gold on this hunt I actually managed to find silver jewelry, a bucket list silver coin and a rare gold pocket watch piece. Like I said, this might turn out to be a very special hunt indeed.
Thanks for slogging through this long tome but I hope I passed on just a bit of the excitement I felt and still do.
I will update this thread when I test the watch part.