This past Saturday was a detecting day in which I do not think I will forget for a long time! Started out at an old park where I have been doing well at recently and managed another Barber dime, 1911 D and then got a 1907 indian. With those old coins I was satisfied no matter if I dug only clad the rest of the day.
I soon went to an old school that I hit the other day where I got a couple Indians. There were a couple homes on the map that showed that they were on the edge of the playground. A couple hours passed with nothing but Wheaties when I came across a 12-44 signal about 2 inches deep...normally a memorial penny and normally a signal I would skip being so shallow. But I dug it anyway and out pops another Barber dime! 1911. Very surprised and excited! I start digging every signal now and started popping some awesome finds...back of a Heart Lockett, then a sweet 1918 D merc, and a WW1 Eagle button, 1912 Canadian LC, and then I popped out a coin I have not found in over a year...a 1929 SLQ! I was so happy to see my favorite coin type sitting there in the dirt! All of these finds were 5-8 inches deep but for some reason the barber dime was shallow.
Later on as I was wondering back to my car I got a deep scratchy signal. A guy wondered up to me and asked what I was doing just as a popped out a pocket watch frame that was encased in rust but had some gold showing through. I told the guy as I was putting the watch frame into my trash pocket that I was digging up mostly trash. I did not think much of the pocket watch until I got home and noticed that the gold showing through seemed to be pretty strong for gold plating. I then started to brake off the chunks of rust and under it was shiny gold. I wondered could this really be a gold watch frame? After an hour of removing the rust (which came from the iron gears and copper/brass springs I realized that what I had was indeed a gold watch frame! The gold portion is more of a shell...its pretty thin and a bit fragile but it shined up great and a gold plated copper frame would not do that without rubbing the gold plating off. I tested it and it came out as 14k! Now I need to go back and find the covers!
I am still in the process of trying to get all of the crap out of the inside of it. In the bottom pic you can see a serial number. I wonder if there is an acid dip that would zap the crap off and leave just the gold? The top pic of the watch which shows some of the rust that was on it...when I first dug it up it had 5x more rust on it.
Well thanks for looking!
Jared
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Originally Posted by del
Awesome hunt with even better finds. Great job adapting to site conditions.
I found a similar but smaller version (probably women's version) last year and I came to the conclusion it was gold filled.
