How much gold do you think we all miss?

Oh we miss A LOT of gold! :laughing: Drives a guy insane just thinking about it! Theres a guy (bootyhoundpa) over on another Forum that specialized in hunting for micro gold...He can find the most tiniest little earrings you ever seen! And he does this consistently, small chains even...He beach hunts, but still, gotta be a lot of gold earrings in every oldish park...Chains/bracelets too...even a decent sized one will sound like scrap, possibly has seen a coil overhead multiple times and either dismissed or disced out...

I would estimate, within a mile where each of us are sitting, theres several oz of gold out there! Might be old Lady Millers ring she lost when pruning her rhododendrons 40yrs ago, might be in the back yard of the new apartment complex where that young couple had a fight and she threw her ring off the balcony...

You know theres a lot down in the sewers from getting flushed, old coins buried safely under the street or sidewalk that we drive over every single day! A boat load of jewelry along about any parking lot edge mixed in with the trash where the snow plows push! Insanity!

So yeah...lots and lots of gold! Its a fools errand nearly...to hunt for dirt gold, but if a fellow reads a lot of posts, condenses and retains that knowledge of locations, replicates the patterns/methods of successful and steady dirt gold finders, yeah..you will get your share and walk right over a LOT MORE!:laughing:
Mud
 

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I use to think I was passing on gold until I started to hunt Switzerland. The modern francs here are made of some low grade metal and all ring out in the gold range.

5 franc = 5 dollars = a vdi of 63
2 franc = 2 dollars = a vdi of 58
1 franc = 1 dollar = a vdi of 51
Half France = 50 cents = a vdi of 47
20 centimine = 20 cents = a vdi of 48
10 centimine = 10 cents = a vdi of 49
5 centimine = 5 cents = a vdi of 57
2 euro = $2.30 = a vdiof 65

All are in the gold range and I dig just about everything except 53 vdi( square pull top) or is not repeatable = erratic. In the six months I have hunted here I have only found two gold rings and they were distinct vid and very solid signals that did not move (vdi) when scanned from multiple directions.

I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I am not overlooking gold. I even dig some erratics on each hunt that just seem odd as chains usually produce this broken signal in the gold vdi range. It is always a square table or a whatzit but never gold.

I have learned that gold is very distinct in both sound and vdi and is rarely erratic unless a chain. The sound is different, a 5 France coin has a mellow modulated but solid report with a repeatable vdi where as gold I have found with a 63 or 64 vdi had a sharp solid report with repeatable vdi's. It is hard to describe and takes practice to learn. It is all in the tone followed by vdi as a cross reference.

I suppose mineralization in the ground you hunt affects this as well as the detector you use. The above is based on a atpro.
 
To some degree ground conditions play a role in how easy it might me to miss something good. Here in southwest Kansas my experience has been not very likely as long as you are fairly good with your detector. Now missing goodies due to depth or masking is a different subject altogether.

I've actually done a fair amount of testing this concept and the results were pretty much what I expected. I've gone through sites like parks and schools and passed up everything I felt was not worth digging. Then go back later and dig it all. My results were I had passed up a good 98% junk. Only a few turned out to be good targets and most were either corroded really bad or missing/cut parts.

If you're fairly competent with your detector then you can tell the good from the bad with pretty good accuracy. There is always a chance you can miss something, but I would attribute it more to having just not gotten your coil over the good target rather than passing up a good target.

I agree!
 
Great stuff here! Gold is a Cruel Mistress! Dirt gold especially! Woe unto the person that commits to hunting her!...I think gold on every outing... especially chains!...cant help it...I dream about my hunting area and where it may be hiding...consequently, I stab up an inordinant amount of trash in certain specific locations where Gold may be lost..But thats good, I got a really fast stoopNstab retrieval method....On any given day I'm pulling 45+targets/hr in a target heavy park setting...In doing this, you learn a lot about drop zones and whatnot and it becomes second nature...

Rings are easy compared to chains...A good solid hit from foil on up like everyone mentioned, unless they are filligree, on edge, masked, or broken of course... With a few exceptions...sure we see some 30+gr rings found from time to time, some bigger than that even, but for most general park hunting, they are gonna be small 2gr 10ks and maybe a nice 10gr+ 14k class ring now and then...

The BIG money is in the chains! You gotta be able to hit those! Even for the water hunters, you gotta hit those big gold chains to make a year! A monster 100gr+ will sound like trash! So here we are, right back into the trash where we started, hunting bastard signals for chains!...The only way out is to stab up all the scrap if you want to find the chains...Like I said, Cruel Mistress, fools errand...stabbing clad pays better and is a lot less trouble! Every once in a while though...a bastard signal comes through bigly!
 

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Great stuff here! Gold is a Cruel Mistress! Dirt gold especially! Woe unto the person that commits to hunting her!...I think gold on every outing... especially chains!...cant help it...I dream about my hunting area and where it may be hiding...consequently, I stab up an inordinant amount of trash in certain specific locations where Gold may be lost..But thats good, I got a really fast stoopNstab retrieval method....On any given day I'm pulling 45+targets/hr in a target heavy park setting...In doing this, you learn a lot about drop zones and whatnot and it becomes second nature...

Rings are easy compared to chains...A good solid hit from foil on up like everyone mentioned, unless they are filligree, on edge, masked, or broken of course... With a few exceptions...sure we see some 30+gr rings found from time to time, some bigger than that even, but for most general park hunting, they are gonna be small 2gr 10ks and maybe a nice 10gr+ 14k class ring now and then...

The BIG money is in the chains! You gotta be able to hit those! Even for the water hunters, you gotta hit those big gold chains to make a year! A monster 100gr+ will sound like trash! So here we are, right back into the trash where we started, hunting bastard signals for chains!...The only way out is to stab up all the scrap if you want to find the chains...Like I said, Cruel Mistress, fools errand...stabbing clad pays better and is a lot less trouble! Every once in a while though...a bastard signal comes through bigly!

Is that 74g chain really at the bottom of a lake now?
 
You miss as much gold as you walk over and either your machine doesn't register it or you decide not to dig it or you miss putting your coil over it by half an inch or more.
 
I bet if you went a year and dug every trash signal you came across you would have more value in scrap weight metal then you would in gold. But who knows, you might get lucky. I've dug 1 little gold ring and some silver trinkets here and there. My problem is I have no consistency. Some days I dig everything some days I don't.
 
I'm just curious to know what everyone thinks about signals we don't dig , that may have possibly been gold. I'm looking for opinions on the subject. I've often wondered myself , did I miss the gold.

I rely almost exclusively on other MDers not being willing to dig up the foil range signals. It's incredibly common for me to find a site that has been cleared of virtually all dime and quarter signals, but lots of penny and nickel ones. These are my FAVORITE sites, as I know that other MDers have left any goodies that were in the ground for me to find. I've not been disappointed.

In the first two years of metal detecting, I've found 31 gold rings. ON LAND. Not a single one was water found. I've found a gold bangle at a beach, but not one of those 31 rings came from anywhere but our local city parks, schools, and neighborhood parks. There's plenty to be found if you're willing to dig those mid-tones.

I'm always surprised how amazing metal detecting has been for me, as a simple result of other people "skipping the trash". I also find a LOT of stainless steel, tungsten, and even one platinum ring... all in the mid-range.

Cheers!

Skippy
 
I bet if you went a year and dug every trash signal you came across you would have more value in scrap weight metal then you would in gold. But who knows, you might get lucky. I've dug 1 little gold ring and some silver trinkets here and there. My problem is I have no consistency. Some days I dig everything some days I don't.

I STRONGLY doubt that, if you're digging in the locations where rings/jewelry get dropped. If you're digging in a trash pit, sure. But city parks, where there's sports events, or mom's greasing up kids with sunblock... you'll find rings.

The value of my gold is approximately 3.5-4x the value of the clad I find every year (for the last two years), all on land hunts. I'm certain if I washed and turned in the hundreds of pounds of aluminum I've pulled (or at least it feels that way with the dirt on it), it still wouldn't equal the $3,000 a year I'm finding in gold and other jewelry that's sellable. I've found maybe 3 pounds of lead in that time frame, and maybe 100lbs of washed/clean aluminum, and 100 lbs of iron scrap. No way that comes close the the $6000 I've made in gold/jewelry sales (and that's a real number, btw, not a fake "I think it would be worth this much" number... This year (2016) I made $2830, last year a bit more than $3800 (2015), but $2K of that came from ONE ring.
 
I actually get tired of digging clad and sometimes go out and target just the strange signals. You'll dig a ton of trash doing that, but it just amazes me how all those little bits can sound off differently. Found plenty of jewelry digging that way, from earrings to rings to pendants... Even the trash pulled (other than pulltabs and bottlecaps) intrigues me. Of course if the clad is shallow, I'll scoop it up too on those weird hunts.
 
That was partly sarcastic and partly the truth. I bet there is a very large number of people who get started and detect for a year or so and never dig a spec of gold. I would love to see a study of the number of people who have metal detectors and how long they used them.
 
Here's another variation on the topic: How many caches have you walked past, simply because they gave you an overload signal on your machine ? And you thought: "Durned sprinkler head" or "durned hubcab", right?

Ok, in order not to miss any caches, you must dig up all such overload signals (that were too big to be a coin so you skipped them). That might mean digging up sprinkler heads in parks, utility boxes, etc.... But ... I'm sure the city people will understand. Afterall, it "might have been a cache".

I dug what I thought was a pop can that turned out to be an 1885 silver dollar years ago. I always wonder about the overload signals now.
 
You'll never miss it if you dig it. Otherwise, it's anyones guess. Jewelry comes in so many configurations and shapes especially after getting trampled on in the dirt, it could give off many different signals.


At the risk of offending those who invest in expensive technologies, interpreting, discriminating, running fancy algorithms, I just dig everything.
Guess I am a hard headed old swamp yankee.

My Sea Hunter II gets a lot of use on the land.

Call me crazy.
 
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