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Finding nickels with Fisher F4

mrmerck

Junior Member
Joined
Aug 25, 2010
Messages
33
I am about a month into owning my F4 and am starting to accumulate jars of clad finding.My problem is that my nickel jar is almost empty..:grin:I fully understand that nickels hit where pull tabs are on the VDI.Without having to dig myself to death on pull tabs, are there any tried and true methods that work to tell if the target is a nickel or not?

F2 users might chime in as well...

Thanks!
 
Nickels are weird.
On the F2, 33 is usually going to be a nickel, once in a while a nickel sized piece of can slaw but usually a nickel.

I have also dug plenty from 29-32, a few at 34-35 or higher, and strange as it seems, a couple at zinc in high 40's lower 50's.

Copper pennies, and dimes and quarters and the other higher coins usually are right on in their VDI #'s, and actually have a tone all their own.
Without looking at the screen, I KNOW when I roll over a quarter, dimes and copper pennies sound similar but I always know it's a coin.
Zinc pennies can go from the high 40's into the 50's, but I am usually right on those except for a still to high ratio of zinc screw on caps and pop tops.
Nickels, so far I can't hear a difference between these and can slaw or other trash in the tone...yet, so I look at the screen for the numbers.

So to recap...the high end is always right on, but as you get lower discrimination can get a little more sloppy, and in the case of nickels, can even overlap different sections.
Why, I don't know, maybe something to do with how they are laying in the ground, how wide the notches are set on these units, the fact that this is not a higher frequency detector, or a physics thing that I am just not geeked out enough to know.

On my 2 Tesoros, almost the same thing.
Higher end coins are always right on, but nickels have been found right on that nickel mark but also plenty on both sides of that mark, too, along with a bunch of odd shaped pieces of tabs and other trash.
These ARE higher frequency detectors too, so it should be easier for them to zero in, but I have found this is not always the case.

Basically there are less nickels out there to find overall than other coins, I believe, but if you want to find more just dig everything at least from 25 to 42, and in all the trash there should also be nickels.
Gold too, if you are lucky.

.
 
For some reason I find nickels more than other coins with my Tesoro Conquistador µMax, a number if dimes but few quarters. It has alot to do with the area you are hunting, the way you have your discrimination set & your willingness to dig alot of signals. Can't always reply on the display either, I for some reason have always remembered the day back when I had my F4 that one day I decided to dig a few iron signals (I always disc. out iron) and to my surprise out of the plug came a real dirty very corroded penny. This happened a few times that day. This is one of the reason I prefer a detector that doesn't have a display.
 
For some reason I find nickels more than other coins with my Tesoro Conquistador µMax, a number if dimes but few quarters. It has alot to do with the area you are hunting, the way you have your discrimination set & your willingness to dig alot of signals. Can't always reply on the display either, I for some reason have always remembered the day back when I had my F4 that one day I decided to dig a few iron signals (I always disc. out iron) and to my surprise out of the plug came a real dirty very corroded penny. This happened a few times that day. This is one of the reason I prefer a detector that doesn't have a display.

Well Steve, I guess I have been Tesoroized, (Is that a word? Should be), because of the amount of time hunting with my Vaquero before I got the F2, for me it is still and always will be all about hearing that good tone before I even look at that screen.
Even on the F2 there is a difference in those tones, but it took me awhile to be able to hear those differences, and I am still working on it.

I also have found gold everywhere from iron to zinc so I also dig most solid tones I come across no matter what.
I assume it's because of that, I have found a good amount of nickels in my travels with all my detectors.

This is the coin count from my first 10 months in this biz...
 

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Well Steve, I guess I have been Tesoroized, (Is that a word? Should be), because of the amount of time hunting with my Vaquero before I got the F2, for me it is still and always will be all about hearing that good tone before I even look at that screen.
Even on the F2 there is a difference in those tones, but it took me awhile to be able to hear those differences, and I am still working on it.

I also have found gold everywhere from iron to zinc so I also dig most solid tones I come across no matter what.
I assume it's because of that, I have found a good amount of nickels in my travels with all my detectors.

This is the coin count from my first 10 months in this biz...
Thats a nice haul. Not to hijack the thread but I am curious if you are getting more depth out of your detectors in Kansas that you did in Alabama. I have a forum buddy in Kansas that I talk from time to time and he gets amazing depth with his detectors, same goes for people in Ohio. Must be real mild ground out that way.

P.S. Tesoroized is a real word, it was added in the Merriam-Webster dictionary the day that the Tesoro Outlaw was released ;).
 
Thats a nice haul. Not to hijack the thread but I am curious if you are getting more depth out of your detectors in Kansas that you did in Alabama. I have a forum buddy in Kansas that I talk from time to time and he gets amazing depth with his detectors, same goes for people in Ohio. Must be real mild ground out that way.

P.S. Tesoroized is a real word, it was added in the Merriam-Webster dictionary the day that the Tesoro Outlaw was released ;).

Oh yea!
Most people on the forum don't have a clue on how bad the soil in Birmingham really is.
Not only the massive mineralization problems that most of the Southwestern hunters have to deal with, but veins of natural iron ore and what seems like a blanket of iron particles spread all over the area because of the history of the area and the material and garbage in the soil that was used to build the road systems over the years that has seem to spread...everywhere.
They don't call Birmingham "The Steel City" for nothing.
Ryanchappel, my old hunting partner, (Hey Michael!) has run magnets through the dirt and picked up iron, and his E-Track and all of my detectors had about the same limit on depth in most of that devil soil...about 2-3 inches.
Frustrating.
If I stayed there longer, and I really wanted a chance to find the deep older silver we all suspected is still there but too deep to reach, I probably would have bought a PI unit.

That's not to say we didn't find stuff.
I turned into a clad and jewelry hunter and did pretty well, and Michael has gotten great at outside the box thinking to find washouts and different sites that might hold that old silver he wants to find so bad and is still within reach.

Once in a while we came across some areas that actually had some pretty good dirt, nice dark stuff that is in the valleys or trucked in from somewhere and dumped in some areas in a few parks that I hunted, but that was rare.

Here in Kansas, well, this is a dream for me.
Exactly the opposite.
Nice dark soil everywhere, the depth on all my detectors is something I had to get used to...still amazed, sometimes.

Good and bad targets regularly are found at 5-6 and 7 inches with all my detectors, including the F2 and the Compadre, and I have found coins and other targets up to 8 and 9 inches a few times, maybe more.
I have just started hunting with the Vaq and the threshold tone and to be honest, there was a couple of targets I just gave up on because they were just so deep it was scary, and I am not used to making holes the size needed to dig deep like that.
That's gotta change, I guess.

I invited Michael to visit me sometime and go hunting for a few days but that would probably just ruin him forever if he ever did.
 
Oh yea!
Most people on the forum don't have a clue on how bad the soil in Birmingham really is.
Not only the massive mineralization problems that most of the Southwestern hunters have to deal with, but veins of natural iron ore and what seems like a blanket of iron particles spread all over the area because of the history of the area and the material and garbage in the soil that was used to build the road systems over the years that has seem to spread...everywhere.
They don't call Birmingham "The Steel City" for nothing.
Ryanchappel, my old hunting partner, (Hey Michael!) has run magnets through the dirt and picked up iron, and his E-Track and all of my detectors had about the same limit on depth in most of that devil soil...about 2-3 inches.
Frustrating.
If I stayed there longer, and I really wanted a chance to find the deep older silver we all suspected is still there but too deep to reach, I probably would have bought a PI unit.

That's not to say we didn't find stuff.
I turned into a jewelry hunter and did pretty well, and Michael has gotten great at outside the box thinking to find washouts and different sites that might hold that old silver he wants to find so bad and is still within reach.

Once in a while we came across some areas that actually had some pretty good dirt, nice dark stuff that is in the valleys or trucked in from somewhere and dumped in some areas in a few parks that I hunted, but that was rare.

Here in Kansas, well, this is a dream for me.
Exactly the opposite.
Nice dark soil everywhere, the depth on all my detectors is something I had to get used to...still amazed, sometimes.

Good and bad targets regularly are found at 5-6 and 7 inches with all my detectors, including the F2 and the Compadre, and I have found coins and other targets up to 8 and 9 inches a few times, maybe more.
I have just started hunting with the Vaq and the threshold tone and to be honest, there was a couple of targets I just gave up on because they were just so deep it was scary, and I am not used to making holes the size needed to dig deep like that.
That's gotta change, I guess.

I invited Michael to visit me sometime and go hunting for a few days but that would probably just ruin him forever if he ever did.
Thanks for the reply.
 
I run the F75 and on my nickels I watch for confidence on the meter 29-30-31 and nickels are hit or miss in trashy locations, though on a fairly clean site like a football field I have been searching I have been raking in the nickels.

Just takes time to get good at what your hearing, with the info your machine is giving you and even then there are these evil pull tabs that will hold the consistent 29-30 or 31 even after a 90° angle change ( that technique usual gives away a pull tab trying to be a nickel ) . In all though, a heavy trash area will have me digging alot less nickels and sometimes I'll hit good numbers and tone and it'll be folded can slaw, evil nickel tab, beaver-tail from a old style rip tab, gold or a nickel.

Lakota
 
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