AirmetTango
Forum Supporter
I went out to a “new to me” park earlier this week to hunt for a couple hours. I was drawn to this park mainly because old aerial photos revealed a baseball diamond sitting in a area that’s currently just grass. When looking at the park in person, it seemed to be the least likely spot in the park that a metal detectorist would be interested in hunting...the section sort of creates a border between a more modern section of the park with new ball fields and the obviously older section of the park (huge tress).
Getting ready to hunt, I was surprised that the Equinox ground balanced with a negative number - somewhere in the cobwebbed recesses of my brain, I was aware that was possible...I just hadn’t seen it before. For my area, the machine generally balances somewhere between positive single digits to low 40s, with teens to 20s most common.
Anyways, I spent the first 30 minutes or so allowing myself to get sidetracked by what every other detectorist probably gravitates to...the section of the park full of big trees with fat trunks. I started hunting there out of curiosity, and ended up with big fat nothing!
So, I moved on to my real target - the area of the former ball field, which is sort of deep, deep, deep right field for one of the current baseball diamonds. Within 2 minutes, I got over a nice sounding medium-high tone showing nice depth - pretty consistent all the way around, with minimal VDI spread centered around 19-21. “I’ll bet that’s an Indian!”, I thought. I dug, and I was down 8” when my pinpointer started to give me clear signs that the target was bigger than coin sized. Worried I was about to find can slaw and learn that my old ball field was covered in 8” of new soil, I seriously considered waving the white flag on this target...I generally don’t like to dig deep in parks anyway, because it gets too conspicuous and the holes start to get too difficult to pack back down to original grade to leave no trace.
In this case, the soil was pretty easy, so I decided to keep going...at the 10” mark, I finally got rewarded and popped out a cool old suspender buckle!! (See what I did there with the title??
) There’s no question looking at it - it’s old...probably late 1800s/early 1900s. The buckle is complete, but once I was cleaning it up at home, I realized the bottom portion is curled over. No worries, it’s in pretty amazing condition otherwise. The really cool part is, once I got all the dirt cleaned out, the buckle prongs still rotate freely! Hard to read the patent dates since they’re corroded and reversed from the bend, but it looks like “1858 & 1871”, so that adds support for dating it to late 1800s.
Over the next 45 minutes, I got over an early Buff (looks like 1917) and a couple of Wheats (‘20 & ‘39) before I had to abandon the field. A pair of little league teams showed up to play a game on the new diamond, and even though the area I was hunting was really way too deep to be a part of their field, there’s no outfield fence. So I figured it was best to move along and come back some other time.
Back to the big, fat trees, where I found nothing but a few clad coins before stopping for the day. I’ll head back sometime soon - I have no doubt that forgotten ball field is hiding some more goodies!
Getting ready to hunt, I was surprised that the Equinox ground balanced with a negative number - somewhere in the cobwebbed recesses of my brain, I was aware that was possible...I just hadn’t seen it before. For my area, the machine generally balances somewhere between positive single digits to low 40s, with teens to 20s most common.
Anyways, I spent the first 30 minutes or so allowing myself to get sidetracked by what every other detectorist probably gravitates to...the section of the park full of big trees with fat trunks. I started hunting there out of curiosity, and ended up with big fat nothing!
So, I moved on to my real target - the area of the former ball field, which is sort of deep, deep, deep right field for one of the current baseball diamonds. Within 2 minutes, I got over a nice sounding medium-high tone showing nice depth - pretty consistent all the way around, with minimal VDI spread centered around 19-21. “I’ll bet that’s an Indian!”, I thought. I dug, and I was down 8” when my pinpointer started to give me clear signs that the target was bigger than coin sized. Worried I was about to find can slaw and learn that my old ball field was covered in 8” of new soil, I seriously considered waving the white flag on this target...I generally don’t like to dig deep in parks anyway, because it gets too conspicuous and the holes start to get too difficult to pack back down to original grade to leave no trace.
In this case, the soil was pretty easy, so I decided to keep going...at the 10” mark, I finally got rewarded and popped out a cool old suspender buckle!! (See what I did there with the title??
) There’s no question looking at it - it’s old...probably late 1800s/early 1900s. The buckle is complete, but once I was cleaning it up at home, I realized the bottom portion is curled over. No worries, it’s in pretty amazing condition otherwise. The really cool part is, once I got all the dirt cleaned out, the buckle prongs still rotate freely! Hard to read the patent dates since they’re corroded and reversed from the bend, but it looks like “1858 & 1871”, so that adds support for dating it to late 1800s. Over the next 45 minutes, I got over an early Buff (looks like 1917) and a couple of Wheats (‘20 & ‘39) before I had to abandon the field. A pair of little league teams showed up to play a game on the new diamond, and even though the area I was hunting was really way too deep to be a part of their field, there’s no outfield fence. So I figured it was best to move along and come back some other time.
Back to the big, fat trees, where I found nothing but a few clad coins before stopping for the day. I’ll head back sometime soon - I have no doubt that forgotten ball field is hiding some more goodies!
Anyways, any small edge helps when going into these heavily hunted parks trying to find what may have been missed!
