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Just needed to vent (if its ok)

mikeybonez28

Junior Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2016
Messages
91
Bought a house built in 1920 & ive hit it every chance i get and have found a whole lot of junk & a few modern coins. The yards look like they havent been hit but im coming up with nada. Every decent signal i get turns out to be !!!!. There is a dump adjacent to the house but that hasn't produced much either
 
You say the yard looks like it hasn't been hit, but how would you be able to tell if someone already detected it years ago?? That's just how it goes man, it's hard to find anywhere, public or private, that hasn't been detected before. Metal detectors have been around for over 50 years...
 
Yeah. Don't let the forum fool you, chances are if it's obviously a good house or site then it has been detected by someone at some point. I have a lot of god days and a lot of bad ones. It's party of the hobby, don't get frustrated or jealous. If your really having a hard time join a club or schedule a meetup, it's surprising how others around you will often yield good finds for yourself. I have had nothing but positive experiences with both and although I like the solo digs, having a crappy day with another detectorist makes it not that bad


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It could be there's silver there, just under a lot of junk that you have to get out of the way first, it could have been cherry picked long ago, or it could be there never was silver there, all of which I've seen too in lots of places that looked good... Some of my best looking sites have turned out to be extreme duds.
 
Sometime in the past, the yard could have been filled in with more dirt making any coins deeper. I would start by trying to locate places where people would have spent time, such as where old clotheslines might have been. Under trees where they might have played and rested in the shade and a path leading to an outhouse if they didn't have indoor plumbing. Along sidewalks and driveways are always good places to search.
 
I have been door knocking now for 4 years. And have found very little. I live in county that has a lot of mid to early 1800's homes. Most of the homes have had fill been brought in. Then there is the most common the yard has been hit by others several times. Plus you have to remember that they did not have a lot of money back the. So what they had they were vary careful not to loose.
Not to say that we do not find anything. But findings are few and far between. Hang in there your day will come. there are treasures out there to be found. Good luck and happy hunting
 
My house was built in 1947 and I found like 1940 1945 wheat cents,thats about it.
I got permission to hunt a friends 1800s house but yep, found only modern coins and a piece of old lead pipe.:no:
 
dont give up.

What kind of detector are you using? Is there alot of iron?

Bounty Hunter Land Ranger Pro & there's a metric !!!! ton of iron including nails, stainless hardware, quite a bit of wire and lots of rusted out !!!! in what I'm assuming used to be a dump. Not sure if it was a house dump or a town dump but I've found bottles (nothing spectacular except one common ink) and a few rusted out pails, oh & an old clock which has definitely seen better days.

I haven't been able to ID an old clothes line or an old privy. There's one old tree that was brought down some time back but it was a large tree. Only problem with that tree is is the fact that it's in the middle of all the damn iron!! There's another decent size tree but it's on the neighbor's property and he doesn't seem to friendly, kind of a jackass actually... I have an email out to a local park that has an old homestead on it but I haven't heard back from them as of yet but I did send the email yesterday to the City Clerk and I wouldn't expect an answer before tomorrow anyways but I am hopeful. There are also quite a few State Game Lands with either old CCC camps or other interesting features but I need to call the PGC and see if I can get permission. There's also an old mill town that I can't get any information on that I'd like to hunt as well but it's littered with modern trash from teenagers having a good time there

I don't know so much about clubs since my schedule is always changing and my only guaranteed day off is Sunday which also sucks for deer hunting. Those not familiar with PA, they don't allow big game hunting on Sundays, only certain pest species

Locally there are several churches and older spots but I haven't ever door knocked before and I need to get my wording and approach down. I might try my luck with an abandoned house on my block if I can track the owner down. hopefully their neighbor will have a good idea
 
All that junk metal will be masking your good stuff, for sure. Maybe if you had an XP Deus you could find treasure in the junk, but without a really good high dollar detector, you are just going to have to dig up all the junk first, to be able to detect the good stuff. If the junk is really, really thick, you may be better off to just shovel up the dirt and dump it into a sifter, and look that way. It is labor intensive, but then you don't miss anything due to masking.
 
Sometime in the past, the yard could have been filled in with more dirt making any coins deeper. I would start by trying to locate places where people would have spent time, such as where old clotheslines might have been. Under trees where they might have played and rested in the shade and a path leading to an outhouse if they didn't have indoor plumbing. Along sidewalks and driveways are always good places to search.

If it was filled in, the yard would be level with it's surroundings (or at least should be) and there wouldn't be depressions everywhere from buried trash. The clad coins I have found were all 3" or less so I'm doubtful of fill. It also transitions to sand after a few inches which I find odd

No signs of an old clothes line, house has more modern aluminum siding on it so it makes it difficult to pinpoint an older feature like that, unfortunately for me & we have no plans or money to redo the siding. The only tree there is in the middle of the assumed dump and there's A LOT of iron around there and bottles but the ones I was able to date were from the 10's or 20's. There are some that have older seam lines but no real markings so they're a bit harder to ID. I swung around the tree stump previously and dug up lots of iron and rust, I need to sift it or use a magnet to get that junk out. Harbor Freight here I come

No real sidewalks up my way but I've gone around the walkway on the side of the house but got a lot of interference but one day I'll drop sens and try hitting it again. I think the front porch and subsequent stairs were a later add on but it's a bit of a pain to get under there at the moment. We've talked about redoing the stairs and possibly the porch so I might have to extend the project by a day or so to detect under there while it's wide open.

It seems that for detecting that this place is a $h1t storm of garbage which is not fun for a newbie like myself
 
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All that junk metal will be masking your good stuff, for sure. Maybe if you had an XP Deus you could find treasure in the junk, but without a really good high dollar detector, you are just going to have to dig up all the junk first, to be able to detect the good stuff. If the junk is really, really thick, you may be better off to just shovel up the dirt and dump it into a sifter, and look that way. It is labor intensive, but then you don't miss anything due to masking.

Haven't used the Deus, can't even afford to spell it really but with what I've seen come out of 1 small area I think even that would be fooled. 2 galzanized buckets, chunk of OLD cement with 1/2 rebar and lots of assorted rust in a 3x3 area, oh and some iron pipe for good measure too. I don't doubt the Deus is better but doesn't every machine false with that much iron? It most likely handles small iron targets like nails better but my machine was nulling out every few swings and some of this was a foot deep.

Once I have time to attack it, I'll use a sifter bucket or grab a HD magnet from Harbor Freight and scoop it out and rescan. Only choice here I think is dig everything the jack up Sens, lower Disc and pray I find something worthwhile.

I will at some point go after permissions but I need to improve my plugging & this yard is kind of perfect since it wasn't pretty to begin with
 
Haven't used the Deus, can't even afford to spell it really but with what I've seen come out of 1 small area I think even that would be fooled. 2 galzanized buckets, chunk of OLD cement with 1/2 rebar and lots of assorted rust in a 3x3 area, oh and some iron pipe for good measure too. I don't doubt the Deus is better but doesn't every machine false with that much iron? It most likely handles small iron targets like nails better but my machine was nulling out every few swings and some of this was a foot deep.

Once I have time to attack it, I'll use a sifter bucket or grab a HD magnet from Harbor Freight and scoop it out and rescan. Only choice here I think is dig everything the jack up Sens, lower Disc and pray I find something worthwhile.

I will at some point go after permissions but I need to improve my plugging & this yard is kind of perfect since it wasn't pretty to begin with

Sounds like your yard was once a demolition dump site. Good luck with that! You probably need a back hoe and a dump truck to excavate who knows how many feet of your yard to get down to the original top soil. You could have 50 feet of demolition debris in your yard! I suggest that you check with your local library or historical society for some old maps to see what the elevation was at your location, originally. Hopefully you will only have to dig up a foot or so to get down to the original top soil. Good luck to you.
 
Sounds like your yard was once a demolition dump site. Good luck with that! You probably need a back hoe and a dump truck to excavate who knows how many feet of your yard to get down to the original top soil. You could have 50 feet of demolition debris in your yard! I suggest that you check with your local library or historical society for some old maps to see what the elevation was at your location, originally. Hopefully you will only have to dig up a foot or so to get down to the original top soil. Good luck to you.

The side yard is full of the big stuff but it's OLD, including a ton of broken pottery, bottles and assorted other household debris so I was thinking it was previously a farm dump or town dump which also explains the depressions in the ground here & there. I was able to pull the Sanborn maps and prior to 1920, nothing was here, it was part of the neighbor's property but was later split. Even on historicaerials dot com the old topo maps don't show anything. I'm not in the original city limits but the later expansion.

Can you elaborate on the original elevation? Is that a measurement I could get off a topo map or Sanborn and how would I verify it currently? I have a GPS with altimeter but is that accurate enough? I could go to City Hall or the library or historical society but if it's as easy as using a topo than why bother? Unless their maps are much more detailed then I'll head over there
 
Hey Mikey-
It sounds to me like you are sitting on an iron mine. Actually, what you are sitting on is the dump. It really was a thing to build houses on "landfill" back in the day; I grew up in a house that was built on a 1950's landfill.
Unfortunately, what this may mean for you is there really isn't anything worth looking through the trash for, being that it's, you know, trash and all. By that I mean it's literally trash, the stuff that people threw away, not stuff people just left laying around. The chances of a decent find are fairly low.
And your current detector is not going to help. No Bounty Hunter detector is going to hunt that area effectively. Even the most advanced detectors out there regardless of brand are going to struggle in that environment. Giant chunks of iron defy discrimination pretty much across the board, and will mask any good targets. It's one thing to defeat masking by a nail or chunk of wire; a bucket or length of pipe is another story altogether.
If you choose to continue on your quest to detect this property, I wish you good luck. If it was me, I'd move on. With no history that would make me think there is a good possibility of good targets in this mess of iron and garbage, I'd spend my detecting time elsewhere.
 
Hey Mikey-
It sounds to me like you are sitting on an iron mine. Actually, what you are sitting on is the dump. It really was a thing to build houses on "landfill" back in the day; I grew up in a house that was built on a 1950's landfill.
Unfortunately, what this may mean for you is there really isn't anything worth looking through the trash for, being that it's, you know, trash and all. By that I mean it's literally trash, the stuff that people threw away, not stuff people just left laying around. The chances of a decent find are fairly low.
And your current detector is not going to help. No Bounty Hunter detector is going to hunt that area effectively. Even the most advanced detectors out there regardless of brand are going to struggle in that environment. Giant chunks of iron defy discrimination pretty much across the board, and will mask any good targets. It's one thing to defeat masking by a nail or chunk of wire; a bucket or length of pipe is another story altogether.
If you choose to continue on your quest to detect this property, I wish you good luck. If it was me, I'd move on. With no history that would make me think there is a good possibility of good targets in this mess of iron and garbage, I'd spend my detecting time elsewhere.

I'm well aware of some of old habits like that. Entire neighborhoods like my old one in NYC were built upon landfills and trash or swamp/salt water marsh. My shop, in addition to the mall it's in is built on a dump that formed from the trash pile after a flood in the 70's I think. From what I can see in my slight exploration of this horrid area is a large concentration of garbage & bottles on one side of the house on a hill/mound and damn near nothing in the back, front and other side asides from small assorted junk like nails, screws, aluminum cans and can tabs. The dump side has produced about a dozen intact bottles dating from the 10's or 20's and the large iron trash including pails, pipe (copper & iron) bricks, an old clock and a 5 foot long railroad tie with a piece of pipe in the middle (that was a royal pain to dig out) which was hiding a partially melted toy firetruck. It was plastic but it was an old design and older material

I'm also aware that my machine isn't the greatest but it's what I could afford at the time and it does what it's supposed to when there isn't pounds of iron in the ground. It has located coins and ID'ed them well but like a lot of other machines it'll also ID a washer as a coin of a brass grommet. Like you said, no machine is infallible and this one is no exception but I have found a decent amount of clad with it the few times I've had it out, including here and it pinpoints pretty well when it's a normally sized target. I'm still in the newbie category and still learning the machine so that does play a role in some of the false readings (inexperience, not quick switching to All Metal and not knowing the Golden Numbers for various targets). There are some locations I would love to hit but every time I think about it something else comes up and when I'm free again I forget. It's also a bit of a pain to tray and figure out who the hell actually owns some of these places and I have no idea who to email to find out.

There are two popular lakes near me, an old mill town, several ghost towns and an old homestead but it's not completely computerized out here and most information isn't easily accessible, plus it's 3 or 4 different counties I'm looking at. Back in NYC, property information was online & easily accessible, but here? it's complicated to say the least
 
Mikey, I had the same problem as you. My house was built in 1895 i thought for sure I was going to get tons of old coins.

Well I have found a few things that are neat but it was not easy.

The first thing that helped me was to hit the outskirts if possible. Get as far away from the iron and work your way in or around the iron before diving in.

2nd. Just start digging targets in all metal near the original sidewalk area. I found an 1860's Napolean the 3rd digging random holes near my porch and getting rid of iron with a neodymium magnet. I even crawled under my porch :laughing:

Good luck!
 
Old dump sites are a bottle hunters dream.

Don't discount the bottles you are finding. Some are worth far more than any coin.

My house was built in 1914. I dug a lot of trash before I started to get to the good stuff. But I have 2 buffalo nickles, 2 Mercury dimes, 1 Barber dime, 1 Indian Head penny, and about 45 wheat cents to show for it. All out of a yard about 20 feet across by 30 feet wide.

One thing that helps too is if the prior owners had a lot of kids. I think all the stuff in my yard is due to the fact that several large families lived here over the decades.
 
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