Metal Detecting For Hire and An Easy Coil Stabilizer
November 8th 2006 15:12
Whenever you go searching for something that somebody lost, whether you got the lead through research, or you are doing it as a service for an individual, remember that people generally think they lost an item, like a ring, where they first discovered it was lost. Unfortunately this is very rarely the actuality. Usually people walk or otherwise travel some distance before discovering their loss. This has been proven to me over and over again.
A bud in Tampa was looking for a ring one day, for a person who had lost it in their backyard. Or so they said. G hunted the backyard for 2 hours, and even found a ring, though it was a vintage wedding band of little or no consequence and not the nice diamond ring this person had lost. After telling the person that he was having no success and was going to call it quits, he headed out front of the house and took a break beneath a shade tree there. The clients dog came and sat by him, and he looked over to pat the dog. As he did so a flash caught his eye and there on the ground, not 5 feet away, was the missing ring! True.
Another time this same person and I hunted a beach, in the water, for a woman who had lost a 7 carat diamond ring which was her wedding ring and had been made from old jewelry of her parents, and her husbands parents. Very sentimental as well as valuable. This lady had been swimming in chest deep water at a beach in St. Petersburg, and had lost the ring during choppy conditions -- this means the water was turbulent and had no visibility, kind of like frothy potato soup. The lady counted her steps out of the water, ran and got a jug and tied it to a concrete block which she used to mark the spot where she felt the ring fall from her finger. She then hired two divers before us, and they told her they struck out, no ring, although that sounded very ominous to our ears. Oh well. We carried on.
G was scuba diving, and that was a hassle because the water was still turbulent and in order to do it right he had to tie off at the block and circle it, letting out a little more rope each time. It was all guesswork because the vis was still nil.
I worked the ledge off the beach, that first drop as you enter the water, and I was wading in about 3-4 feet of water with a whites surfmaster, and using a scoop of my own design and manufacture. The water was even more turbulent closer to shore, and I was getting pummeled. I kept getting this one particular good signal, which actually sounded like a pulltab, but under conditions such as these I dig all decent sounding signals. I had already dug 7 or 8 pulltabs, but could not get this one in the scoop.
G had gotten out of the water, shivering, to get his other tank of air, when I finally got a scoop where there was no signal left in the hole I had dug with the underwater scoop. I walked out of the churning water and dumped the scoop load on the sand in front of G, as he struggled out of his first air tank. Both our eyes got real big then, because there was the ring! Sitting on top of the pile like we posed the picture or something! The lady got her ring, we got a real nice reward which we split, and everybody was happy.
The point of that last tale is this: even though the lady had taken time to mark where she lost her ring, the tides and pushing action of the ocean have a major moving effect too, and even the best intentions are many times thwarted, like here, where the ladies ring had been rolled at least 150 feet in to the shore, to become deposited along that ledge I spoke of earlier.
When hunting for a known loss, always attempt to gain the perspective of the person (s) who lost it.
Metal Detecting Underwater: Easy To Make Coil Stabilizers
When metal detecting in the water with an older model detector, and even some newer ones, the biggest problem is keeping the coil stationary -- it seems to want to tilt up and down. Some manufacturers make special coil stablilizers that are non-metallic and hold the coil in place, so you can keep it at a fairly uniform distance from the bottom as it is swung back and forth underwater. I made my own coil stabilizer out of plexiglass strips which I got for free as scrap at a plexiglass company. I melted them where they needed to bend (Propane torch on low) then drilled holes so I could cable tie the contraption to the rod down by the coil. It worked fine, for a long time.
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