Curious about this. On the one hand i'm interested in having a go at detecting in parks etc for coins, on the other the realist in me says "you're wasting your money and time, pick up extra work in the afternoons and buy pms with that". How long did it take you, until your finds (whether gold nuggets or coins) covered the cost of your detector. PS Going for a walk yesteday, i noticed that some douche had been detecting in my local park and didn't bother to fill in the holes. First time i've seen diigings round my area.
If your only motive for detecting is financial then you should follow the realist in you. It will cost you more in petrol than most of your outings will probably return. For most keen detectorists (at least monthly outings) its a hobby that, if you work at it or get lucky, offers a return for effort and expenditure. You might find enough to pay for your detector, but dont forget the other outlays such as other equipment and cans of insect repellant, food, drinks, petrol etc. I do not measure my successes in $$ terms only. I give myself a pat on the back sometimes for finding a tiny bit of gold, simply because it was a very weak signal that most people would have missed. Sometimes a nice find is in a spot that requires some work to get to due to rough terrain or gorse and blackberrys. Sometimes I find a nice nugget or coin after digging 50 pieces of junk before finding it. It takes effort to get good returns and if you dont consistently find something interesting or of value, it can quickly become a boring chore. Sometimes I go out and find next to nothing, but still enjoy being out in the bush and being with good friends, even if they do well and I dont. Just to turn you off further, 10% of detectorists find 90% of the treasure and 90% of the good nugget and old relics have already been found. But I still love it.
Every fossiker I've met still has every find they've made in their possession. They never sell for cash.
I have. To pay for things like detector upgrades, broken picks, different sized coils, a new thermos, some very large tins of International Roast and several gallons of insect repellent. All essential items in the continuing quest. Selling some nuggs and upgrading my detector was well worth it. Replaced the amount that I sold in less than 6 months. I agree most hobbyists dont sell. If you can afford to cover upgrades and outgoings why would you? But I have also met a lot of blokes who show pics of big nuggets they found back in the 80s and 90s but no longer own. Plenty of people have paid for their houses, and some can still make a living out of it. A professional detectorist cant just stack their nuggs. They need to sell them to live on.
Well EM at least your finds offset the cost of your hobby! Also do you think its worth burying some items as a test run for beginners? Get used to how your detector works and signals it gives?
Well it's very dependent I guess. My first rig was a Minelabs X-Terra 30 (the flagship coin and relic detecting machine released way back in 2005 (So 7 years old). I bought this bad boy 2nd hand from a seller on a local metal detecting forum for a princely sum of $250 delivered. I also bought a good headset ($85), Garret Pro Pointer ($150) and a Lesche Digging Tool for $60 delierved. Total outlay was $545 With this 'beginners' set' in hand, I proceeded to hit up all the parks in my local area over 3 months (about 25 hunts) and here's the results : My total haul was : $430 in goldies $42 in silver moderns (5c to 50c) 78 Full Pennies 36 Half Pennies 28 Silver coins (8 Florins, 5 Shillings, 8 Sixpence & 7 Threepence) ~200 brown buggers 2 x Sterling silver rings 1 x 18k gold diamond ring 1 x 9ct/925sterling pendant and sterling chain 7 Foreign coins a handful of smaller relics (buttons etc) So I guess you could say my entire rig was fully paid for pretty quick and in all honesty, that gold ring alone probably paid for the entire setup. Mind you, this doesn't show all the JUNK you dig up as well... which over 3 months probably looked similar to this : :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: This just goes to show you don't actually need to drop a lot of cash on a unit just to give it a go. Whilst the return for hours invested was clearly quite low (IMHO you'll never earn a living wage doing this), the fun factor and exercise I got made it quite worth the effort. I haven't really done much in the way of detecting at all this year, but for those interested and wondering if they can get results, I think the proof here is that you can and do it on a small budget. If I can give any advice though it's that you have to assume you'll regularly come up empty handed. Suburban metal detecting is a very hit and miss game and even with all the proper leg work on research done, you can still hit a prospective site that ticks all the boxes and come up completely empty handed. It CAN get frustrating when you get a few of these back to back and amusingly, some of the 'best' sites I've hit are tiny suburban parks with a history of weekend sports (which makes sense). With the suburban park scene, replenishing stock is *extremely* slow - even for busier parks. If you want to do this on a 'regular' basis, I recommend gold prospecting or the beach where you're going to get more regular restock. You have to remember that detectors have been around a while and during the 80s, there were people out there trying their luck on that huge spike which has picked off a lot of the low lying fruit on the larger, more popular sites. Sometimes, thinking outside the box on a new prospective can yield surprising results and you'll be hard pressed to get a bigger rush when you dig out a plug and pop a florin or even better, a little gold! But at the end of the day it's all about having a laugh and learning a little history. In studying up potential sites I learned a lot about my local area's history which many people I've spoken to in the area were not aware of.
Beginners luck does exist. A person with little or no experience can find a large lump of gold or a 1930 penny etc. They can recoup more than their lifetime outlay in a single hit by simply having a go. Better odds than tatts.
I've had my detector over a year now and only detected for one season. I found about $30 worth of clad change and silver coins combined. No gold. Its a hobby. If you're able to break even in a short time you did good, if you make a profit you're one of the lucky few. You're average person looking to get into metal detecting just to increase their PM stack will realize they're going to store their detector in their garage rotting away and getting ready to leak battery acid. Even when you find gold and silver the time and effort put in makes it far from worthwhile. From what I see a lot of people who start off investing or collecting precious metals end up attempting to prospect or metal detect and its a very small percentage of people that stick with the hobby. You can go on the metal detecting forums or even related sections (e.g)here and just because you see someone finding something good really means nothing. That mentality is very bad just because someone else finds a diamind ring doesn't mean you will.
Oh absolutely. That haul above was done over about 25 hunts (as mentioned) with an average of about 3 hours per hunt. 75 - 100 hours' worth of detecting there alone and that doesn't include any historical study on prospective sites before getting out there in the field. Unless you're on the dole or something, even a basic entry level service wage would be far more profitable many times over and that's before you even consider the initial outlay of the gear. Metal detecting is a labour of love - actually finding goodies is always a bonus you hope for, but shouldn't really expect. Towards the end of those hunts where I'd start going over old turf, the finds got fewer and fewer. Nowadays, if I was to head out to those old haunts, I'd really only expect to find modern coins and perhaps the odd piece of jewelry and that's it. But the number of times I went out and did 2 hours of leg work for a single dollar coin and a few 1c and 2c pieces.... oh man, I still have nightmares remembering it! :lol:
I remember taking my GP Extreme out on my first trip.Didnt know squat about areas. Asked the local guy he sent me to Whipstick,only had about 1/2 hour of daylight left that day. Got the detector out hit the second runoff of clay and Whoop Whoop found a small 1 gramerDamm this is easy i thought. Never found another piece for a year! Damm this is love :lol:
