What Is The Average Depth Old Coins Are Found In Your Area?
Not including re-landscaped areas, how deep do they go?
Re: What Is The Average Depth Old Coins Are Found In Your Area?
Normally around 5-6" at the deepest.
Now the exception is our local 130+ year old city park. It sits alongside the Arkansas River, which when it had water, used to flood every 30-40 years depositing from 3-6" of mud. This has made the perfect detector depth testing garden. You can start from the south and the mud had nothing to hold it so the coins are relatively at normal depth. As you move north you start to approach a wall that was built in 1933 which held the mud. At the very north end the wall is 24" tall and the grass now is level with the top of the wall. That means coins from the 1883-1930's are going to be at least 24" deep. So you just take a detector, start on the south and walk north until the coins get too deep for that detector.
So far it has been the E-Trac/CTX that has gone the furthest north and still consistently produce coins down to around 12".
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/15/2017 11:45AM by Southwind.
That is a good question and I'm looking forward to the replies. Generally 4 inches and sometimes up to 6. Have thought maybe I'm just not ever getting deep coins. But when you go past a certain depth you can tell there's nothing ever been there. The ground will be hard packed and clean with no other junk of any kind. One place I've found no coins but deep pull tabs. That is a place that stays damp a lot, so they probably get pushed into the ground by foot traffic or mower wheels.
4-6"...a couple to 7-8" but that's is rare.
Most of my dirt won't let things sink real far, I have found 1800's and very early 1900's coins at 1-3" a few times.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/15/2017 01:52PM by REVIER.
Here in WV the old coins(silver age) are deeper than most areas it sounds like by the replies received so far. They are running 6" to 9" in this area, maybe even deeper that's the limit of my F5. Now in a wooded area they seemed to be a lot swallower, 3" to 5" range. We've talked about that difference, my two brothers and myself, and what we think is the areas that are mowed are deeper because the trimmings keep piling up on top of the ground making the coins deeper. If you look at the curbs around here most of them has dirt piled up several inches above them.
Mowed and not collected grass trimmings for sure increase soil growth over the years!
John, I have paid a great deal of attention to depth since I started using mid to high priced detectors. The first two years in the hobby was with cheaper models and I think I found three silver coins. Two were found on the side of a hill and virtually on the surface. As I upgraded, I found with the higher priced detectors came increased depth.
My first detector that gave me "eye popping" depth was a Sovereign and in the same exact places I thought were hunted out started finding 8 inch deep silver coins. It was unbelievable to me.
I next tried CZ's and the new Explorer. They were no deeper than the Sovereign, but much easier to interpret. I had a run of seven years of over a hundred silver coins a year. I can honestly say, that 9 out of 10 silver coins came from the 7 to 8 inch deep range. I have dug several older coins from over a foot deep with Explorers. These were large cent type coins.
After years of scouring my favorite places and seeing my older finds all but disappear, I tried some of the newer, faster detectors. With these detectors, I started finding the shallower older coins that were being masked. One of the best detectors for this type of detecting is one of your favorites, the AT Pro. I remember going to the old fair grounds the very first time out with this detector and finding an incredible amount of Indian Head pennies that were in the 5 to 6 inch deep range with all kinds of trash surrounding them. I really think this detector is one of the best all around detectors available.
When I am in the market for a detector that meets my local needs, I look for one with an honest 8 inch deep range, but will do this in trashy environments. As I have aged(not so well), I also need a detector that is light or well balanced. That narrows the field considerably.
Exactly like you John but I never found a silver or copper coin beyond 6 inches. Most of the old ones are at 4-5 inches with the odd ones at about 2".
The ground here is mostly packed clay. Hard to dig and make a nice plug but on the upside, the sinking rate is slow.
A given detector may be capable of finding a silver dime at 8-10 inches, but that doesn't mean it will find most coins at that depth that the coil sweeps over . It's very easy for a deep target to be compromised...masking, angle of target, sweep speed, coil position over target, user error, etc.
In most soils, I would argue that older coins at less than six inches would be the exceptions, not the rule.
That most old coins are found at 6" or less has to do with the inherent capabilities of VLF detectors, not because that's where most of those coins reside.
But there is no such thing as "most soils". It differs greatly from one area to another (at least in the New England region and Canadian provinces just north of that). Surely soil types can have a very important incidence on how deep a coin will sink over time.
I once asked the question on this forum, which coin would sink the fastest in the same type soil a dime or a half dollar? I got a lot of interesting answers and I still wonder about that. The dime being lighter would have less gravity pull, the half dollar would have more mass which would help it stay afloat better.
Agreed, Mike. And fortunately for us, there are soils where old coins haven't sunk out of detecting range.
Think about the 1964 silver dime often found at 4-6", with a very high probability of being dropped in a narrow time frame between 1964 and 1967. On average, how much deeper would the barber dime (minted 1892-1916) in the same area typically be, or the seated (1837-1891), or the bust (1809-1837)?
I would have liked Tom to explain the differences between Northern and Southern soils and sinking rates in more detail just to get an idea of the advantage that we have in the lower Canada/New England states. Can we expect the coins to drop at half the rate as say California or Florida or is it nowhere near that. Maybe he has an article on specific details and testing but I haven't seen it.
I can tell you that I've never found a silver coin from the 60's at more than 3 inches around here. We definitely have an advantage but how much of an advantage is it really ? I don't know but I'm glad we have one.
After reading those 2 articles I can better understand why detector depth capabilities are so important to some.