The Death of Coin Shooting

Intro: 

Hey Everybody. Welcome! To Episode 85 of the metal detecting show podcast. My Name is Ciaran and I have been Metal Detecting for nearly 30 Years. 

So this week I talk about my best hunt in ages this weekend and we also talk about the future of Coin hunting or as some people call it Coin Shooting, So lets get on with the show.

Music

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Content:

Hey everyone Welcome to this weeks episode I do hope you have had a great week whether out hunting or not as I know some global regions are probably gone into the off season with snow covering the ground either way I hope you guys were productive in the hobby this week.

Did you see the The legend broadcast last week on the 19th I have to say very exciting and  I want one but I have to call it I wasn’t too far off on my price ok I was a little I said 499 pounds  in line with the top vanquish and it came in at 650 pounds in line with the NOX 600 now I do think the uk price is a bit saucy as the euro price is 750 euro anyways I hit the nail on the head re the features and frequencies so go back and listen to episode 82.

In other news, news im very happy about Makenzie Crook writer and actor for the two time bafta  winning detectorist sitcom has said that he is starting the process of thinking “yeah, we should get the old band back together”  this is news to my ears and if you have never seen this show please check it out it is amazing and  funny and so true to the life  of a detectorist amazing stuff.

I got out for a hunt this week probably the best hunt of the year so far, as you may know the best find this year was the silver louis the 16th thimble I found at the start of the summer now that day was great and that find is still the find of the year so far, but this week I have to say I had the best day out hunting full stop this year. 

Let me paint a picture I remember it like it was 4 days ago, I decided I would hit a beach I hit once a year with limited success over the years but its close enough to not be prohibitive and far enough for me to need a coffee to drive there. 

Nothing unusual so far so, I get to the beach and im all set up and I walking the beach surveying from a high wall trying to find a good spot to start.

By the way I totally recommend this 5 mins of surveying when you get to a spot it gives you a great plan to stick to and to start with. 

anyway im up on the high embankment wall looking over the beach and I notice that jesus the tide is really out far today and I also notice a change in the sands that looks like a deep cut. 

so I set this as my target and I start hunting in a straight line directly toward the cut, on the way I find some rubbish and a few euro coins enough to cover a coffee which is always a good start so early on a hunt, as it really sets you up for the day having a little success at the start. 

So when I get to the cut it turns out it isn’t a cut at all or maybe it is let me explain when I got there it was a clay bed like legit brick making yellow clay with stones and rocks cast through it imagine a large gravel yellow terrazzo floor.  

It was very strange especially when you remember this is in a beach in the athletic ocean what i imagine happened was the winter storms shifted all the sand off this spot revealing the clay bed about  250 square feet at low tide. 

So anyways im hunting away and it was tough going every scoop needed to be forcibly banged out of my sand scoop making it a chore to dig any holes at all but any ways I ploughed on. 

My first signal was a great tone resulted in a 50 year old 10p piece that was in amazing condition, next was a penny similar condition, then a half penny same condition I knew I was in a good spot as these coins would normally be toast but looked like they were dropped the day before. 

up next came a great signal which rang up as a 14 – 16 on the nox however its tone was immaculate so I dug it thinking it would be a large lead sinker but it wasn’t what came up was a large musket ball now remember this is a beach where a musket ball wouldn’t last and I have never had a musket ball before some of you guys probably have had 100’s but you probably remember the first any ways this came up immaculate as well so I knew I was in a great spot. 

I switched to all metal so I could hear everything and started spiralling around the clay bed over the next 90 mins I pulled up buttons, more coins but the piece do resistance was a sterling silver teaspoon that was in good condition considering it must have rolled about the beach for at least the last 100 years. 

I didn’t pull out much trash at all over the time there except 1 large lump of aluminium and 1 large lump of cast iron which looked to be the bottom of a pot. 

It got to the stage that my hip pouch was full and my safe finds pouch was so full it was causing interference with the pin pointer every time I tried to pinpoint a find in my hand. I decided at this time to walk back to my van and drop off my finds and any trash of which there wasn’t much. 

I didn’t get to go back as it was a mile away and the weather was changing but I made note of the spot to get back to this weekend with the 6 inch coil and the CTX.  

When I was making a review of my finds I noticed that the majority of my clad modern coins were close to being toast while the older ones were is way better condition so it was this that prompted me to chat about coin hunting and whether it’s a viable part of the any more and if it is where we should be focusing when coin shooting.  

So lets start with the first piece is coin shooting a viable part of the hobby anymore is it dying away, in my experience I am definitely not finding as many coins when beach detecting and I have put this down to contactless payments no longer are we walking about with a pocket full of beer change even our wallets have changed from needing a pouch to solely designed to carry cards so I do believe the era of coin shooting is coming to an end and that’s a pity because it is coin shooting that gets the most people involved in the hobby till they can figure out their niche and focus on finds that suit that niche. 

Its not just contactless payments that are killing it, the design of the coin itself is accelerating the demise of this part of our hobby, just like this weekend coins are not designed any more to last in corrosive situations and are no longer made from essentially unreactive alloys of silver or gold and are now since the mid 60’s made in clad form which is multiple layers of differing metals sandwiched between a core of copper with an outer layer of a copper-nickel alloy and zinc. 

If you have done any engineering work with metal you know that you don’t use/join two differing metals as it leads to accelerated galvanic corrosion in one of the metals especially in a corrosive environment and this is why when you find a clad coin that has been in the ground a while it has bulged a bit and is falling apart from the inside out. 

With the adoption of the euro in 2002 European detectorists were tortured with what was called Nordic Gold which was the term used to describe the metal alloy that was used to produce our 10,20, and 50 cents this was an alloy of 89% copper,5% Aluminimum,5% zinc and 1% Tin resulting in an iffy signal no matter what the orientation environment or detector you use our 1,2 and 5 cents went to clad copper covered steel which melt when they hit the ground and our 1 euro and 2 euro coins are a bi metallic design with the inner being clad copper nickel and the outer consisting of Nickle brass all a nightmare to identify confidently. 

This is all nice information however what it means is that any spendies now result in two piles ones that can be spent and one that are too far gone and cant be spent and begs the question is it worth the time to dig them when there is a 50/50 chance it will be of any value or even a coin. 

I think what both these points will result in is the days of going out an finding a stack of spendies are going to fade into distant memory and Coin shooting will become about finding coins from before the contactless era and before the clad menace of the 1960s.

So how does that change the hobby well where do you go now it might get to a point where going to your local park will be pointless unless your looking for something other than coins you may need to change your coin hunting techniques to hunt for older coins like focusing on high conductivity coins knowing that it wont be worth digging a clad coin that are slowly being phased out. 

Coin shooting will move from parks and picnic areas to the fields in the hope of something older this will mean that in Europe although plagued with contactless payments and the euro coin we will have 1000’s of years of coins dropped to draw upon which is good for us however I’m afraid coin shooting in the US may be very different due to the sheer size of sample to draw from over a few hundred years. 

So how will you coin shoot In a modern era well like I said you won’t go to parks or playing grounds the coins simply won’t be there so you’ll have to go to either very high populated areas or areas of long history well before the clad coin.

Your test bed will have to have its clad coins removed in favour of higher conductivity silver alloy coins 

And your detector may no longer have park or coin mode and will struggle to identify modern coins as they drift further down the shit shoot of conductivity and your audio processing will become more important for you to know the difference between an iffy 50 cent vs a 30% silver coin which will blow the earphones off your head.  

Even your mind set will have to change your level of patience’s will have to improve, how often do we find silver coins mixed in with the buckets of clad we find some people do well in this and some find one a year now take away the clad do you have the patience to weather the silence between silver coins in a coinless contactless era. 

I know this is a dystopian version of the future but I think we are on the way to some version of this maybe not our generation but most definitely the next generation of metal detectorist will be hit with this scenario. 

Wrap Up 

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Once again, I hope you have enjoyed this episode and we will chat to you all again next week. 

Get out there eyes down and Happy Hunting.