I hear all the time that this is an "old man hobby" but it sounds like so much fun! Since I've taken up mushroom hunting, I've been dying to try my hand at another "wander around aimlessly to try and find something but also work out your legs a bit" hobby. Has anyone ever done metal detecting? Ever found anything cool? Any tips or warnings? Thanks!
Nope, but I've got a sweet sitcom to recommend to you... Fully Netflickable! Good luck with the real answers you seek.
I've done it a handful of times with friends over the years. I would say it's sort of fun but mostly as a prelude to a bbq or camp out or something. It always depends on location though. Here you can't legally do it on most public land because if tons of people walked around parks digging up bottle caps the parks would be ruined rather quickly. Beaches are a good exception since there isn't anything to ruin. Only thing I ever found and kept was a rosary with a sterling silver chain and cross. If I lived anywhere near Arkansas I would spend lots of time here though. Some little kid picked a nearly 8 carat dark brown diamond off the ground there just a few weeks ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_of_Diamonds_State_Park
Not quite metal detecting in the traditional sense but I have seen some great hauls with magnet fishing like these czech guys who found an mp-40
Ooh, now this is Really interesting. I'd love to spend a whole summer lounging around the coast doing this. Probably come up with more crab traps than anything tho.
A mate of mine is really into it.He has this very high end detector that can scan for particular metals. Land laws in the UK make detecting quite a political hobby with ninja teams of rogue detectorists doing night scans. A few years ago he showed me some crazy finds including these small rounded flat discs with dents in the middle, apparently medieval child-sized solid Lead palm tools for pushing needles through thick leather, not a nice job. I think it has parallels with toy collecting in that half the time the fun is working out the provenance of what you have found...
You don't always find much, if anything, but when you do it's so exhilarating and if adventuring and this sort of thing is up your alley then you will love it. I have only done it a handful of times but i am constantly thinking about getting a detector. It really is a fun time...... That magnet fishing looks incredibly interesting aswell. I question the authentic nature of it though. I think it's weird he pulled the clip to that type of gun up and then just happened to pull the gun itself up without possibly knowing it was there. That's either a great staged event or insanely unfathomabley lucky. I can't decide.
I recall having a weird fascination with metal detectors when I was like 7 years old. My family had no money to spend on expensive hobbies, so I wrote away (snail mail, with stamps!) for metal detector catalogs and daydreamed about owning one. Kids are such fucking idiots.
Bahahaha, I had a weird fascination with them as a kid too! Also digging up fossils. The whole "hunting treasure" thing was a big thing for me. Then I forgot about it until we had a landscaper scam us maybe 6 or 7 years ago. We paid for a few inches of fresh topsoil to be added to our lawn, and turns out that he put garbage soil (literally full of rocks, plastic pieces, and even a piece of a women's razor... lovely) and covered that with a tiny thin layer of topsoil. My boyfriend, dad, and I spent the following spring picking out all the fist-sized rocks jutting out of our lawn after the heavy rains, and I removed one particularly huge rock... there was something underneath it, so I dig around it, and suddenly I pulled out this crazy-looking rusted metal farming tool. The house behind us used to be a farm over a century ago, so I got all excited and metal detecting became a thing I wanted to do again. ...and then my mom threw out my find once I put it in the garage because "it's just old junk." I haven't bought any toys in almost two months now, I think I can finally justify dropping some money on a metal detector. Plus I found the PERFECT spot. At a local beach, there's a bridge where water from... someplace, I guess another beach, connects directly to the LIS. When the tide goes down, the water becomes a tiny, thin stream and you can walk completely under this bridge... the waterway is about 20ft wide and easily accessible, but I'd need some above-the-knee waders. I've never seen anyone walk around there.
I've done it before as a kid. It's usually more interesting, or scary, in Europe from what I've read. They have such a long history of metalworking, and undetonated ordinance from the Great Wars, so I think that we all have heard of folks finding some actual valuables over there. In America, you usually don't find a whole lot except garbage, unless you live on the coasts or near a long-settled area... which you do!
Well hot damn!!! Imagine unearthing something like that! Too bad we don't take the preservation of artifacts as seriously here in the States. Hell, for my Archeology class my teacher required us, a bunch of complete newbies to digging and preservation, to clock in a certain amount of hours at a digsite of his. We were finding prehistoric quartz bits from tool making, and someone a few years earlier found either a spear or arrowhead that was something like 4,000 years old at that same site. Yet here we were, a bunch of barely-adults, digging that site for class credit. Honestly, I think a part of why it was required is because the teacher couldn't even get a grant, so he used us as free labor in an attempt to preserve history. But hey, find anything from the Civil War and everyone shits their pants.
