Lead plug use?

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Hi all, here's the best stuff from half an afternoon around our old 1900's farmhouse with a Go Find 40; 1895, 1926 and 1933 pennies, a silver pocket watch case that I rammed my mattock through, and a lead plug that I found in very old, hard dirt. It looks like it has an aluminium outer, and has a few turns of a thread around it.

I'm at a loss for what the plug might have been used for, I'm sure it's something really obvious. Any ideas? The father in law reckons it could be a Welch plug.

1526345898_plug.jpg


Also, this could just be my lack of technique showing, but pennies seem to be over-represented in my finds, I'm sure that other denominations were lost equally as often. Is it just that they are larger than other coins and more easily detected, or are there really just more of them in the ground?
 
Cool fob watch despite the hole, still rare to find one intact. Don't think your technique is in question, just a fact of life that some older sites do not carry that many silver coins, mainly copper coins.

Also the first series of Go-finds are also not the deepest detectors in the world, something that has been addressed on the more recently released Go-Find range (I have the GF60). Small silver coins can be hard to find at the best of times, so I wouldn't expect them to necessarily be as obvious targets as the larger copper ones.

Masking can also be an issue if you have a fair bit of buried junk around the house site. I would work the site progressively, weeding out all the more obvious non-ferrous targets at first, then move onto the lesser obvious ones. Some of these targets may only give a one way response if a little out of range of the Go-Find, worthwhile digging them in case they are deeper coins.

Still, I'd be happy with your result thus far, I have done a lot worse on some house sites. :)
 
Goldpick said:
Masking can also be an issue if you have a fair bit of buried junk around the house site. I would work the site progressively, weeding out all the more obvious non-ferrous targets at first, then move onto the lesser obvious ones. Some of these targets may only give a one way response if a little out of range of the Go-Find, worthwhile digging them in case they are deeper coins.

I think I'm at this point with the back yard, I've taken out most of the major non-ferrous targets that the Go Find will give a decent pin-point on but there are still many more targets that aren't as solid, and I think there are a few that are being masked that I haven't bothered digging yet. Not to mention the other 75% of the ground that's covered in thick lawn that I'll have to develop my plugging technique for, I'll work over the easy ground properly first.

It would be nice to get a little deeper but my other detector is a White's GMT which of course is a pest to use for this purpose vs the Minelab.
 
The pinpoint method is what I used to do with the Ace 250 when targets started to get a little deep for the normal search mode. It was really good for picking out coin sized objects at depth, and used to pick out smaller silvers quite well. That was in pretty clean ground, so not sure how easy it will be for locating coins in your particular circumstance.

The GMT probably wouldn't be ideal, though on the upside it does have the iron grunt and probability meter, plus the smaller elliptical coil might help unmask some finds.
 
Got another one that I'm not clear on the use of, figure I'll reuse my thread rather than make another one. I found this lead plug or spike on the site of a 1870s-1920s sports oval that was highly disturbed, although not many other trash signals around. The spike end has a rectangular cross section. I thought I'd use something more interesting than a ruler for scale, so here's a military button.

1528080895_lead.jpg


Got to be some sort of plug surely? Got me baffled for what you'd use it in though.
 
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