Its the second week of July and a landmark week for me. Six months ago, in the second week of January, I bought my humble Fisher from Rob on the forum and started detecting. I have detected before, on and off over the years but had been drawn over to my other love of bottle digging until my broadband played up one day and I had a visit from a technician who happens to be a forum member. (You know who you are) My interest was reawakened and the rest is history.
I thought it would be a good thing to keep a check on what I found over the first year to see how easy or hard it was for a machine to pay for itself, so this is my half yearly report. My finds, although not many (I am probably about half a ton or so of silver behind Hunter) are not too bad, based on the fact that my detecting has taken place almost exclusively on a Saturday morning for around three or four hours at a time max.
Sorry about the fact that these pics will still have to be downloaded, I remain unable to downsize the pics. The suggested programs to do this just wont download properly for me.
So here we go...
The first pic is of my copper coins. All junk, worn or corroded, but an impressive 5.4 kilos of scrap copper. The offered rate round here for such junk copper is 5.50 per kilo, so around 30 bucks worth here. The pile may not look big but it stands 7 inches high and is 12 inches wide approx. Hundreds and hundreds in number, cant be bothered to count them all up.
Pic 2 is my silvers. There are 148 of these which isnt bad for 6 months I guess. These are nearly all post 1920 50% silver examples, with only twenty being sterling silver. The total spend value of these pre 46 finds was 4 pounds 2 shillings, and the current spot silver price for this little lot is just under $285 scrap value, although the actual resell value would be higher as there are some very good condition pieces among them which are far too good to melt for scrap.
Pic 3 is the small amount of silver jewellery I have found, mainly thin rings and other hallmarked trinkets. No real value here above scrap. Probably a couple of ounces only.
Pic 4 is of my only gold finds, a solitary ring with amethyst and an engraved and hallmarked piece off of who knows what. Cufflink possibly?
The next pic is of my gold spends, $244 in total. I refuse to spend any of these until they alone have paid for my detector but still a long way to go yet!
Next, no value whatsoever but too interesting to throw away. Badges, brooches, name tags, nik naks etc etc, which all end up in a tin for some reason.
Lastly, the 20 sterling silver coins I mentioned earlier, weighing in at 2.34 ounces of silver.
I have never kept any of the scrap oddments of lead, brass etc which I found, perhaps I should have, but my tunnel visioned approach kept me focused on coins and jewellery only.
So there we have it, not quite enough to retire on but I've had a good time acquiring it. Hopefully that meagre gold total will be improved upon during the next 6 months.
Edited by user Saturday, 14 July 2012 7:50:25 PM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
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