For brothers Bob and Bill, it’s finders beepers
With metal detection, you just might strike it rich
Think of the world as a giant chesterfield, in the folds and under the cushions of which all kinds of objects get lost, often for the longest time.
With a sofa, stick your arm far enough down into the crevices of the thing and you might pull up spare change, an old TV remote or a half licked sucker — Halloween 2009 — cocooned in lint.
With the world itself, if you’re like Bob Jackson, you use a topof-the-line metal detector, i.e., the Garrett AT (All Terrain) Max with Z-Lynk Wireless Technology.
The Garret AT Max is a kind of magic wand held toward the ground in the manner of a shuffleboard cue, but one with a search coil at the end that looks like a race car steering wheel.
And the things it pulls up from the couch of the earth and the sand are absolutely intriguing.
This past summer, for instance, Bob Jackson came to our attention when he responded to an OPP report that someone had dangerously buried hundreds of rusty nails under the sand at Port Dover. Bob volunteered to remove them, with his metal detector. He succeeded.
On a Saturday morning recently I meet up with Bob and his brother Bill Jackson at Norwood Park, and they’ve already been at it for a couple of hours when I arrive.
Bob holds out his hand. He’s found three loonies, a quarter and four dimes. There’s also a kind of bangle.
“You get a lot of pop can pull tabs, too,” he explains.
Bob shows me how it works. He grazes the unit over the ground in the park and before long it picks up the presence of metals,
which register as audio signals.
Some beeps Bob disregards. He’s been doing this long enough to distinguish the subtleties; apart from that, the detector’s controls show readings and if the reading is in the 60 range it’s most likely scrap but if it’s in the
70s and 80s, there’s a good chance it’s some kind of coin or other material of possible value.
“Go gentle now,” Bob cautions helpfully as I take the detector and try my beginner’s luck. “You don’t want to scratch it (the search coil).”
Bob and his brother employ headphones, as do metal detector users generally.
This allows them to hear faint, deep signals, and make better judgments about what to go after. Headphones also filter out distracting sounds such as wind and traffic. Mostly, it’s a courtesy to passersby who don’t need to hear all the beeping.
After I make a couple of passes over a patch of ground, that one signal is worth digging for.
“We’ll set the controls to PP (pinpoint). This feature tells you from the tone exactly where to dig and the depth,” says Bob. Six inches, 18 inches whatever. Bob hands me the customized shovel, with grooves and serrated edges, and we dig into three sides of the “plug” of earth.
“This keeps the roots intact,” he explains. “Our goal always is to leave a place as we found it.”
With the plug dug out on three sides I run the pinpoint feature over the area. The signal is now confined to a particular spot. I dig out an old ... penny.
And so I score my first find. I put back the plug. Bob and Bill have been doing this for two years. They took it up when, by coincidence, each of their wives got them metal detectors as a Christmas present.
It’s a great retirement activity, says Bob, who retired a few years ago. “It gets you outside. Otherwise I’d be sitting in front of the TV.”
Every Saturday the two of them hit a public space or beach. They spend hours. They often go out during the week, as well.
The results have been a treasury — old coins; square nails, hand-hammered, from the 1800s; a railroad switch key; a tungsten ring; bullets, some from a musket; shotgun shells and other ammunition; dogtags; an RCMP button; a Lesney toy car from Britain; a 1939 Beaver nickel; various rings and items of jewelry featuring such gems and stones as black onyx, diamonds, 14-karat gold; an Upper Canada halfpenny; much else.
Oh, and almost $1,000 in pennies and other coins.
“It takes forever to roll them up (and take them to the bank),” says Bill with a laugh.
Almost everything valuable they find (except current coins) is a keepsake; they won’t sell. “The pleasure is in finding it and researching it.”
What they don’t keep gets properly recycled, and they pick up litter they find.
Above and beyond the obvious joys of their topsoil archeology, exploring the world that lives under our world, they’re always thinking safety and cleanliness. (Bob made four separate drives out to Port Dover, at his own expense, to clear out those nails).
And I’ve still got the old penny we found. I keep it in my pocket for good luck.