South Australian Metal Detecting
Had a look for a ring lost four years ago by a now deceased gentleman. The son phoned me up to see if I could help his mother out by finding the long lost ring and bring a little bit of her lost husband back to her.
The search was over much of the front yard and it ended up being under a rock in a very overgrown bush.
One very happy son, and a crying, overwhelmed beautiful lady who gave me a hug
Another great day
Some ring and coin finds from around Adelaide
The quiet winter months are over and it is time to prepare for spring and summer. This year I am hoping to build enough momentum and goodwill to make a living out of metal detecting.
I know there is enough demand and opportunity, it is the marketing and general business skills that need work- yep me 🙂
Everything related to the business needs work, there’s the crazy low pricing, the lack of some specialist equipment, a shop front and 100’s of other details that would improve things. This week’s task was organising some car signage.
The largest single genre of lost jewellery searches I perform are lost rings that slip off while throwing something at the beach. While I really enjoy searching for and finding rings in beach environments they do have some unique difficulties that make things interesting. 1. Salt water destroys electronics quickly
2. Waves and wind can make searching the surf zone extremely tricky (and sometimes a little dangerous)
3. It can be really busy on nice days, so physically getting to the search area is problematic.
4. Often the search can only be carried out at low tide.
It is this last issue that keeps coming up and makes logistics interesting for finding some items. Usually (Adelaide is a bit weird with this) there are two low tides a day around 12 hours apart. These times are just about never convenient to organise time off work, so balancing a 9-5 job with jewellery rescue is a real challenge.
Until now, I have managed to juggle these commitments, but for the near future I am going to see if I can concentrate on metal detecting full time. There is no way I could financially survive just with jewellery searches at $50, so I am going to supplement that income with metal detector retail sales and the random coins I find.
Not sure if this is going to work while I try to keep the service costs down as low as possible, but happy to have a go 🙂
The low tide quandary came up this week when I needed to search for a ring at Seacliff during low tide. Unfortunately the lowest tide was 11.30PM, so I spent from 10.30pm to 12.30am down there with the beach all to myself. It was certainly beautiful and peaceful, but no joy this time as i failed to find the ring.
I had the absolute pleasure of helping out Phil and his wife with a very sentimental lost item yesterday.
The call came in while I was knee deep in databases so was in itself a welcome relief 🙂 Phil was originally looking for a hire detector to find his late mother’s wedding band but 
after a quick chat I explained that the hire detectors were not really ideal for new users in wet beach salt water sand environments and suggested just getting me to pop down there..
I met Phil at Glenelg where I handed him some flags to mark out the search area and went to work walking one pass, turning back and picking up a awesome low tone signal about half way back along the second pass. It didn’t sound too deep so I just leaned down and pulled the target out with my fingers and called Phil over 🙂
The ring had that high gold content almost red tinge and had a lot of weight about it. A beautiful ring, and awesome ending to the search and I will never forget the look on Phil’s face when he got his Mum’s wedding band back after having it on a chain every day for 18 years.
I love this job 🙂
While jewellery rescue is the main reason we get called out to search with metal detectors there are plenty of other reasons to consider using a detector. Here are some to think about:
I have even found a cache of gelignite.
Today’s search was tricky for a few reasons. The main issue was that the lost keys were somewhere in a massive search area. They were lost in one of two 2 hectare paddocks and narrowing the search zone was difficult.
The second major issue was that the keys were lost in knee high grass, so both keeping the coil close to the ground and also following up on signals was difficult.
The client was the lovely Liz who did her best to cut down the area and fill me in on how she lost the keys, but couldn’t really cut it down too much. I gave Liz a quick lesson in how to use a detector and handed over a Tesoro Silver, while I used my Sovereign GT and went to work.
Unfortunately the paddocks were full of metal junk so searching was painful, slow and annoying. After 2 hours we were both starting to get tired and we were just about to give up for the day when Liz yelled out that she had eyeballed the keys 🙂
So the day ended successfully and I headed home to charge the detector and standby for the next job. Cool 🙂
Just back from a successful search for a really nice white gold ring with a large Victoria era diamond. The lady was completely distraught and devastated at losing this ring. Fortunately she was clever enough to note the area carefully and was able to put me within 5m of the location. Connor joined me for this trip and the little trooper helped hold a torch 🙂
After marking out a search area and getting to work it only took about a minute before hearing that lovely growl of white gold. I am really glad I was able to get down to Seacliff tonight and help out this really nice couple 🙂
A lovely couple contacted me with the sad news they had lost an engagement ring down near Middleton Beach on the Fleurieu Peninsula. They were not sure exactly where the ring was and asked to hire a detector for the weekend.
The ring was likely to be in either grass or dry sand so I set them up with a Tesoro Silver Umax (Micromax) and some accessories. They had not used a Metal Detector before so I offered a few tips and techniques including searching for a gold ring on the lawn, and they were off.
The phone rang on Sunday night with the fantastic news that they had been successful in finding the ring 🙂 I love a happy ending 🙂
Most of the metal detecting jobs I get are based around finding lost jewellery. Every now and then I am asked to help find others such as pipes, cables, darts the kids threw into the back yard grass, etc. This time I was asked to find some electronic counters used on a mountain bike track in the Adelaide foot hills.
After walking along the track dodging the intermittent rain for around a kilometre or so I came across the area where the counter was lost. I turned on the the Minelab Sovereign GT and searched the rough area quickly. There was one very strong signal around 1 inch away from where a trench had been dug to find the counter so I marked that and kept looking for more signals.
After about 2 minutes it was obvious that there was only one main signal so Dr Stu started digging. After a couple of scrapes with the digging tool the outer plastic box of the complex waterproof setup emerged and it was obvious that the trip was a success 🙂
A good trip, good company and a great result 🙂
You must be logged in to post a comment.