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A little detective work finds the ring without a metal detector

Turned up to a nice house up on Mt Osmond at 5pm today to find a lost wedding band. Introduced myself and had a quick chat for a couple of minutes.

Then at around 5.03 I asked all the heavy questions about what he was doing at the time, where he had been, what was he wearing, is there a chance it is in the car, bin, house, and all that logistic stuff …

5.07 He mentions that he did pick a few bundles of weeds up and moved them around …

I ask if he was wearing gloves ….

5.08 he gets a glint in his eye, walks around side of the house, finds the gloves and pulls the ring out.

All done in 8 minutes without turning using the detector at all

Awesome

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Lost wedding ring found on Brighton Beach

Dom called me on Saturday while I was away on holiday. He had lost his wedding band at Brighton Beach just south of Adelaide on Friday and tried to find it himself after buying a metal detector. Unfortunately he was unable to find it and found me online. I spent about 45 minutes looking in the areas he pointed out then extended the search area a little and found it. A nice gold wedding band found and returned 🙂

Wedding band
Dom’s recovered gold wedding band
Gold Wedding ring recovered
Dom, very happy to have his lost wedding ring back

Great to see Dom and his wedding ring reunited.

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Ring lost for 4 years found

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

shrub
The ring was hiding in this bush.
Found ring
Very happy to get the ring back
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Preparation for Summer

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.

Detecting car signage

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Logistics of Beach Detecting

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.

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Sentimental Ring Found

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..

It was decided that I would drive down from the foot hills and run a search for the ring …

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 🙂

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Other Metal Detecting

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:

  • Have your lawns searched before moving house
  • Safety search to remove wire, nails, bullets, etc from play areas
  • Search for caches buried in yards
  • Coin and relic searches while visiting historic locations
  • Remove junk metal from garden beds
  • Searching for pipes
  • Searching for buried cables
  • Locating lost pop up sprinkler locations
  • Searching for nails in timber

I have even found a cache of gelignite.

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Lost keys found in a horse paddock

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 🙂

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White Gold Ring Found in Seacliff

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 🙂