Posted by JB(MS) on 11/13/2008, 8:02 pm, in reply to "Re: Coils for the Baron, a bonehead screwup and......"
66.175.148.151
I've seen guys detect with their coils very similar to the way the guy is swinging his coil in the video, and also seen some use a pendulum swing so their coil is a foot or more off the ground at each end of their swing. The best find I've seen made since I began detecting was a Mississippi state seal Civil War belt plate, found by a newbie I took on his very first detecting trip of any kind. He was swinging almost just like the guy in the video, and even had the front of his coil tilted up almost as much. Here's where, and how, it happened.
About 10 years ago a couple of detecting buddies and I had been hunting an old townsite and along the road that ran through it. The name of the town was Prairie Mount, it was about 20 miles west of where I live, but it moved five miles southeast to the Ohio-Mobile railroad when the railroad was built in 1859 and renamed Okolona. Nothing at the original townsite now, or at the time we hunted there, but pastures, cows, two old cemeteries and the road, but during the Civil War a running battle went through it. General Nathan Bedford Forest and his troops had headed off General William "Sookie" Smith and his yankee troops, on their way to join Sherman at Meridian, MS when he was on his way to burn Atlanta, and were chasing them back toward Tennessee.
Bob and I hunted by the cemeteries one weekend and only found a couple of bullets. By one of the cemeteries there was a tree that had fell and Bob hunted up to about three feet from the stump and walked around it. The newbie guy had bought a Fisher CZ a few days earlier and had been pestering me to take him relic hunting. The next weekend I took him to where Bob and I had hunted because I didn't think he would find anything and maybe stop pestering me.
We walked in to where Bob and I stopped hunting, he turned his detector on and with the coil a foot off the ground started swinging right by the stump where Bob had stopped. He immediately got a signal that was the MS belt plate, only a couple of inches deep and less than two feet from where Bob had stopped the week before. Bob almost crapped his pants when I told him he missed the plate by a foot. The MS state seal beltplate is rare, especially in the condition that one was in, and at that time was $3,000 to $6,000 or more depending on condition. Top photo is of some of the stuff I found there, bottom photo shows what Praire Mount looks like now and where the town and cemeteries were located. 
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