Interesting Band on Found Watch. I always like to browse sites showing 17th an 18th century items. If there is one thing I regret, it is the times that I failed to recognize the approximate date of an item when I dug it up only to learn later that I should have paid more attention to the item.
I've mentioned before the time I dug a musket part and the musket flint and didn't recognize what it was at the time. That was when I was new to digging up things from earlier centuries. If I had recognized what I had, I would have stayed in the same area longer and hunted much more thoroughly than I did.
I once dug a gold enameled ring on a shipwreck beach and didn't think it looked three hundred years old. I didn't know that they did enameling centuries ago. But they did.
Anyhow, as a result of things like that, I like to study old artifacts of all types so I recognize them when I see them.
A big part of successful detecting, is recognizing the clues that you come across. If you find a 17th century artifact, for example, you should hunt that area very thoroughly before moving on.
Here is a nice web site where you can study some very nice examples of 17th and 18th century jewelry.
http://www.peterszuhay.com/jewellery.htm
If you were detecting and found a Seiko watch, what is the oldest it could be?
Back of Watch Bearing Serial Numbers.Sorry. The numbers on the back of the casing didn't show up in the photo very well, but they are there. You can clearly see the number on the band.
Did you guess how long ago Seiko watches were made?
The first Seiko brand watches were produced in 1924. Not exactly an antiquity, yet much older than I would have guessed. I would have thought something like 1970.
The Seiko company is even older than that, going back to the 1880s.
An interesting bit of trivia: the first crystal watches made by Seiko cost as much as a new car at the time.
Thanks to the internet a lot of information is available to help you decipher serial numbers. On a Seiko, for example, the first number of the six figure serial number gives the last digit of the year the watch was produced. 4 as the first digit indicates the watch was manufactured in a year such as 1964 or 1974, for example.
Unfortunately you have to figure out what the first three digits of the year would be from information about when that model of watch was produced or other sources.
The second digit of the serial number indicates the month. If you want to learn more about that just search Seiko and serial number.
Similar information is available for most other watches. There is a really great forum for Rolex watches as well as many other brands where you can get your questions answered.
Here is the link for the Rolex forum.
http://www.rolexforums.com/
Vintage and antique watch collecting are very popular.
Ten rare Double Eagle gold coins worth 40 million were ruled to be the property of the U S Treasury. The coins have been in the possession of a family for a number of years, but were ruled to have been improperly removed from the mint and therefore the property of the Treasury.
Here is the link to that story.
http://search.aol.com/aol/search?query=double+eagle+gold+coins+owned+by+treasury&s_it=keyword_rollover
The story suggests that the coins might go on display. Many people think they should be sold. Sounds right to me. Pay off some government debt.
I added a web site to my Tide and Surf Projection Section on this blog. It gives the links to many live web cams for Florida, including many for the Treasure Coast.
Thanks to Jim M. for submitting the site.
Treasure Coast Beach Forecast and Conditions.
The low pressure area down by the Lesser Antilles has developed only a little. It now has a 30% chance of becoming a cyclone. The early projections that I saw, predict that it will most probably go into the Gulf.
I wouldn't be surprised if the surf predictions change a little in the next few days, but right now the wind is out of the south/southeast and the seas for the next several day will be about 1 to 2 feet. If that is accurate, the conditions will not be changing significantly for a while. I wouldn't be surprised to see the surf predictions changed in the next few days though.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
PS: I don't usually post this early in the morning. If you usually check out the posts early in the day, you might have missed yesterday's post.
