Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Source of illustration: Master's Thesis (See link below) |
Iron objects don't hold up well in salt water. Besides rusting and corroding, they can eventually become totally covered by encrustation and eventually dissolve.
Those lumps of encrustation formed around old objects are commonly referred to as EOs (encrusted objects). You'll miss a lot of them if you are discriminating iron, or you might discard them at first sight.
I find them interesting for a number of reasons. One is figuring out what object is inside or was inside the clump before it dissolved. Another is that a variety of objects can be in such a clump - including coins.
I posted one example that Darrel S. showed us of a reale attached to two bolts. You probably also read my post on the 1984 Thanksgiving storm in which Clint described how he found a keg-size conglomerate that contained a bunch of amazing goodies.
The trouble is that it is so hard to tell what might be inside and not knowing if the object or objects survived at all. Another problem is trying to remove the encrustation, if that is what you choose to do.
I found a resource that will help answer many of your question about EOs. It is a Master's Thesis entitled Recontructing the Assemblage of Iron Artifacts From the Late Hellenistic Shipwreck at Kizilburun Turkey.
The illustration above is from that thesis and illustrates the process that an iron object might go through. There are a variety of factors that can influence the rate of corrosion and encrustation, so you can't estimate how old the object is by just looking at how much it has deteriorated.
When the object has totally dissolved, you can pour plaster or some other substance into the void and create a mold that will show you what the object looked like.
I think you'll benefit from quickly reading through the thesis.
Here is the link.
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/pdf-files/Rash-MA2012.pdf
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| Partially Encrusted Object Find and photo by John C. |
Interesting find. Thanks for sharing John.
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Steve from Sebastian ordered a Garret AT Max and shared his experience and observations. Here is what he had to say about that.
Sadly...I had to return the new Garrett AT Max. They have a known screen issue of having un-viewable screens if you wear Polarized sun glasses, which I must. The AT Pro had this issue already. Too bad...it was a very nice machine. Probably not the best for wet salt beaches anyway. You had to do a special "7 step plan" that was not in the manual to tame it down (excessive falsing) on the wet salt sand beaches and in the salt water.
So... I now have a 185 page manual to digest on my new/used 2017, 10 month old CTX 3030! With all 3 coils and 3 CF shafts. I've come a long ways... from a Relco $19.95 kit, with a little plastic bag full of resistors and capacitors that you had to feed in through the little circuit board, solder and cut off the ends...to a powerful "walking computer" in the guise of a metal detector. That tracks your path on GPS, laying down "bread crumbs" so you don't miss any spots, and learn to walk in straight lines, and stores your "find points" with a touch of a button, that not only has the exact GPS coordinates, but the date and time, what reading the detector had over the target (like 12-43, ferrous/conductive scales) ...ratchet pin-pointing that keeps closing down the target strength on each pass to get you set up perfect...and on and on. Many things that I haven't even found yet!
And now...just tonight...I was contacted by Minelab to be the -first beta tester- to do test analysis on their first ever Apple Mac version software! Quite an honor for me.
Thanks for the report Steve. I always appreciate detector reviews. And congratulations on becoming a beta tester.
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Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
