9/1/18 Report - Tropical Storm Florence and Other Weather. Royal Sabre and Stingray Metal Detectors. Old Shipwreck Discovered.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blog.com

Source: nhc.noaa.gov

You probably heard the thunder last night.  There was a lot of it on the Treasure Coast.

Tropical storm Florence is over near Africa and most likely headed northwest and far from us.

The area down around Hispaniola is not expected to become a cyclone, but will send us some thunderstorms.  On Monday we'll get some higher surf from it - something like three to five feet.

That could cause some scattered cuts, but there is so much sand accumulation now, don't expect to see the older sand.

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Royal Sabre Metal Detector.

The Royal Sabre is a metal detector made by Tesoro back some time in the eighties. It was good for working dry sand but not wet salt sand. It had features that you don't see very often.

One feature was called surface blanking, which eliminates really strong signals so you could focus on smaller deeper targets in trashy areas. I used that a just few times.  

It also had notch discrimination, which I also found useful at times.  

Those features were advanced for a metal detector of that time period.

Overall, performance was good.  It was good for small pieces of gold.

I found a number of Revolutionary War buttons and artifacts with on a Caribbean Island.

Having a four digit serial number, you might consider it to be a collector's item, but I would still use it in some situations.

I had three different Tesoro metal detectors over the years, but will never purchase another because Tesoro does not honor their advertised lifetime warranty.  They declare some detectors obsolete and won't honor the warranty for those detectors. 

I also owned a Tesoro Stingray, which is a submersible detector.  When I got it, it didn't work right in shallow water.  I sent it back and few times, and they didn't fix the problem.  Eventually they sent me another detector as a replacement.  They said it was Jack's.  I tried it and it worked.  The trouble is that it had a modification, so when I returned it years later for service, they said the warranty was void because it was modified. The original Stingray was not properly grounded or something. 

It was not the best metal detector in the world anyhow, although there were times when I would use it.  

The primary reason I bought one or two of my Tesoro detectors was because of the lifetime warranty, but since they do not honor the advertised warranty, I will not buy a Tesoro again.

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After weeks of underwater excavation, a team of researchers and volunteers is inching closer to ruling on whether a wreck recently found near Kelley's Island is in fact the Lake Serpent, a ship known to have sunk in 1829.

If it is the Serpent, as suspected, the site would be the oldest known shipwreck in Lake Erie, a likely candidate for the National Register of Historic Places, and another significant feather in the cap of diver Tom Kowalczk and the Cleveland Underwater Explorers, the nonprofit group that discovered the wreck in 2015, during a scan of the area.

Here is the link for more about that.

https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/08/underwater_explorers_research.html

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I was going through some dug Canadian nickels and found some older ones.   There are some error nickels that are valuable.  It is difficult to know what to look for and the research takes a while.  That is one thing I've learned about checking coins for errors or valuable varieties.  You have to do a lot to do a lot of research.  It isn't as easy as I expected.

Anyone who has detected South Florida very much has probably found a bunch of Canadian coins, and since you can't spend them here, one way you can get something out of them is find some old ones or find some errors.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

10/3/13 Report - Density and Shape Both Affect Where Items Gather On a Beach & What Does Lifetime Warranty Really Mean

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

National Hurricane Center Map

We still have the same two areas to watch.  Jerry seems to be going nowhere, but the low pressure area down by the Yucatan now has an eighty percent chance of becoming a cyclone and could be headed for the Gulf Coast.  That is the one to watch for now.

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Here is an interesting article about ancient Roman bones and thousands of artifacts being discovered in a lost river.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24351460


Here is one brief quote from that story that I wanted to elaborate on.

"Forensic studies show that when the body disintegrates near a watercourse, the skull travels furthest, either because it floats or it can roll along the base of the river."

In my 8/5/13 post I did a simple experiment which supported what I always say about how items move on a beach.  My experiment involved four items made of lead, but each was a different shape or size.  When washed by a rush of water, both size(or weight) and shape affected how far the water moved the four differently shaped items.

(You can page back to my 8/5/13 post.)

The egg shaped lead sinker moved the most, a fish shaped sinker next most, and then a small disk or coin-shaped sinker, and then the bigger and heavier disk or coin-shaped sinker moved the least by the water.

Although people talk about weight as being the biggest factor in determining how an object sinks into the sand, I've claimed time and time again that weight is not as important as density and that shape as well as density is a very important factor in determining how an object is moved on a beach or in the water.

The quote from the article above is just another illustration of that fact.  A skull will present more surface area for the water to push against and may also roll.  The other bones are generally more aerodynamic than the skull and will not be moved as much by rushing water.  Skulls can also trap air, giving some buoyancy.

How does that relate to detectorists on the beach?   Coins lay flat against the sand and present a lot of surface area to the sand while presenting only a thin edge for the rushing water to push against.  They hug the surface of the beach while the water rushes over them.  They therefore lag behind other items that are more quickly washed away.

Watches are something like the skulls.  They contain space where air is trapped making them more buoyant.  They also present more surface area to the sand and do not sink into loose sand rapidly.  You'll often find watches in dips filled with course sand and bits of shells.

Rings while laying flat will sink into the sand rather rapidly, but they can also get turned on edge and roll down the slope.  I've seen that happen a number of times.

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What is a liftetime warranty?  You might think that if a metal detector manufacturer offers a liftetime warranty that means that you'll be able to get your detector fixed under warranty for as long as you own the detector.  Think again!

I don't know what lifetime Tesoro is talking about when they advertise a lifetime warranty, maybe the lifetime of a fruit fly, but it does not mean the lifetime of the detector.

One person was motivated by the advertised lifetime warranty to buy a Tesoro detector, which he used primarily as a backup.  He liked the idea of having a detector that he could get fixed without cost or problems.  He also owned a variety of metal detectors made by most of the other major manufacturers and used a couple of those other detectors the vast majority of the time.

But "lifetime" to Tesoro did not mean what the buyer thought it meant!  When he sent in his detector for repairs after years of using it only rarely, mostly having it around as a backup, after tracking the detector and finding that the company had received it a week earlier but having heard nothing from them, he called to see if it was shipped back yet.  What he then learned was that in the past week they did not diagnose the problem but instead told him he would have to send in a deposit to have it fixed and that they no longer had a circuit board for that model and so didn't think that they would be able to fix it anyhow.

Evidently what lifetime means to them is the period of time that they maintain a stock of parts for repairs.  When they no longer have the parts for a particular model, the "lifetime" is over.

I know of another case in which the same thing happened.  The older detector was purchased under the lifetime warranty and when sent in for repairs was deemed too old, and they said they no longer had the necessary parts to repair it.  When pressed about the lifetime warranty, they said there was white dust from corrosion in the unit and that voided the warranty.  That was said after they had already admitted that they no longer had the parts to repair the unit, but it gave them an out.   If the corrosion had voided he warranty or not, they still did not have the parts to repair the detector.  I suspect you can find some hint of corrosion on any electronics of some age even if you have to use a microscope to find it.

My main point is that when you hear a "liftetime" warranty advertised, it probably means something other than what you think when you hear the term.  Don't be fooled by that.

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On the Treasure Coast, conditions remain pretty much the same.   Watch that low pressure area.

The surf will be about 2 feet today and down around 1 foot this weekend.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net