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This is for the guys who hunted CW relics in late 70's

maxxkatt

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or early 80's. Did you dig pop tops and pull tabs? certainly there had to be fewer of them that there is 50 years later.

I have heard stories from one source that his neighbor was a detectorist in the late 70's and 80's who brought home CW relics almost every time he went hunting at a spot near Decatur, Georgia. I have hunted that area quite a bit with an Nox 800 and found just a few relics that may be period. A watering bit, carved 3 ringer. But don't bring relics home every week.

Was that period the golden days for detectors and relic hunting?

I hunt another area that was a very large CW battle and have not had much luck with my 800. One problem is that these CW battle areas in urban Atlanta are so very trashy. I am one to believe that no area is hunted out, but have come to believe they can become so covered in metallic trash that they have been rendered very difficult. When where the stupid pop top and pull tabs invented? Before the 70's or 80's?

Oh well just a mini rant against trashy hunting locations. I guess I just have to deal with my hunting areas.

But I still am amazed at PA & VA hunters and some North GA hunters who can pull three ringers in by the dozens on a single hunt.
 
I can't answer this question as it pertains to CW battle-field relic hunting. Since I'm in CA. But I can answer it from an md'ing-in-general perspective :

Since you narrowed down your date range to late 1970s/early 1980s: I can assure you that there were PLENTY OF PULLTABS in those years. Perhaps not in-the-middle of nowhere . Since, go figure, there was no one there drinking sodas in modern times.

And so-too can the same thing be said of today as well : I can think of some stage stops we research and hit-virgin, where: All human influence stopped @ 1910. Hence we pull seateds and so forth, and NEVER find a pulltab. EVEN TODAY.

Thus location has a lot to do with your question. Eg.: One CW site might be "in the middle of nowhere", yet another one might be in a current park where people are drinking sodas all the time.

Pulltabs were invented in 1964 I think. And for the rare individual who started md'ing by that time (or shortly thereafter), then yes: the parks didn't have pulltabs. There was foil though :roll:

But there were very very few persons hunting junky parks anyhow in the mid 1960s. The hobby (in-so-far as fumble fingers individual coins go) was still very new at that point. There were entire swaths of the USA where detectors were still a novelty until the 1970s.

I knew someone who started in about 1964 or 65-ish in our town. With a BFO that probably got no more than 2" deep on coins. But by-golly he got a lot of silver back then. Go figure, silver was still in circulation, hence not deep. And yes: He was spared pulltabs, since they were still a new novelty at that time. But he did recall getting plagued by foil in the parks and school yards.
 
Interesting Tom. I remember opening beer cans with a "church key". Big hole on one side, small one on the other to vent.

I associate the 1950s with chewing gum. A stick has a outer paper wrap and an inner foil one. How long would it take for that thin foil to disintegrate? Are the little bits of foil i dig up possibly 60+ years old?
 
Seems I remember that they quick making beer tabs that pulled off the cans because people thru out the tabs in the water while fishing & too many fish died from it ...

~around in the middle 70's I detected a CW camp & the only I found was Shotgun shell brass & CW relics. Found some chain stuff, horse shoes, few tools like axes & even a pocket knife. Never beer tabs tho LOL

it was great, I gave all the stuff on a small museum in a college years ago, don't even don't any pix's of it dang-it
 
It was the golden day of detecting for sure, but not for detectors. In the 70s I had a BFO that was lucky to find a Volkswagon at 2' LOL. Actually, not that bad but small stuff was rare. 80s got much better with the TR & VLFs.

I don't remember finding near as many pull tabs and can slaw as I have in the last 20 years. But then I hunted mostly old fort sites that were now open fields. There was a field, still is, just east of Fort Dodge where you didn't even need a detector. You could fill a bucket with 45-70 shells and mini balls by eyeballing them. I remember finding a Kansas state seal officers button on top of the ground. Not a plowed site either.

I would come home with a hand full of wheats & silver on every hunt. In a location like Dodge City being the first to swing a detector in many locations was amazing to say the least. It was great times, but the 90s were my hay day. Better detector technology got me down to beyond 6". That is when the really old stuff came to light.
 
The first removable pull tabs - with the u-shaped tab, not a ring- came out in 1962, Iron City beer. Same year Schlitz started using them, the first national brand to do so. Pretty soon almost all brands switched to them. The ring pull appeared soon after. They started switching to the nonremovable design in the mid 1970s.
 
Pulltabs were invented in 1964 I think. if that is true then 1964 was doubly bad for our hobby. Loss of minting 90% silver coins and the invention of pull tabs. A day of infamy for our hobby. Someone must have really upset the detecting gods.
 
.... A day of infamy for our hobby. Someone must have really upset the detecting gods.

There is a special place in heck for the person who invented pulltabs, eh ? Shall we take a vote to see if they can be "strung up and shot" ? :?:
 
Yeah, but you hunt at places so far out in the boonies that I would rather think pull tabs, pop tops, can slaw, screw tops are as rare as large cents in your hunting areas. Probably every signal you get is a relic or a old coin or gold nugget or diamond ring. I have to admit if you lived at a place in CA halfway between the beach and old relic areas in the mtns or deserts you would have some productive hunts.
 
Yeah, but you hunt at places so far out in the boonies that I would rather think pull tabs, pop tops, can slaw, screw tops are as rare as....


Yes, I can think of stage stops that were like that. There was simply no aluminum, since no foot had set-foot there after 1900 or whatever.

And can think of a country picnic site like that, where all usage stopped in 1926. The utmost *newest* coin we ever pulled from there, was a 1925 merc, if I recall. So every single penny/dime signal was an old coin. Simply no clad or tabs.

I imagine that east coast guys have run into similar at "cellar holes". Where the home and all human habitation and influence disappeared before 1900 or whatever. Then the only trash would be some modern hunter bullet shells or whatever.

Those are the fun sites ! Because then even "junk" is FUN junk (rimfires, pistol balls, lantern parts, buttons, gun parts, toe-taps, etc....)
 
Yes, I can think of stage stops that were like that. There was simply no aluminum, since no foot had set-foot there after 1900 or whatever.

And can think of a country picnic site like that, where all usage stopped in 1926. The utmost *newest* coin we ever pulled from there, was a 1925 merc, if I recall. So every single penny/dime signal was an old coin. Simply no clad or tabs.

I imagine that east coast guys have run into similar at "cellar holes". Where the home and all human habitation and influence disappeared before 1900 or whatever. Then the only trash would be some modern hunter bullet shells or whatever.

Those are the fun sites ! Because then even "junk" is FUN junk (rimfires, pistol balls, lantern parts, buttons, gun parts, toe-taps, etc....)


One that comes to mind is Brad - green mountain metal detecting. He detects the Green mountains in VT and most often colonial cellar holes. You describe his environment almost perfectly. I think the mtn range goes 250 miles from the MA boarder up to Canada so he will probably never run out of hunting sites. He lives very near or in the foothills and has a lot of contacts and seems to get permissions very easy. Quality videos. Very mellow guy, no grandstanding, no controversy.

Even finds Spanish and English coins since some areas predate the formation of our country and coins. Oh, finds lots and lots of Large Cents, it is like ho hum, another large cent.
 
I did not detect in the 1970's but on cw sites I consider the small square nail to be the 1800's equivalent of today's pull tab. It proves people were there during the correct time period.
That type of nail was used on wood boxes that were used to transport supplies.
Staging areas near battlefields where wagons were unloaded are full of these nails. It is common to find them spaced both vertically and horizontally in the pattern of the four box corners but the wood has completely rotted away.
I suggest digging those small nails because many of those boxes contained things that do not give a signal such as officer's fine China.
 
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I am in North Georgia and I normally find something every time I go out related to Civil War, but I don't find tons of items. For bullet finds, my best day was 20 bullets. But, seems, unless you live in Virginia it is a much tougher search to find relics. The golden years were the 70s and 80s it seems and also because the battlefields, etc here in Georgia weren't protected yet. I hear stories of relic hunters going to Pickett's Mill, Kennesaw Mtn, etc... And then there is the construction which is happening all the time here and I hate it. It ruins everything.
 
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