• Yankee_Self_Loader@lemmy.world
    46·
    5 months ago

    I have an actual answer. I bought a metal detector and naturally I set to work in the backyard to see if I could find anything cool. Well I don’t know if you think rusty nails and bottle caps are cool but I sure found a lot of those. I did find a lot of good time to practice though.

    Fast forward a few months, I had branched out to local parks and such and hadn’t revisited the backyard. We were having some landscaping done which included digging up some tree stumps. For a lark I ran the detector over one of the holes a stump had come out of and I got a hit. Not just a hit but a hit that registered the same as a pre-1964 quarter. Silver.

    After a little digging I pulled up a pair of vintage ww2 aerial gunnery wings! (Note: these aren’t the ones I found but they are very similar)

    Not sure how I had missed them or what they were doing there but best I can figure is that since the house dated to the late 1950’s some kid grabbed his dads wings from the war and managed to lose them in the backyard and was never able to find them. Sad for dad but cool for me I guess

    • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      What are gunnery wings supposed to do? Are they like a badge, a decoration, something that goes on a car, or something else?

    • Chozo@fedia.io
      2·
      5 months ago

      That’s really cool! I wonder if there’s a way to find the previous owners of the house, that’d make for a really fun story if you were able to track down the original owner somehow.

    • Blizzard@lemmy.zipEnglish
      13·
      5 months ago

      A small child nicked my keys and dropped them somewhere in a large field. A detector was cheaper than a new electronic key for my car.

      That is hilarious and quite interesting!

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    23·
    5 months ago

    I took a metal detector to the beach once and all I got was antisemitic slurs. I’m not even Jewish; those bigots just assumed so.

    • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      Me and my BF have had a similar experience, I had my recording equipment and he had his metal detector, and I guess both of these things are semitic stereotypes because we were both hated upon for these two things. Neither of us were Jewish, I’m a Christian (more or less if one wants to argue the semantics) and he being an unspecific mix of things.

  • SeaJ@lemm.ee
    15·
    5 months ago

    Not me but someone who did it in our yard back when I was a wee lad: a gun. Don’t worry. Someone did not drop their gun willy nilly in our lawn, at least not recently. The thing was a very rusty 80-year old revolver. He also found a decent amount of tax tokens.

    Digging in my current yard has not resulted in anything as fun: 150 beer bottles, an animal skull (still not sure what species), and a wine bunch of oyster shells.

  • frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io
    14·
    5 months ago

    Copper chisel chips on old mining piles, copper replacement agates, lots of small copper specimens that are slowly filling my house. I gave up on the sweeping metal detectors once I got some nice handheld probes that you can shove deep into loose dirt and rocks while digging.