Metal Detecting: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Uncovering History, Adventure, and Treasure - Mark Smith

Back in the mid-eighties or so, I spent a lot of my free time fooling around with a metal detector that I would take way out in the country or to some of the old schoolhouse sites in my county – many of which go back to the early 1900s. I often came home with a handful of old silver dimes and quarters, and maybe a few old nickels and wheat pennies. It was a nice combination of fun and exercise that I really enjoyed. But that was before some of life’s more intricate responsibilities took over and my spare time became pretty much non-existent. That old metal detector was put away – and eventually misplaced in one move or another – sometime around 1990.

Well, now I’m retired, and guess what? I have lots of free time again. That got me to wondering what it would be like to take up the hobby again, but when I started looking around for a new detector I learned that technology has pushed the hobby way beyond where it was when I last enjoyed it. I didn’t know where to begin -  and that led me to Mark Smith’s Metal Detecting: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Uncovering History, Adventure, and Treasure. Now, I don’t really expect to uncover a whole lot of history or treasure, but if metal detecting can get me to spend more time outdoors walking, bending my knees, digging and re-covering a bunch of holes, and using some of the muscles I barely remember having anymore, it will have served its purpose.

Metal Detecting is the perfect first step for a beginner or someone like me who is being exposed to the hobby’s new equipment and rules for the first time. Metal detectors come in a variety of price ranges these days (with goof ones priced roughly from $300 to $2500) and they are built for a variety of purposes. Some are best for finding gold, some for coin-shooting, some for historical relics, etc. Some are more suited for highly mineralized ground than others, some work best in and around saltwater, and others are fully submergible in freshwater rivers and streams. Mark Smith covers all of these in this introduction to the hobby.

But there’s a whole lot more to metal detecting than the simple purchase of the metal detector best suited for your particular needs. Mastering the quirks and qualities of your particular detector will be between you and the machine’s manufacturer. Smith can’t help you much with that.

Some of my gear: detector, headphones, and pin-pointer

But what he can do is teach you the “rules of the road” (where you can and where you cannot legally search for stuff); what kind of spots to search (beaches, riverbeds, old homesites, old schoolgrounds, etc.); how patient research can lead you to unsearched locations; what support tools you will need (hand spades, small specialized shovels, battery operated pin-pointers, gloves, knee pads, and the like); how to improve the effectiveness of your detector by adding additional search coils to your inventory; and the importance of joining the metal detecting support community, among other things. Personally, as much as anything else in the book, I appreciated the chapters on the etiquette of metal detecting. That includes the art (and, yes, it is really an art) of digging a search hole in a manner that allows you to cover it back up so effectively that it’s almost like you were never there (I’m getting really good at this, I’m proud to say).

Bottom Line: Metal Detecting: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide is really a crash course that covers every aspect of the hobby. This is definitely the place for newbies (or returnees to the hobby like me) to start. Reading this book will save the new hobbyist time, money, and grief galore in the long run – and it may even be the thing that keeps the more aggressive of them out of jail. If you are thinking about investing some time and money in the hobby, you can’t go wrong with this one.