Coil Cover Cleaning - Mystery Signals Revealed!

Far be it for me to tell you how to metal detect, treasure hunt, or any of the intermediary things involved, but there is something you ought to know about your coil; that little device way out on the business end of your machine. Especially if you are part of the group known in social media circles as the New-To-This-Great-Hobby! crowd. Now if you are not mad at me yet, like most everyone else is for one reason or another, you soon will be. No one likes to know the truth about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy (who I always thought was Joey Heatherton doing some part-time work!) but I need to tell you something.

I don't know how to break this to you, but coil-covers or skid-plates, as they are sometimes called, are not really necessary. As a matter of fact, they are usually a pain in the larger scheme of things! "But...but...but...what are you saying?" you stutter, sweating profusely and thinking about the cash you just spent on that skid-plate for the inverted barbecue-grill-sized coil you use for deep cache hunting. 

What I'm saying is the usual story is that they keep your coil from wearing out on the bottom...physically wearing out. But do they really? No, not really. I have coils I've used for more than 10 years without a coil-cover; detecting over sand, soil, rocks and debris. After a decade of hard use, barely a scratch appears on the bottom of the hard epoxy base of my search coil. The thin-thermoplastic coil cover's real talent, though, is collecting and holding salt-water, sand, dirt, clay, fertilizer, smelly cow manure, plant-debris and whatever else your coil has motored thru that day...or the previous day. A veritable toxic waste dump of mineralization has leaked into the base of your plastic skid plate. 

Stuff builds up in the coil cover without you realizing it...salt sand, water...you name it

And that means false signals, trouble ground balancing the metal detector, and the general loss in depth and sensitivity of your expensive search coil. Searching over dry beach sand with a coil cover full of stagnant salt water or damp salty sand in the base confuses the liven dickens out of your detector ground balance circuits and can create havoc with a machine in all phases of the hunt. A lot of new people, who have no idea this is happening, and with only a few months or weeks in the hobby itself, can usually be found liberally bashing a metal detector brand on social media as a lousy machine, as if they were now an expert in metal detecting dynamics. Other newbies, unaware they are reading another inexperienced newbies opinion, can start a rumor mill that lasts for weeks, months or years, as misinformation is taken as gospel, reinforced by other un-knowledgeable comments by others. I've seen this happen at least twice in social media circles with all attempts at putting them straight come to naught.

If you absolutely are convinced that your thin thermoplastic coil covers do, without a doubt, keep those rock-hard epoxy coils of yours from being worn down like pencil erasers from hard use, then by all means, keep em' on your coil. However, do yourself a favor and after every hunt involving fine sand, water, salt-water, or mud, remove the skid-plate and thoroughly wash and dry the interior, and wash off the base of your coil, before putting it back in place. Better still, use the coil cover inverted on your coffee table and fill it with a nice party mix; peanuts, pretzels, almonds, cashews and the like. It would certainly be put to better use that way and I'd be likely to visit you a lot more after the hunt. Cheers!