g'day folks i'm the coffee bush kid and today
we're going to talk about gritting but first off i want to give you a little history lesson
so at home i might have a book that i was given many years ago called detectorists through the
ages now it has lots and lots of stories of the old detectorists of times gone past like
genghis khan alexander the great who of course's real title was alexander the great detectorist but
because it was just took so long to write and for printing costs at the time they decided to shorten
it but he financed many of his mediterranean vacations through what he found under the coil
but today i want to tell you about william shakespeare now it's a little known
historical fact that william shakespeare was an absolute gun detectorist so what happened was that
on one wednesday he was invited to a party at a local lord's place on the outskirts of london
while he was sipping a beverage he happened to look across the fields and notice these earth
works and he thought oh geez i reckon that looks like it might be roman just at that
moment the lord walked past and he said hey mate that field over there has anyone detected that
and the lord said well you know what to my knowledge no one has ever detected that yet sorry
william said to him well would it be okay if i had a bit of a swing over it and the lord said
yeah go your hardest mate why don't you come back on saturday and give it a go so oh william
was absolutely wrapped to the back teeth couldn't wait so you know the rest of the week dragged on
finally you know friday night true detectorist he couldn't sleep much so he was up at sparrows
fart poor old anne was still in the cot snoring away he's had his breakfast he's sipping on his
coffee and he's looking out the window and the sky is all overcast and pretty with the day and
william was thinking about how he was going to attack the field what he was going to do first
and as he looked out the window and pondered he thought to grid or not to grid that is the
question and right at that moment the big zipper in the sky opened up and it persistently bucketed
down and william thought well you know i'm up already i might as well make the day productive
so he penned a play and you know what for the life of me i can't remember which one it was
but the same conundrum faces you and i when we get to a certain spot that we want to detect
should we grid and that's today's segment so the first thing we need to actually explain
is what is gridding gridding is where we take a small section of ground mark it out yeah this tree
that tree that stone this stone and we go over it thoroughly with the coil so we know we've got
good overlap on everything and we go in multiple directions as it so happens i have a piece and
a piece of paper and a texture that have been put here so if we mark an area that we think we're
going to detect what you should do is you have your coil swing overlapping going all the way
like that in the area that you have decided to detect then you should come the other way
and this is the same for going for gold as well
so not only do you do that you should then also if you really really keen
you detect over the other way
with your coil overlapping each time
and once you've done that you'll also then go the other way now with
your coil overlap you can see from here
we've covered the ground fairly well so that's only been the texture but naturally enough if
you're using an 11 inch coil you're going to get good ground coverage that is what uh gridding
is now when should you use it when you decide to grid you should really have already found a target
in the area personally me i would not just pull up at a spot and go yep this looks good i'm going
to grid it because there are just some spots that don't have any targets in them whatsoever
and there's there's also time factors involved if you pull up at a park in a country town and
you've only got a 20-minute stop you should not grid the area you should just start swinging with
absolute wild abandon picking out the spots where you really think that there will be something
the times that i would grid an area is of course you get your first target you go yep
this is good you start if you like mini gridding around that target to see if there is anything
there so you might start to go in spread out from your your find area and if you don't find
any more targets around it you just keep going and searching for more but if you were to find
two targets that were let's say half a meter apart or closer you should really start to pay attention
so that would be when you either have your own markers go find some stones mark out tree areas
and do this type of swinging with your coil over that area to get the most targets out of the
ground as you could now another thing that you should probably do is when gridding don't don't
make a big area always have a small area so that you can fully concentrate i would say three to
four meters tops at a time right so now i've shown you how to grid and when you shouldn't potentially
grid another little factor that you might like to keep in mind is is it a public area that you're in
you may not want to grid and draw attention to yourself too much to be honest i don't grid that
way i'll mark an area go up and down at once if i'm feeling good i might come back another time
do it the opposite way just to go over it and see what i may have missed
if you have a permission that no one is going to you know you could put stakes in and just
leave them there and absolutely make sure that you've done that area to death really to death and
you know you don't have the the mental constraints of is anyone else going to come and take your
targets well i hope that that has demystified when you should grid when you shouldn't grid
and what gridding is all about at the end of the day with any luck it will get more targets out
of the ground for you so i'm the coffee bush kid and that is today's top tip for the mind map show