Hey Everyone. Been skulking around here for a while but this is my first post. Have had a very long relationship with wood on several levels, including 17 years of hoarding firewood as my primary heat source. Also been known to "rescue" a piece here and there from firewood pile to use in the woodshop. Other trees don't even make it to the firewood processing as I have been doing greenwood carving the past couple years which brings me to my current reason for posting. A neighbor had a few trees removed to make room for a new septic system and I had the tree company drop the logs in my driveway. One Ash that is for the stove and the other turned out to be Ambrosia Maple! Essentially a hard/sugar Maple that was attacked by Ambrosia Beetles, leaving behind a beautiful spalting pattern. IMG_9546[/url] by Kyle, on Flickr[/IMG] Couldn't wait to start carving out a hand hewn bowl from a section and while hollowing the bowl with the adze suddenly noticed something shiny... It was getting dark and I was working outside by the light of the Coleman lantern but something wasn't right. Ran it into the basement to discover I had clipped the end off of a nail with my razor sharp Swedish forged Karlsson bowl adze. So, I'm thinking it's time to invest in a metal detector to make sure this never happens again. I would need it to be able to sense metal through 3 or 4 inches of wood minimum, with a high degree of reliability. The tools I'm using can take several grievous hours to restore a damaged edge, so I'm fine with spending a little money to spare myself & my tools. Any recommendations?
Welcome aboard RabbleRouser There are several sawyers around as I’m sure you know, hopefully someone chimes in to share their experience.
Still trying to figure out the image insertion protocol here... maybe a picture of a nice chunk of wood will get me a little more action on this thread.
Wow, that's stunning! I'm here to learn about detectors as well so hoping someone chimes in. mike bayerl
Haven't had a metal detector since high school. Bought a nice Whites with paper route & lawn mowing money. Not sure how well it would've worked for this application though. Perhaps one of the wand type scanners would work better. Beautiful looking wood to work with.
This has a bit of a price tag on it, but seems well reviewed, and is specific to woodworking. Lumber Wizard 5
That tool for $150 is probably worth getting. Expensive, but think about what it’ll save you. You could also use a metal detector pinpointer which works the same way, but maybe not as deep as this one for about $100-125. The other route is to check Craig’s List for a used metal detector. Should find one for under $75.
I use a MDI detector at my sawmill it is a handheld similar to a detector used for beachcombing except it can detect a 8 penny nail as deep as 12 inches into a log it has saved me a lot of blades on the mill
Thanks everyone. That Lumber Wizard looks interesting but doesn't seem to have much range at all. I did some poking around after posting here and as JB Sawman has said, it appears most Sawyers use the big version, like you would sweep the ground with. I'll check out the MDI JB, 12 inches in sounds impressive. It sounds familiar from some of the other info I found. Any idea what model you have?
