Why Have I Purchased Two Tesoro Detectors In 2023?

I've explained in previous blogs how I approach hunting my pasture fields longterm, I go through a series of stages, the final stage is when I use machines and coils that I know can punch deep. However it takes a while to get to that stage, my last few YouTube videos are a perfect example. That specific piece of land I've been slowly working away at for at least two years now, the amount of shallow targets I've cleared out falls into the hundreds. It's only now after a few years that I can bring my deep seeking machines on to the area with the viewpoint of going for deep signals. There are still a few shallow targets that come up but I'm starting to hit on the deeper items, both trash and treasure. I might start to remove the iron as well to help open the land up even more.

I've mentioned a few times about the land that I hunt, one of my main farms, centuries ago use to be pasture and then the fields got ploughed and after sometime were turned back into pasture by bringing a load of top soil in, spreading it and seeding it. The parts of the land that were left have produced fantastic finds, the land that had the top soil brought in is far more hit and miss. I look upon it in a pretty simple way, treasure is still there but it's going to be sitting at all different levels. Some areas have super shallow items other areas have bottle caps at 14 inches + you've just got to dig and dig and all of a sudden something cool appears. This is what metal detecting is all about, it's only been in recent years where people seem to think it's their right to find treasure all the time. Many YouTube channels give this impression, I never wanted to do that hence why I now put videos together of a mixture of targets, I feel this provides a far more realistic view of the hobby and it also allows the ability of the machines to be demonstrated. 

We can't all have super historic land, land is hard to come by and you have to make do with what you can get hold of. Guys that have brilliant land are more of an exception than a common occurrence, it's all about the land you have, good land can make a crap machine look amazing, and bad land can make an amazing machine look crap. There are so many variables involved in this hobby, I actually feel sorry for those getting into it nowadays because it really is a circus of misinformation and unrealistic expectations. 

For me I just love digging stuff, as long as I'm using machines that I love swinging then I really don't care too much if I'm not digging history, history will appear at some stage and that makes it all the more rewarding. When I use my Nexus machines I find the whole experience very exciting because you can pull off some pretty impressive things when it comes to digging deeper. Because they're so intuitive to use I genuinely don't lose any interest when I'm out in the fields and feel like I could hunt for days without stopping. The fact I can modify and tune my machines in such an acute way also makes the whole experience very fulfilling.

When I initially start on a new field or a new area of a farm, in my mind, this is the first part of a long process. First and foremost I want to be clearing out all shallower nonferrous targets, of course I can do this with my Nexus machines but I wanted to have a few detectors in my collection that I can use for this specific task. Also when I'm hunting on ploughed land I don't really need my machines to be punching deep either, this is where my Tesoro detectors come in to play. My two machines are the Laser Rapier 2 and the Tesoro Outlaw, I managed to get the Outlaw brand new and clearly boxed in the Tesoro factory when the company were still in business. It was clear the Italian distributor had stock left and because Tesoro fell out of favour and went out of business, interest in the machines dwindled. 

I love Tesoro detectors, they look quirky and sound fantastic, they have that classic analog buzz and click and you genuinely don't have to think too much about what you're doing. There are times when you just want to swing something different, not all hunts have to be this super focused threshold obsessive approach. The Laser Rapier 2 is as basic as you can get, you literally turn it on and start swinging, it doesn't have a ground balance control so dialling the machine in is non-existent. This obviously hinders performance but that doesn't bother me because I'm not looking to go particularly deep, it's about clearing out those shallow targets. Not only that but the iron discrimination on this unit is fantastic, you literally don't even have to touch the discrimination dial because its default is to cancel iron out. Obviously if you're on land that has lots of really large iron then the dial position will have to be modified. 

The Outlaw is a little more advanced and has a few more features on it, you need to ground balance it so that alone will allow it to perform better than the Rapier. You have a non-motion mode for pin-pointing and a cool retune function, I won't go into too much of an analysis about the unit because I will eventually write a comprehensive blog about its operation and my experience using it. So to sum up, these Tesoro machines are for fun and focusing on the shallower targets, they're going to be great to use for this specific application. It just doesn't feel right using my Nexus machines for the shallower stuff, it's all about incorporating in a series of machines that have a specific purpose in my own personal metal detecting.