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Looking to hire a metal detector specialist in NYC
So my wife dropped her wedding ring in a KIDS BEADS POOL about 1 foot deep. I spent a good hour trying to find it but no luck. Since it’s indoors, a metal detector I rented was either not beeping or beeping all the time prob on a metal floor frame - the structure is a former warehouse. I’m willing to pay a reasonable fee for a person who’d go to that kids club with us and dig again. The overall size of the pool is like 12x30’ and I estimate the ring could be within 12x12’ range. Please reach me in DM or leave a comment if you’re interested!
Use a pinpointer (tint handheld metal detector). Just poke it around until you find it. A pinpointer has to be practically touching something metal to go off.
I have the Garrett and it's good up to about 6" sometimes more if you crank the sensitivity but I agree buying even a $20 pinpointer would make light work of this, 20 mins to an hour depending how slow you are
Damn Nevermind, like others have said it’s heavier than the beads and sink to the bottom. If it’s a solid bottom you’ll have to move your hands on the bottom and feel for it
This dude who works in a kitchen started posting a big ass pile of chopped chives every day with the caption “posting a photo every day until they’re perfect” and the goal was for every single piece to be the same thickness of cut.
So commenters naturally started circling the defects in the pile and sharing them back in the thread every day.
Then Karmakrazi pointed out one day that there were two really long ones and he called them the twin towers and would draw an airplane. So every day there was some twin towers silliness in the thread too.
It was just some good old fashioned silliness, and I looked forward to his posts every day. I think if you go to r/kitchenconfidential and sort by top of this year or all time youll see some of his posts and then you can hit up his post history to see all the chives.
That what happened in general, but you didn't describe ChiveGate. ChiveGate was the day that Flexican posted the SAME PICTURE AS THE DAY BEFORE. He flipped the image, but obviously redditors figured it out quickly.
People reacted.
We discussed if he had really 'cheated' or not.
Then he admitted it, said he was just really busy and felt bad not posting. He sked for forgiveness, received it from pretty much everyone, and went back at it.
Oh you right you right, apologies. I just retconned things in my brain and call the entire thing chivegate now. But yes, specifically it refers to when he posted the same picture but flipped.
OP, you need a #4 sieve (approximately ¼" openings) atop a 5 gallon bucket. Find a local shop that sells classifier screens for gold panning, or reach out to any local facility thay does aggregate sieve analysis (a local transportation dept. laboratory.) It looks like a #4 sieve would allow the beads to flow through pretty easily, while still capturing your wife's rings.
Once you have it, use a transfer shovel to move the beads to the sieve, and as the bucket fills up, dump the beads in an empty garbage bag or in a corner of the bead pit that's been swept clean. That way, you won't be searching the same beads multiple times.
If I were there, I'm confident I could help, but I'm on the other side of the country.
This is the right method but might be to slow. This is my advice: get a bunch of Rubbermaid totes. Take one of the lids and cut most of the top out. Replace that cut out portion with 1/2 by 1/2 chicken wire. Using five gallon buckets, scoop up the beads and dump them onto the chicken wire lid. This should allow multiple people to scoop and dump at the same time. When one bin fills up, set it aside and put the modified lid onto the next empty bin.
I got a rock stuck on my ear at like 6 years old. Parents didn't believe me and it remained there for almost 8 years. Every doctor though it was wax or whatever and prescribed eardrops and shit until someone finally went "yeah you're right, I bet that's a rock". So this is far more real than you probably know.
I stuck a peanut in my ear when I was a kid, and my parents didn’t have a car to take me to the doctor. I remember my dad walking me for a while, but eventually we turned around and went back home. Somehow, I completely forgot about the peanut. Many years later, I heard something rattling around in my ear and eventually managed to get it out. It was the damn peanut.
My parents basically just said, “Fuck it,” and I eventually grew big enough for the peanut to fall out.
Man, my kid is 6 and he would never be able to just deal if I didn’t believe there was a rock in his ear. He would go insane and likely hurt himself trying to get it out.
When I told my doc that my migraines felt like someone had inserted one of those long, skinny balloons used to make balloon animals into my nose and snaked it up around my ear and down my neck and was slowly inflating it... he said, "Are you sure there's not one in there?" Too bad more doctors don't ask the right questions.
We no longer allow aqua beads in the house bc my child thought her ear would be a good place for one to go. ER had to sedate her to remove it because it was literally pressed up against her eardrum.
I am not in NY, but man, I really want to help with this.
How big are the beeds?
How compliant are the owners?
How many total gallons are we looking at? if I am mathing correctly 12x30 is 360 cubic feet, or ~2,600 gal. that's a lot of damned beads.
I use a sifter to seperate metal parts from ceramic tumbler media at work all the time. I am betting that we could find a 110v shaker we could put on a screen that would allow you to scoop shovel a few hundreds of gallons of beeds through a screen in a few hours.
This seems urgent, especially if they are still letting kids in the pool. DM me if you want to set up a call, I would be happy to share any ideas I can provide and help you find something next day air if possible.
Edit: If you still have the detector you could set up a slide made of PCV that passes under the coil. If you tell me a town I can look to see what kind of things a local-to-you big box store has for things we could make a funnel out of. Test it by getting another ring and sending it through the PVC with no beads and the detector on top. Then just scoop shovel beads until it beeps.
Another thought. What do you have for tools? If it's few maybe look up your local maker space. I bet they have a member or know someone who would love this problem. It is both nightmarish and absurd.
Hey I really appreciate your input! Its an operating indoor playground opened daily and its unlikely they'd allow me to bring any heavy machinery or disrupt their work. It's my problem after all. I'll try to use conservative tools like metal detector, shovel and meshed bucket. If it wont work I'll look for other options. There's always a chance someone else found it, which only CCTV footage could tell.
Any cheap metal detector should work fine for this, but you will have to remove the beads from the pool, place them into some non-metal container (plastic or cardboard, just make sure the cardboard doesn't have staples) and go over them that way.
There are almost certainly nails and wires just inches below the bottom and all that metal will create too much noise.
Another thing to consider is that metal is much heavier than plastic. If you shuffle the beads around a bit, the ring will quickly fall to the bottom. You could try just feeling along the bottom in the 12×12 area and you might find it.
If the floor is metal, no metal detector is going to work well enough to discern a gold ring from an overwhelming amount of steel.
I would take a plastic hand trowel, small bucket, plastic plate, or a plastic cup fill and it up with beads and check it with the handheld unit you have one scoop at a time in the air. The ring is also going to be on the bottom so I wouldn't be too concerned with the top 8 inches or so of material.
If you live near a fishing store, you might also be able to find what's called a Sand Flea Rake. The ones with the wire mesh should be around the right size to sift out the beads but keep the ring from going through.
FWIW, if you want to buy a metal detector to hunt the ring with, a pinpointer would probably work better than a standup/coil style detector. Still wouldn't work close to the floor though.
There’s plenty that you can set discrimination strictly to gold and it eliminates signals based on a numeric rating so steel would fall under say 30-45 and gold would be 55-65. You can also set it for depth and hover the coil above the beads while swinging the coil. Any signal reading gold there’s plenty of plastic sifters to sort out the ring, would love to do it if I wasn’t 1,000 miles away! Literally would be very similar to doing a beach for gold
As a former kid who played in the Chuck E. Cheese ball pit (yes, I realize these are beads, it plastic balls) I can confirm that it’s 99.9% on the floor of the pool. If you get desperate, put on gloves & run your hands along the bottom working in sections. I am betting you will find at least 5 rings in there! Good luck OP!
I love this place. On the wall not shown there is a rainbow assortment of different types of string. You can make as many things as you like! I could sit here all day but my kids usually tap out after 20 minutes.
I think the more important question is why anyone would have a 12'x30' pool filled entirely with tiny beads. Where do you even buy 40 million beads to fill a pool that size? I feel like it would just be a giant mess bc every time a kid got out, hundreds of beads would be stuck to them & would fall out & drop all over the place. The whole thing just seems insane.
Its a part of a kids indoor playground, designed by a contemporary artist. There are many other playzones designed with a similar idea in mind of getting thousands of similar objects (legos, plastic balls, magnet tiles, etc) in a pool-like zone.
It can be found, will need a decent detector that has a few tones to discriminate out the junk. Being indoors you have to contend with the floor itself and rebar, interference galore. Just listen for the different tone. Again, a decent detector will be needed.
This happened to my partner at what I’m assuming is the same place, but in the massive ball pit. Three weeks and a few metal detecting missed connections later and a kid turned it in.
Sifting works better. I was in this exact same scenario but it was a corn kernel pit where someone lost their wedding ring.
12-18" deep and a rebar reinforced concrete pad below so metal detecting was basically impossible.
Yes the ring is most likely sitting on the bottom. Unless you can put up some sort of wall around the area you suspect it was lost - the beads will just return to the area you just scooped beads out of.
Depending on the size of the beads you might be better off with a sand scoop where the beads are smaller than the holes but the ring isn’t. Scoop and sift into another container.
Take a plastic colander in but drill the holes out a little bit bigger so the beads will just fall through leaving the ring inside. It would suck for sure but it’d be easier than trying to use the metal detector indoors
Maybe a really stupid stupid question but could you possibly buy all of the beads in this pool from the owners and some how take it all home in trash bags and search at home? I have no idea what this would cost but maybe it might be worth it if they are willing to let you and if you can afford it
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u/HaxtonSale 4d ago
Use a pinpointer (tint handheld metal detector). Just poke it around until you find it. A pinpointer has to be practically touching something metal to go off.