Vehicle Camo Netting

Inka
2 days ago
4 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

This week I only managed to get a couple of trips done, but I did land a few good finds.

It has been getting colder so the first hour or so of the searches has been pretty terrible. The fingers are having the worst of it. They are really painful until one is warmed up and getting the circulation going.

While digging the first signal in the start of the week I forgot about the needles shooting up through the hands very quickly. It was a rather good and strong signal, and when I opened the ground I saw black soot and charcoal, and the corner of a metal box.

I got the box to the surface and it was of the type that had held optical sights for machineguns. And it was heavy. I gently used my blade to open it, hoping the sight would have survived, coz the box was pretty rusted and had probably been cooked in the fire.

As I lifted open the lid I smelled old karbid. The box had been crammed full of the stuff, which had hardened into a concrete like substance. Too bad.

german mg optical sight box — *Box for optical sight.*

With the pin pointer I checked for more metal, and it made sounds and vibrated wherever I poked it. I started scraping sand from the bottom to scoop it out and it was a little `clink` when my bayonet hit metal.

A belt buckle!

It was facing down, but I could see it was a Heer buckle, and it was made of aluminum! I don`t find those too often.

It had survived the flames and was in surprisingly good condition after having been stored underground for so long.

Working on the rest of the bottom, and later the walls provided me with a nice big pile of boot heel irons, and a wooden "foot dummy" used by cobblers to help shape the shoe. Then I dragged up a wire with what looked like lots of half EKMs hanging. I became very excited, but crashed moments later when I understood they were the toe plates for combat boots.

Together with this was a small square tag made of leather, and I could see things written on it with a pencil, sadly unreadable.

Other than this the small dumping pit had a 20 litre wehrmacht jerry can converted into a field stove, an intact jerry can and a bakelite karbid box. It was missing its lid, but I found that when I was refilling the hole in the ground.

But the last piece of metal that was down there I found very interesting. It was a section of chicken wire crumbled together, but it had lots of rectangular plastic strips attached, in two different tones of green. A camo netting! I have never found something like that before so I was pretty happy.

ww2 wehrmacht camo netting — *A small section of the camo netting. A very interesting find.*

I walked around picking rubbish for a while before I had another good find. This time I believed it was a common enamel soup bowl when I saw the rim of it, so my surprise was big when I dug up a dogs drinking bowl!

Then I found two large carrying handles made from a pair of horseshoes. I dug up a Notek reflector, some cream tubes, a Feldgendarmerie stop sign and the last signal I dug that day was a gasmask canister together with some cream- and food tins.

a dogs drinking bowl — *Drinking bowl for a Heereshund.*

I went back to the place a day later, and opened the show by finding a leather wallet. With cold and suffering fingers I unfolded the rotten leather pouch and inside were a few coins, a pen split plated in 14K gold and what looked like a train- or bus ticket.

Next to a birch tree nearby another very good signal had me tearing up moss and roots. There was a metal housing for a Bosch windowviper engine, in very good condition.

But that was all the luck I had. One Odol toothpaste tube was the only other find worth bringing with me this day.

Some days are like that.

A few days later I drove to where me and the GirlfriendWife usually harvests berries. On our last trip there I had ran around with the detector a bit and found either a jerry can or a grenade box. There had been no time to uncover it that time, but now I wanted to know what it really was. And maybe I would be lucky enough for it to be a dumping pit.

I found the site and started digging.

It was a 20l fuel can, and it had been cooked so its sides were bulging out. There were nothing together with it, but on the surface nearby I had a little luck. There I picked up the lamphouse from a Kettenkrads fender light. A bit broken ,and missing the insides, but in original color!

I searched the area for a few hours and found a Notek lamp bracket, a Heer- and a Pionier axe and a small burnpit with a shovel and a few Finnish coins.

There were too many things to do at home this weekend, and also a few of my fingertips have some cuts that needs to heal, so there was no trip together with Jimmy, but we are hoping to get an expedition going next weekend, which might be the last one for this season as we are expecting the snow and days following days with subzero temps to hit us the coming week.

So crossing the fingers.

Thanks for reading :) Keep Smiling :)