A memorable find was not a monument, but after removing 1/2 foot of hardpacked mining road, the 4" square hole about 18" deep where the original post had completely rotted away.
Another was a ring of rust around the cement core of a GLO pipe, found about a foot deep after calculating search coordinates by Double-Proportion. I never had to set a corner by DP that I can recall, but I found several by computing the location by DP.
I don't know that it's a favorite but one of the first I ever found was working with @holy-cow just south of my home town. I know I've mentioned this story before but it will always be a good one that I reflect on often.
Since then, I've found more than a few on vacations, road trips, etc.. Always looking for the next one.
That's one of the things I truly love about this profession. It's all around us, everywhere we go, and few others, outside of those of us who do this every day, even know such a thing exists let alone understands it.
T. Nelson - SAM
Remember looking for one corner and reading the notes and realized I was there 100 years to the day from when the original corner was set. It was an interesting project.
nice
This grinding hole, called out as an accessory to a corner in a silver mining claim survey in 1876.
Surveying a boundary of a parcel whose only description was triangular shape and iron pipe corners.
I thought the instrument looked good with the sunshade on, but dropped it while trying to put it on.
The sunshade rolled down a hill, and when I followed, it had come to rest at the iron pipe.
Historic boundaries and conservation efforts.
Found several really cool monuments. Axles, gigantic white oaks, old stone piles, old pipes. One of my favorites is a control point I set early on in my field work. It was just a 5/8" rebar, but I found it after about a half mile of traverse exactly where I calculated it would be within less than "0.04'" 😉
The satisfaction of that is a big part of the essence of surveying to me.
Ellicott's Rock. Actually a carving into the stone wall on the east side of the Chattooga River at North 35 degrees 00 minutes 03 seconds. Not bad calculation for 1811.
Andrew Ellicott marked the stone as the borders on Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. A friend and I hiked up the river to the stone about 20 years ago and nailed a sign to a tree above it, nailed loosely so that when the tree grows it can expand.
As an aside, the movie "Deliverance" was filmed just a few miles downstream.
Andy
@not-my-real-name Any chance I can buy that sunshade from you? I need one with those exact skills.
I took a step forward and tripped as the pipe had gone inside of my pants.
LOL A fellow that worked with me for years accomplished that in a subdivision that had some really poor platted dimensions, but he found a couple of the pins that got caught in his pant leg. Love to hear that others have those pin finder pants as well.
Great stories!
One of my favorite monuments is one that I didn't find--but then again I did.
It was in a Twin Cities suburb, not a terrible area but a place where you couldn't be sure anything was at record. I wasn't in the field, but the crew chief, normally pretty good at this sort of thing, came in to report that he couldn't find this particular corner. I went through the comps and analysis, studied the situation a bit, made my best guess of how to adjust the record dimensions, and sent him back out with a comp'd position to set the corner.
When the crew chief started to drive the iron, he hit an obstacle about three inches down. He had sense enough to dig around a bit before proceeding. There it was--the missing original iron.
A buddy of mine with a different firm had a similar experience. He was following a survey of mine. Everything was found except the east quarter corner, which I had set in a county road. As he went to drive his bar, he hit the top of mine. For some queer reason, his detector could not raise a signal on that bar. He asked me about it. I explained that we had to beat that bar viciously to get it below grade. Told him we must have knocked all of the magnetic particles to the far end of the bar.
I've had it happen a couple of times. Magnetic properties can be beaten out of rebar. It's probably good to check and make sure they still zing after setting them, but I don't.
I'd surmise his batteries were dead.
or you're using non-ferrous titanium or similar rods.
not sure how the physics of magnetic procession is possible from just impact, heat can realign the field but it's induced back to the field of the planet over time as the flux moves similar to the isogonic lines with compass use...
damn physics....
We occasionally hear of a rebar that doesn't make the detector sing.
Some of those cases may be due to people using the detector with suboptimal setting. I like to get a medium tone and listen for changes in pitch. If you have it barely ticking and expect it to scream at the target, the sensitivity is less.
But it could occur that the rebar started with "permanent" magnetism opposite the earth field where it was installed and the beating made it adapt partway to that field such that the total was near zero.
There are two components. The bar may have some of its own magnetism, and also the soft iron effect of concentrating the earth field. The self-field can be changed by shock, strong induced fields, or high temperatures.
I've read here that some people carry a small magnet and touch the rebar after installation. Watch the polarity if you do.
I should add that I have found a rebar at our church that is under a very large power line. The Shoenstedt has a warble on its tone due to the power line field. That rebar had too little indication to more than barely change the warble and be found. Touching a magnet to it brings the indication up considerably, but I don't know how long that lasts, as I think the power line AV field acts like the erase head of a tape recorder (remember those?).
I know a surveyor who:
Checks the polarity of his rebar at the house (I'd guess with his meta detector display) it will tell you positive, and negative polarity), then paints one end, (green as I recall), and that end goes down).
If you find a bar, with nearly no signal, touch the top with a magnet, and then check signal strength. It goes up considerably.
It's a very real issue.
I've found 3 bars, by same surveyor, at a section corner. It has 3 witness trees.
2 are maybe 0.10' apart. One is about 0.3' from the other 2. Hard ground. I'm sure it was set. Then later looked for with mag locator. Assumed it was gone, set another. Repeat.
Very real phenomenon.
N
This is a real problem. A DOT bar was less than two inches below the top of asphalt but made absolutely no signal on either detector we had with us. Dug anyway and found it right where it should be. Talked with the DOT Area Surveyor about that. He said a similar situation happened along a stretch of I-70 in northwest Kansas with multiple bars set by the same crew over a week time frame. They were all there, but, there were no standard signals.
I have encountered this numerous times over the decades for bars that I knew were set, the reference ties all agree and every time we had to dig to find them still in place and undisturbed. There were no signs of activity suggesting they might have been disturbed.
How high were those multiple bars stacked end to end at the end of the week? Seems like a blind squirrel would have noticed something was amiss in a week.
I wonder if they were staking the same point from the same control.