Wednesday, May 30, 2018

So You Don't Have To Experiment #1- Worm Food Follow Up


Last year I came up with the idea of doing a segment called “So You Don’t Have To” experiments with the intention of doing various things with my collection to show what would happen. My first experiment was suggested by Fuji, bury junk wax era cards in dirt to see how they would fair.

I buried three 1990 Bowman Mike Boddicker card in my yard on my 45th birthday last year and left them underground for one year. Over the past 365 days the temperatures hit a low of 14 degrees and a high of 104 degrees, we had rain (the backyard did get flooded at times), snow, hail and plenty of sunshine. There were three major brush fires during that time and smoke and ash was around, not that I would think that would do anything additional to the cards.
Today is my 46th birthday, so like Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s vault, I went digging to see what treasure would be awaiting me. 

The cards were placed at 3 inches deep and 6 inches deep, so I slowly removed the dirt, stopping to take a picture when I saw the first bit of cardboard gold, a small piece of blue as I closed in on the 3-inch part of the hole (Inside the red square in the image below).
What I found (or lack of what I found) was a complete surprise. In the end I found less than 10 small pieces of the card with the largest being about 1.5 inches long. This was in the 3-inch deep portion of the hole, I found nothing of the other two cards that were buried 6-inches down.

Turn in tomorrow for a continuation of this experiment.

11 comments:

  1. First off, happy birthday Shawn! Second, has it really been a year since you did this? It seems like it was just a couple of months ago. I knew that this would be the outcome, but it was still fun to see.

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  2. Pretty cool. I'm curious how a Chrome (or similar plastic-like card) would do.

    Hope you had a great birthday!

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  3. Happy Birthday!

    And awesome experiment!

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  4. Awesome. I don't have to do that myself now.

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  5. I'm thinking that the modern "plastic" cards would hold up a lot better, but only the card I believe the photo would be gone. I think chromium coated cards might rust, lol.

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  6. Happy birthday to you, and RIP to the Mike Boddicker cards!

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  7. I didn't see that coming. The other two are completely gone? The worms must have really liked them. Happy belated birthday!

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  8. Happy Birthday! Baseball Archaeology. That is so cool!

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  9. Happy birthday! Very interesting where they disappeared to lol

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  10. Happy Birthday! I expected a bit more leftover.

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  11. Happy Birthday! Never would have guessed these results. I figured maybe they'd suffer some water damage or something. Thanks for testing this one out so we wouldn't have to.

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