Reports Of GM1000 5" Coil Touch Sensitivity

[vanursepaul]

Anytime I touch the short run cable coming out of the coil I get a false...both coils...sens doesn't seem to matter..

It is just that first six inches of cable

[Bhogg]

Hi All

Yes a brand new detector and the same issue if you bump the coil or coil cable it sounds off!!

Its beyond Frustrating! obviously if your detecting on nice flat ground with no obstacles or bumps I'm sure it's fine, but let's face it how often would anyone be using the 5 inch coil for detecting on flat open ground!  This size coil is made for getting in those hard to get to places that bigger coils can't get into.

Is there any solution for this coil ? eg a recall ?? 

Exspecily since it's not an isolated issue!!

Cheers

[Steve Herschbach]

There is nothing official. Bill Southern has inquired with Minelab directly but so far reports no response. I started this this thread in an attempt to get a handle on the issue - how real is it and how widespread? You have people reporting no issue and people reporting severe issues and some in between. My unit is relatively knock immune, only getting there at manual sensitivity of 9 and 10. Since I am normally running sensitivity 6 - 7 - 8 or one of the auto settings I am not normally encountering it as a problem. I get no sensitivity to touching grass also and others report this as being an issue.

The GM1000 also lights up hot rocks as you run over the ground at high sensitivity levels in a way that mimics touch sensitivity, and I am not sure how much of what is being reported as touch sensitivity is this instead. The bottom line is I think this is still in a "collecting information" stage at most.

[Ridge Runner]

I'm rich! With the sensitivity set at 9 in my back yard it shows it's covered in gold. If I put it on auto sen. I'm back in the poor house. Now this is with the big coil and no dog leg on the cable coming out the coil'

I went out to do some testing with about a 1/2 gram nugget. One thing I found out was if I got say three inches away from the nugget the ID bar won't show anything. That's with the sen. set at three like i said but you can hear the signal good. The sen. bar comes alive when the coil is about a 1 1/2 away. You may have known this but it's new to me that you could hear it good but come up short on the sen.bar. I forgot to say that with the auto sen. I got the same results.

We may not have much gold in Texas but we got all the water you could want right now I have a daughter lives in Houston and her street is like a river but she's on high ground so far.

The best to All

Chuck

[Bhogg]

I played around with the settings to see if anything made a difference but in all reality we shouldn't have to do this regardless,

And after I played around with everything I did find a setting where it didn't false at all but unfortunately this was when it was turned off! So not much use to me lol.

But let's face it minelab makes great detectors and the best gold machines around! and nobody's perfect we all make mistakes from time to time, and yes if it was just the very odd machine that had a problem it's wouldn't be a huge issue , but I believe this is a bit more wide spread then that but I'm sure minelab will find a way to rectify this issue and keep there loyal customers happy.  

Anyway like Bill I'm eagerly awaiting a reply back from minelab!, I just hope anyone else with this issue also contacts minelab so we can get it quickly addressed and sorted out so I can use my machine again very soon!.

Cheers Hoggy 

 

[Reno Chris]

In using my GM 1000 with the larger coil, I am finding that when I turn it on cold, its fine, but after a few hours use, every touch on the coil, no matter how slight, is a false sound, so at that point it must be held far enough above the ground that it wont possibly touch anything, which means I am holding it so high that I am losing significant depth. As I am hunting areas with lots of stacked rock, so its an issue. At that point it's not long and I am switching to the SDC or the GPZ.

I have tied down the coil wire very carefully with multiple velcro ties, so its not the wire moving. Turning down the gain does help a little, but it does not eliminate the problem. Besides, if the ground is mild, I should not need to turn the gain way down to 4 - 5 because of bad bump falsing. I plan on fiddling with it some more and I would like to remove the coil cover to see if anything has gotten in there, but if more fiddling does not resolve the issue, then yes, I will contact ML.

Steve pointed out it is not a universal problem, so it may be some spotty manufacturing quality issue.

[Bhogg]

Another Email sent last night and another one first thing this morning without response, so I contacted them by phone 3 times today and got a response this arvo not exactly the response I was after as it's not an actual fix to the issue but just replacing the entire machine. 

So I guess we'll see what happens with the new machine.

[Steve in Idaho]

I tie my coil wire so that it runs straight up the shaft. I use those velcro ties and have not had any falseing. I do this on my other machines and never get any falseing from touching the coil wire. 

[Steve Herschbach]

6 hours ago, Bhogg said:

not exactly the response I was after as it's not an actual fix to the issue but just replacing the entire machine. 

There is only an issue to fix if every machine has the problem, and that does not appear to be the case. There is nothing to fix on my GM1000. What we are talking about then are some machines having an issue. My guess is rather than mess around Minelab wanted to get your entire unit back in order to help nail down what's going on. People are assuming it is a coil issue but that is not necessarily the case. There could be some other problem causing inherent instability.

Stuff happens. I see a lot of the new Deus HF elliptical coils are dead on arrival or have some other problem causing quite a few of them to have to be returned. And that is after an exceptionally long delay to make sure there were no problems on release! It happens with all the companies and is the number one reason for not being an early adopter of any new item, and I am not just talking metal detectors.

I used to own a large powersports dealership and we had a large service department. We had some bad management at one point that got severe enough that I stepped in personally and ran the service dept for a couple years. I could tell countless stories about new product issues that make whatever happens with metal detectors look like nothing. Here is just one.

Johnson and Evinrude outboard motors were made by a company called OMC and in 1996 they came out with a new fuel injected lineup designated as FICHT outboards. This was an exciting new product with good fuel efficiency at the time, and we jumped on the bandwagon and sold a bunch of them.

Then the 150HP units started blowing up. A piston would typically undergo severe detonation and literally blow a hole in the side of the powerhead. The only real solution was to replace the entire powerhead. A lot of these were installed as dual outboards on charter boats. Soon the trickle became a flood. Charter operators as a rule always want a commercial discount, and then they also want overnight service because they are losing money every day the boat is down. Now these are people who have real problems with new product that is costing them a small fortune and they are angry - and the person across the counter from them typically takes the brunt of their ire. I have had people nose to nose with me screaming in my face about their problems. I got very good at handling that stuff but it is stressful.

Not only did the motors blow up, but after we put a new powerhead on, they would run a while and blow up again. We had stacks of powerheads and for some time that seemed to be all we were doing.

Now OMC of course has engineers going crazy trying to figure out what is going on. The problem was not occurring at all or nearly as much at other locations. We seemed to be ground zero for the problem. OMC finally had to send engineers to Alaska to go out and run the motors and monitor what was going on to get to the root of the problem.

These were very high performance motors and akey to that performance was the onboard computer or "brain box" that collected information from numerous sensors and tweaked the fuel injection parameters on the fly to get the best horsepower and fuel efficiency under various conditions. Just like new metal detectors, these things are basically running a computer program to operate. It was finally determined that at certain RPMs and certain water and air temperatures things went wrong. It was related mostly to colder operation and so we were having huge issues while dealers in Florida were having none. When they develop the motors and test run them - guess where? Not Alaska! no, they were debugged in warm climates but the program failed in colder climates. The motors under the right conditions would lean out, detonation would occur, and catastrophic failure.

This took most of the summer to figure out and not only cost our company a lot of time and money (no, manufacturers do not compensate dealers for all their incurred costs when these things happen) but eventually I believe it was what bankrupted OMC in 2000. In 2001 what was left of the outboard motor division was purchased by the Bombardier corporation of Canada.

I saw similar instances over the years with everything. Polaris ATVs, Honda generators, Volvo Penta inboard motors, Ski-Doo snowmobiles, etc. We sold lots of stuff by many top name brands and they all fell victim to this at some time or another the pattern is always the same. It was always brand new product. And the problems increased exponentially with the introduction of high tech products that have lots of sensors feeding information to onboard computers that in turn are actually running the show. Back in the old days all a motor needed was fuel, compression, and spark to run, and anybody with some basic knowledge and tools could fix them. Now you can't even look at a motor without first hooking it up to a computer and large numbers of motor failures are simply sensor failures.

Long story short - never buy anything new in the first year of production unless you have a tolerance for this sort of thing. I don't care what the product is or who makes it. The only thing you can count on is the more complex the product, the more likely there will be first year issues to sort out.

[Ridge Runner]

Like I said in another post I had big time trouble with both coils in Colorado. Back here in San Antonio Tx. it works okay if i keep the sensitivity low or put it on auto sen. The thing is here the ground is very mild. i'd done some panning of some cons and dump it in my yard. It had lots of black sand and I'm thinking I'll see how it reacts over that. I had the big coil on and i can't say it was a lot of difference but it was some.

The trouble I see on pulling the coil cable down sharp is over time this may cause it to break. Now will this happen before the warranty runs out on the coil or after ? I think we the customer is making this our problem but it shouldn't be.

Oh to answer your question I do have my name in the pot at Minelab. I think all calls is getting a recorder. On two numbers that is what I got.

White's had the problem with the MX Sport and not one time did I ever get a recording when i call them.

I think no I know Minelab is a great company and over time I've had many of their detectors and as long as I can swing one I'm sure I'll buy another. The trouble is this one has got to be fixed.

Chuck