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Big Coils -- Do You Still Use Them?


mn90403

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What is the biggest coil that you have used?  I have an 18" Nugget Finder that works very good.  I don't need a sled.  It is light.

The 19" Z coil is a beast.  Many of us know what it takes to wield that monster over good ground.

Reg's Gold Album thread has several pictures of prototype coils that were very big.

4iifm9.jpg

 

Here is a picture I found on Bill and Linda's site for John Bowles.  http://www.billandlindaprospecting.com/johnbowles.html  

 

johnbowles-06.jpg

 

What are some of the other ways to use and mount coils?

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Some interesting detector/coil rig setups in those photos especially the wheeled trolley rig :smile:

For me the current biggest coil setup that i have on my TDI Pro are the Minelab 15x12 Concentric coil which is reasonably heavy but i use with a harness,18'' Detech Mono which is much lighter than the Minelab one,but the biggest coil that i swing is the 20'' Grande Sierra mono which is a Jimmy Sierra design but built by Miner John for him.

I will highlight that i have never been near a gold nugget location as all my detecting is done in the UK and using the big copils for deep hoard hunting,so we have different techniques when using Pulse machines.

But i guess most folks are using the GPZ with either the 14'' or humongous 19'' coil on,big coils on the GPX possibly could be on the decline as folks change over to the GPZ.

Its interesting in what rigs the nugget hunters use,great photos that you have shown.

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The large coil I use most often is the 17" coil on the 3030.  It doesn't really seem that large out on an open beach but it covers a lot of ground and does go deeper by 3-4 inches over the 12" coil.

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I find that the 25'' Nuggetfinder runs very smooth on my QED, and has lots of depth as well as good coverage. It is extremely light for a large coil. The coils we ran on the PI protos were 20" DD and were real 'wrist breakers',

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Reg,

Your 25" will find anything 3g or greater to a depth of 20 inches or so?

Does anything 'hide' in that range as a 'class' such as a fine specimen or rough nugget?

Mitchel

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Sorry mn, but I've no idea what I may or may not be missing. How can anyone know such things unless they try several different options, and then scrape with machinery to see what they've missed, and at what depth. Even that may not be totally accurate.

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Just wondering how small it might go and how deep.  We sometimes find out from our friends that they found a couple we missed in a gridded area.  I try and get their settings and see why I might have missed them.

A couple of years ago we found a rather large area that had been worked by GPX models including the 5000.  There had been pushes/scrapes and dig holes all over the area.  It had also been previously worked by dry washing methods.  Maybe they got bored or they were just not thorough.

We came along with the Zed and started finding lots of smalls in the .5g range, and then we would find some deeper targets and clearly some larger 'missed' targets.  The largest any of us has found was 6g near the road so it was probably a miss or a trash nugget as you might say.  My best day was about 5g.  I ended up with more than an ounce over that summer.

The missed and smaller nuggets are much farther between now.  My last 2g nugget from there was outside of the best areas in the past but it might be the best now.

These would not be patches of much interest in Oz these days as it couldn't pay any expenses. 

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I've hit spots dozens of times with different size coil...after all that of course the ground is what I call " DEAD " but for some reason or another...I'll go back and find another one, and at times way bigger than I would expect!! So, its a mystery...mind you that dead ground doesn't give up as much anymore...as it used to. 

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7 hours ago, mn90403 said:

Just wondering how small it might go and how deep.  We sometimes find out from our friends that they found a couple we missed in a gridded area.  I try and get their settings and see why I might have missed them.

A couple of years ago we found a rather large area that had been worked by GPX models including the 5000.  There had been pushes/scrapes and dig holes all over the area.  It had also been previously worked by dry washing methods.  Maybe they got bored or they were just not thorough.

We came along with the Zed and started finding lots of smalls in the .5g range, and then we would find some deeper targets and clearly some larger 'missed' targets.  The largest any of us has found was 6g near the road so it was probably a miss or a trash nugget as you might say.  My best day was about 5g.  I ended up with more than an ounce over that summer.

The missed and smaller nuggets are much farther between now.  My last 2g nugget from there was outside of the best areas in the past but it might be the best now.

These would not be patches of much interest in Oz these days as it couldn't pay any expenses. 

Probably as many patches still out there as have been found, just have to look for and walk over them.

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