Woody Detector Mods - Are These Legit or Bogus?

[Jonathan Porter]

On 3/31/2018 at 10:40 AM, Decanfrost said:

Peter Woodland s modified detectors are amazing.Unfortunately the Biased meter blurs the waters here,as far as the closer you get to the Dealer s and there rep s the more untruth s are spoken.

Jp here in Oz has slowly but surely has also been faced with this many times and now unlike in the past is a little more tight lipped.

He knows where his bread and butter is.

From personal experience and the Gp Extreme i own ,which is fully modded by Peter i will never sell it.I HAd a 4500 and worked and lived in the WA goldfields for 10 years and my Gp Extreme matched and yes beat the 4500 on some occasions.Love the 4500,but not as much as my Extreme.

Anyway im not bagging Minelab just some are truly unable to see past there wallet when it comes to expressing honest proven information.

Peter at Detector mods has found some spectacular gold with his modded machine ,the likes of which almost all on this site will never.However the doubts and criticisms keep flowing.

Again this is not a personal attack on anyone's ability but 30+ ounce nuggets are far between!.

Currently own and run 3 x Minelabs....

Ash

 

Ash I've deliberately avoided this thread because of it being contentious and yet my name got dragged into the discussion anyway. Not really sure where your angling with your comments but I will now give my opinion so there can be no confusion on where I stand on the subject of mods.

The SD 2000 benefited from two mods, one was an increase in battery voltage which helped increase somewhat the coil field strength and the other was a crystal change which improved the sensitivity to small targets. The crystal mod was not so useful on the SD2100, but both the SD2100 and SD2200D did get some benefit from running a higher voltage. The higher voltages on the SD units did improve target response however they also increased ground noise so then forced operators to use DD coils in variable ground which then had a corresponding reduction in depth compared to a Monoloop.

Battery voltage increases on GP and GPX machines is no advantage due to the dual voltage technology, in essence the voltages of DVT are adjusted internally regardless of the input voltage however there is some evidence the audio is "brightened" by running a higher voltage on the GP series (highly speculative, and only really noticeable if the Minelab battery is low on charge). 

I am unfamiliar with the current mods other than experience with customers in our shop and Minelab's stance on modded units when it comes to repair work etc. If a detector comes into Minelab with mods the repair center just closes up the unit and returns it to the sender. Last year I had a customer who I've known for many years come into our shop to say Hi and talk gold, in the discussion he very enthusiastically told me about his modded GPX 4500 and how he felt it could beat a GPZ 7000 on all target sizes which was supposedly demonstrated to him on a test bed in Victoria, we had an interesting discussion where I put forward my case on mods and the differences in the different technologies etc (I had to do this very tactfully because he is a friend and a customer so I did not want to offend). This was not a heated debate, he is also not broke so could in this case afford to take the risk if the unit failed etc.

Two days later he came back into the shop and bought a brand new GPX 4500, his modded unit although brilliant in his opinion on the test bed where he had seen it perform on known targets was next to useless in the real world where you don't know if a target is actually present or not.

This is the sum total of my experiences with modified Minelab metal detectors, I have expressed my opinion in the past to try and put balance to discussions to help inform people like my friend above, especially those who cannot afford to have a detector become unusable, in almost all cases the discussions became personal to the extreme with suggestions about my Minelab bias etc. These days I just can't be bothered getting into all the debates. 

I won't be responding further on this discussion.

JP

 

[Steve Herschbach]

Just a reminder that on this forum it is best not to speak about or for others and about what they may be thinking, what their motives might be, etc. We are all quite capable of speaking for ourselves and it’s generally best if we do exactly that and leave others out of it. No responses required to this, just a friendly reminder. Thank you! 

[Joe76]

Personally I wouldn't get a gpx modified, based on price for upgrading towards a Zed or even a good second hand one would seem more logical. My brother actually forked out $1200 to get his sd2200d modded many years ago & yes there was a marked improvement especially the gain mod.This helped with using mono coils, but still I couldn't justify the cost myself. I had owned a modded gp3000 done by Woody which I picked up for less than the price for a stock secondhand gp3000 . The person who paid for it to be modded lost out on that detector big time & that's something to think about if your considering going down that road with modding. 

I had an opportunity to test a modded gpx4500 in the field one time, Mount Mulligan actually & this detector had some real issues going on. I'm not sure what was wrong with it but the gentlemen who owned it wasn't a happy camper. No matter what i did i couldn't get it to settle down, even to a point by dropping the gain & stabiliser right down made little difference. This isn't to say there isn't any good modded gpx's out there, just that this gpx4500 most certainly wasn't one of them.

If I was going to get my 3500 modded It would be done by Ismael Jones & done for less than the cost of a new coil!