X Coils In Salty Northern Nevada

[jasong]

Can you mail a coil to Strick to get X-rayed? 😀

Thanks for the opportunity to swing it some more, looking forward to it. I am on a short trip and I have a laundry list of exploration to do to test some geo-theories I've spent the last few years thinking on. Plus I have a lot of shovel work to do on my land before I have to get back home to normal job. But definitely will take the opportunity to get some more time on the 6k.

[Gerry in Idaho]

1 hour ago, Condor said:

If I was rich like Gerry, 2 machines would be the cat's meow.  I better get out and find some more gold tomorrow.  Where was that patch again Gerry?

40.93735834372933, -118.37677467837338 is a good place for base camp.

You know I take gold nuggets in trade Condor or your favorite gold nugget hunting patches.

[jasong]

With every reward seems to come a risk. I made a patch lead 2 years ago now, and my first one had an issue where this tiny, very thin RX wire literally broke on day 1 of me testing it. The solder joint was fine, the wire itself broke when I extended the shaft out all the way. Afterwards, Phrunt posted some ideas about using adhesive backed shrink wrap, wrapping in tape, etc. I did those, and I didn't have an issue for 2 years. I've changed changed coils probably as much as anyone out there except the X Coil manufacturers themselves, as I have a nice stack and I am not afraid to use them, sometimes I'll change 3 to 5 times a day and when testing or showing people coils/comparing I can change easily 10 times a day. Each time extending the shaft back out to maximum. This puts stress on the patch lead.

Unfortunately a few days ago I did have an issue where right after changing a coil the patch lead stopped working. As a result I didn't have a chance to test the concentric against the 6000 on my own machine, so we did a brief test on Condor's machine and then I hauled ass to Winnemucca to try to round up supplies to repair this patch lead before the small amount of stores here with such supplies closed for the day.

Here's my stack. $80 I didn't want to spend, and a half day of detecting lost. This doesn't include the trip I had to make back to O'Reillys to buy an impossibly tiny screwdriver, which thankfully they had in stock and I made it just minutes before they closed.

Luckily I had a multimeter with me as I just installed 1200 watts of solar on the roof of this RV before leaving. I did some quick testing and determed it was the blue shielding wire which had come undone, which was odd since I assumed it must be the tiny RX wire again, or maybe the enameled RX shields.

So chop chop, I cut off the tape and heat shrink, I had added extra hot glue to the outside of the adapter for added strength and pull resistance so I got that cut off to, and then pulled the clamp off. There was no sliding/failure of the strain relief clamp visible, and I could see where the clamp teeth had bitten (and stayed) on the cable sheathing. So, no failure there. (The shield wire was bent by me poking and prodding, it wasn't originally where it was in this photo).

The blue shields wire was in fact broken, as my multimeter had told me. And again, the wires themselves broke, the solder joint was fine and still had wires sticking out of it. Unfortunately, the break meant there was not enough wire left to attach to the connector post, so I scraped the enamel from the magnet wire with the Exacto knife and soldered straight to it.

But somewhere along the way I must have bent the adapter slightly, and it was just enough movement to snap the ultra-tiny grey RX wire in half!! Thankfully I noticed before rebuilding this. 

Yes, my soldering is getting ugly, but I struggled with those enameled red wires at first, and I've now resoldered the blue wire once, and the grey wire twice, with limited tools sometimes and a crappy Big R ranch store soldering iron and tip. Unfortunately there was not enough wire left to peel back insulation and attach, so I had to spend some time creating a solder bridge to the RX, which I already did once before on day one, so it was quite a long bridge now and took some time to get right. This solder is getting quite messy with 2 repairs now, and the wires are getting very short, with the RX breaking twice. I might have 1 repair worth of wire left before I have to buy another coil to cut the adapter off. 

So, I repaired it all. I tested, restested, and then triple and quadruple tested for shorts and opens with my multimeter. And then I hot glued everything inside and reassembled the connector. Then I tested a 5th time after it was reassembled just to make quintuple sure of no shorts.

There is not a single piece of adhesive backed shrink tubing in Winnemucca or anywhere even close to me. So, I 3-d printed a sheath of hot glue over the entire adapter by hand with the glue gun. It's ugly but hopefully it'll hold better than the shrink tubing.

I'm pretty sure these wires are breaking by either pulling strain, or from slight bending of the adapter. I am sure I bent the adapter slightly when repairing the blue shields and then promptly broke the gray RX during repair. So, I put 7 layers of Gorilla tape over this whole mess to try to stiffen the adapter up. I cannot put any more tape on without it starting to bind up in the shaft.

So, this is the best I can do with what I have. 

It's working good and I'm back running again. But this was a reminder to me that even a properly built adapter can eventually fail with enough bending/pulling strain/constant changing of coils. Just since I've been in NV for 3 days I bet I've changed coils 15 times. 

Luckily I can repair things myself and Winnemucca had enough stuff between Big R, Walmart, O'Reillys, and True Value to fix this. But I was thinking if Mitchel or Condor were alone out here and had a break, they'd probably be driving back home and ending the trip to get it fixed. So, it's something to consider. If I flew to Australia, or treked into the depths of Papua New Guinea, is this what I would take with me? Probably not, too much to lose if something fails. 

I'm dangerously low on bandwidth on my phone, and this RV park Wifi it too slow to even open up the default Google search page, so that internet is useless. So, barring any kind of exceptional finds here, I don't think I'll be posting any more photos this trip.

[jasong]

2 hours ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

40.93735834372933, -118.37677467837338 is a good place for base camp.

That's hilarious, if that's one of your base camps then that must be why you recognized my photo quickly. 😄 Totally unintentional, it was just a random spot away from any place I was detecting to take a photo to show the salt flats and mislead the ticks and leeches into hunting down when they try to find me. 😆 I'm not sure if it's exactly in that picture, but it's looking towards the general direction.

[Condor]

7 minutes ago, jasong said:

With every reward seems to come a risk. I made a patch lead 2 years ago now, and my first one had an issue where this tiny, very thin RX wire literally broke on day 1 of me testing it. The solder joint was fine, the wire itself broke when I extended the shaft out all the way. Afterwards, Phrunt posted some ideas about using adhesive backed shrink wrap, wrapping in tape, etc. I did those, and I didn't have an issue for 2 years. I've changed changed coils probably as much as anyone out there except the X Coil manufacturers themselves, as I have a nice stack and I am not afraid to use them, sometimes I'll change 3 to 5 times a day and when testing or showing people coils/comparing I can change easily 10 times a day. Each time extending the shaft back out to maximum. This puts stress on the patch lead.

Unfortunately a few days ago I did have an issue where right after changing a coil the patch lead stopped working. As a result I didn't have a chance to test the concentric against the 6000 on my own machine, so we did a brief test on Condor's machine and then I hauled ass to Winnemucca to try to round up supplies to repair this patch lead before the small amount of stores here with such supplies closed for the day.

Here's my stack. $80 I didn't want to spend, and a half day of detecting lost. This doesn't include the trip I had to make back to O'Reillys to buy an impossibly tiny screwdriver, which thankfully they had in stock and I made it just minutes before they closed.

Luckily I had a multimeter with me as I just installed 1200 watts of solar on the roof of this RV before leaving. I did some quick testing and determed it was the blue shielding wire which had come undone, which was odd since I assumed it must be the tiny RX wire again, or maybe the enameled RX shields.

So chop chop, I cut off the tape and heat shrink, I had added extra hot glue to the outside of the adapter for added strength and pull resistance so I got that cut off to, and then pulled the clamp off. There was no sliding/failure of the strain relief clamp visible, and I could see where the clamp teeth had bitten (and stayed) on the cable sheathing. So, no failure there. (The shield wire was bent by me poking and prodding, it wasn't originally where it was in this photo).

The blue shields wire was in fact broken, as my multimeter had told me. And again, the wires themselves broke, the solder joint was fine and still had wires sticking out of it. Unfortunately, the break meant there was not enough wire left to attach to the connector post, so I scraped the enamel from the magnet wire with the Exacto knife and soldered straight to it.

But somewhere along the way I must have bent the adapter slightly, and it was just enough movement to snap the ultra-tiny grey RX wire in half!! Thankfully I noticed before rebuilding this. 

Yes, my soldering is getting ugly, but I struggled with those enameled red wires at first, and I've now resoldered the blue wire once, and the grey wire twice, with limited tools sometimes and a crappy Big R ranch store soldering iron and tip. Unfortunately there was not enough wire left to peel back insulation and attach, so I had to spend some time creating a solder bridge to the RX, which I already did once before on day one, so it was quite a long bridge now and took some time to get right. This solder is getting quite messy with 2 repairs now, and the wires are getting very short, with the RX breaking twice. I might have 1 repair worth of wire left before I have to buy another coil to cut the adapter off. 

So, I repaired it all. I tested, restested, and then triple and quadruple tested for shorts and opens with my multimeter. And then I hot glued everything inside and reassembled the connector. Then I tested a 5th time after it was reassembled just to make quintuple sure of no shorts.

There is not a single piece of adhesive backed shrink tubing in Winnemucca or anywhere even close to me. So, I 3-d printed a sheath of hot glue over the entire adapter by hand with the glue gun. It's ugly but hopefully it'll hold better than the shrink tubing.

I'm pretty sure these wires are breaking by either pulling strain, or from slight bending of the adapter. I am sure I bent the adapter slightly when repairing the blue shields and then promptly broke the gray RX during repair. So, I put 7 layers of Gorilla tape over this whole mess to try to stiffen the adapter up. I cannot put any more tape on without it starting to bind up in the shaft.

So, this is the best I can do with what I have. 

I

It's working good and I'm back running again. But this was a reminder to me that even a properly built adapter can eventually fail with enough bending/pulling strain/constant changing of coils. Just since I've been in NV for 3 days I bet I've changed coils 15 times. 

Luckily I can repair things myself and Winnemucca had enough stuff between Big R, Walmart, O'Reillys, and True Value to fix this. But I was thinking if Mitchel or Condor were alone out here and had a break, they'd probably be driving back home and ending the trip to get it fixed. So, it's something to consider. If I flew to Australia, or treked into the depths of Papua New Guinea, is this what I would take with me? Probably not, too much to lose if something fails. 

I'm dangerously low on bandwidth on my phone, and this RV park Wifi it too slow to even open up the default Google search page, so that internet is useless. So, barring any kind of exceptional finds here, I don't think I'll be posting any more photos this trip.

I had the same problem with the blue shield wire in the past.  It's so thin and I used too much heat that kind of crystallized the wire so it broke just past the solder joint.  I'm leaving my patch lead production to people way smarter and more talented with electronics.  If anyone is interested Mitchel has a guy in Torrance, CA that does a professional job.   

[jasong]

Hmm, maybe I applied to much heat at first too? I wonder if those are aluminum wires or something. They seem very fragile. Thankfully this cheapo Big R soldering gun is pretty low temp, I used my good Weller the first time around and it will get hotter.

[Norvic]

3 hours ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

My question for those with a GPZ-7000.  Do you spend a few thousand dollars more in coils to get a few more nuggets, or do you just purchase a GPX-6000 and have 2 machines ready at your disposal?  I myself feel 2 detectors is smarter than 1, just in case 1 goes down and or a friend wants to hunt.

Your question now the 6000 is here, is get a 6000 rather then additional coils for the Z. Will be much lighter to add larger mono coils for the 6000 when/if they become available rather then DoD or concentric coils for the Z. As you know I have the luxury of both ie. a good range of X coils for the Z and a 6000, my dilemma is I`m having so much fun with the 6000 when? will I use the Z again but having been around awhile I know the day will come when ML supersede the 6000 and on and on it goes.

[Gerry in Idaho]

1 hour ago, Norvic said:

As you know I have the luxury of both ie. a good range of X coils for the Z and a 6000, my dilemma is I`m having so much fun with the 6000 when? will I use the Z again.

Glad you were able to work hard enough and save enough to own both the Z and the new GPX6000, well deserved.  It looks like you are answering some of our questions. 

 

[Norvic]

38 minutes ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

Glad you were able to work hard enough and save enough to own both the Z and the new GPX6000, well deserved.  It looks like you are answering some of our questions. 

 

No hard work involved at all, all hard play, good fun for me Gerry, I mean no offence to any religion but the GoG is/has/will be my mistress. I ask who could ask for more in life? Not me.  Now I`m bugging off to the GoG on an o`nite mission.

[vanursepaul]

On 5/12/2021 at 12:43 PM, Norvic said:

No hard work involved at all, all hard play, good fun for me Gerry, I mean no offence to any religion but the GoG is/has/will be my mistress. I ask who could ask for more in life? Not me.  Now I`m bugging off to the GoG on an o`nite mission.

Any pics of the latest adventure at the hut???