Axiom Gold

[Aureous]

11 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

It may not make a dent in Minelab there per se, but they will definitely make some sales.

Thats encouraging for sure.... if it retailed for under AU$6K, I'm certain it would gain a following.....but until the exchange rate alters drastically, it might only be a competitor on paper. When performance appears to be only slightly better than a 5000 at a premium price, many newcomers will be steered towards a used 5000 instead. 😞 

[Steve Herschbach]

23 minutes ago, Aureous said:

When performance appears to be only slightly better than a 5000 at a premium price, many newcomers will be steered towards a used 5000 instead. 😞 

We will see about how it compares to what, and by how much. It all depends on how you want to define slightly better and slightly less, and why settling for less at lower cost makes sense only when it favors one brand, but not the other.

[Sourdough Scott]

Here is a Steve pic with a nugget he found with the Axiom.  I was his professional photographer for the day. 🤣

[Aureous]

8 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

why settling for less at lower cost makes sense only when it favors one brand, but not the other

I am no 'fan boy' of Minelab. My first 50oz of gold was with a Garrett, back in the 80's. I only use what brings me gold. But, I luv the style of the Axiom plus the light weight is a bonus. I'd like to own one and my Brother desperately wants one coz he's never been an ML fan either and always used Whites or Garrett. But the cost is a killer for both of us. <sad face> 

[Ridge Runner]

 The guy on the back of GPAA magazine with the Axiom in the November/December issue is Warren M .You can see it has to be down Australia way 

 It looks like everybody has the Axiom but you and I.haha  

Chuck 

[Steve Herschbach]

23 hours ago, Aureous said:

I am no 'fan boy' of Minelab. My first 50oz of gold was with a Garrett, back in the 80's. I only use what brings me gold. But, I luv the style of the Axiom plus the light weight is a bonus. I'd like to own one and my Brother desperately wants one coz he's never been an ML fan either and always used Whites or Garrett. But the cost is a killer for both of us. <sad face> 

I'm sorry to hear that for you and your brother. But apparently a whole lot of Australian prospectors can afford a GPX 6000, as I am told it easily outsells the GPZ 7000 now. The GPX 6000 sells for $7999 in Oz, and the Axiom $7385. That does mean it offers a detector where one might say it has slightly less performance than a GPX 6000, but also sells for less. Or you can say a GPX 5000 has slightly less performance than an Axiom... but it sells for less. That's my point, for people that do have the money, it's all relative to price versus performance, and where people draw the lines on those things. The price of the Axiom is no less going to kill it's sales than it killed GPX 6000 sales or GPZ 7000 sales. Having said all that, I do think Garrett is in a come from behind position in all this, and a selling price of $2995 in the U.S. and $5995 in Oz would have helped them buy some market share.

I can honestly add I really don't care. It's another detector, that's all. I'm proud of the effort I put in getting it to market, and I'm honored Garrett choose me as one of the few involved in that task. But that's behind me now, and it all will sort out one way or the other. People will go on using various different detectors as best suits their needs and budgets. Winter is here, and I do not see myself doing any real detecting for 4-5 months. By then the drama should be over. I'm not entirely sure myself what detector I will be using most next summer. It might be the Axiom. It might also be a GPX 6000 with Nugget Finder 16" x 10" mono coil. It's a tough call and depends on where I focus my efforts.

If I was to really hit the Nevada desert much next summer, that GPX 6000 and NF combo might be just the ticket. But not only is gold getting harder to find out that way, but it's a four hour drive for me one way, and a lot of that on bad roads, facing dodgy weather conditions. I can be in good California locations in half that time, on better roads, with less chance of getting caught in desert weather. I think my odds of large gold are better in California, but the big issue is thousands of nails buried with those nuggets. In the desert the issue is simply finding a target. The patches are depleted. In California there are more targets than I can stand to dig, so obsessing over a 1/2" of performance on small gold is kind of silly. I'm thinking digging those nail sounds until one turns into a one ounce nugget. The Axiom is every bit as good or better as any other choice for a task like that. Months to think it over, but I am leaning to the California scenario, mostly due to the shorter drive, and already having the detector for the task. 

[Gold Catcher]

1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I think my odds of large gold are better in California, but the big issue is thousands of nails buried with those nuggets.

So true, Steve. Are you using discrimination at all with the Axiom for these areas? Just curious. I usually dig everything, with some exceptions where the sound of the target gives me >80% confidence it would be rubbish. But generally, discrimination has never been productive for me, unless at times using the GM for <= 0.5 inch shallow gold targets on bedrock. Just curious if/how you are using discrimination with the Axiom. I always thought the biggest leap forward in the detector world would be a "revolutionary way to do discrimination" with a PI to get to those deeper bigger gold nuggets that you are talking about, and of which there are still plenty of here in CA I am sure. However, masked in tons of miner's junk. I am counting on Bruce's ingenuity, and tend to believe that if something like that would ever exist in the future it would be a ML machine.

Best,

GC

[Steve Herschbach]

47 minutes ago, Gold Catcher said:

So true, Steve. Are you using discrimination at all with the Axiom for these areas? Just curious. I usually dig everything, with some exceptions where the sound of the target gives me >80% confidence it would be rubbish. But generally, discrimination has never been productive for me, unless at times using the GM for <= 0.5 inch shallow gold targets on bedrock. Just curious if/how you are using discrimination with the Axiom. I always thought the biggest leap forward in the detector world would be a "revolutionary way to do discrimination" with a PI to get to those deeper bigger gold nuggets that you are talking about, and of which there are still plenty of here in CA I am sure. However, masked in tons of miner's junk. I am counting on Bruce's ingenuity, and tend to believe that if something like that would ever exist in the future it would be a ML machine.

Best,

GC

Minelab iron disc blanking, and Axiom positive iron check "grunt" only work on shallow targets, the targets I need them the least on. Deep nails are beyond the reach of both systems. You can go by tones for deep objects. High/low means small size or low conductor (most gold, small ferrous, like broken nails) and low/high means large size or high conductor (large or dense gold, large ferrous, like whole nails). In nail pits I normally chase the high/low tones to avoid most nails and get the most gold. But by avoiding large ferrous, you are also avoiding large nuggets. Like one ounce and larger. So to dig the big nuggets, you need to dig the big nails. And people tend to avoid doing that, which is why so many nails remain.

You can go VLF for large nuggets, but then you lose the depth in bad ground. And VLF calls any target at depth in bad ground as ferrous. There is no great answer on how to deal with this issue, once a VLF has been used to pull all the shallow stuff out, and most pits were cleaned out by VLF decades ago.

There is good news here. Many large gold nuggets remain to be found in big mining pits full of large nails. The way you do it is the old riddle - how do you eat an elephant? Answer - a bite at a time. Just find a nail pit you think has good odds of large gold, as in it has produced them in the past, and start going there a lot, digging everything over time. That's pretty much going to be my program next summer - do a long term dig it all operation in a couple California pits. I'd rather do that for the odds of finding a really spectacular nugget, than keep chasing the tiny bits I've been chasing. I'll do that also, but I'd like to go find at least one more trophy nugget, and I'm losing faith in the super pounded Nevada patches as being the ticket to doing that.

[phrunt]

I'm certainly guilty of it, I rejected quite a large nugget for NZ a few weeks ago.  I know I went over the spot, no way would I miss a booming signal but I am guilty of ignoring them especially towards the end of the day when I'm getting lazy with images of KFC flashing in my head.  A multi gram nugget was pulled up by someone else in the spot and it was a shallow easy target.  A pattern I'm noticing though are some of my bigger nuggets have all been big booming targets, everyone's so mentally focused on hearing the little faint signals when they get a boomer they dismiss it as junk leaving these big nuggets sitting there for decades untouched even in heavily detected areas.

[mn90403]

Oh my, you need some serious nugget patch adjustments.  What happened to dig everything?  You will be kicking yourself forever about that missed nugget.  That is what we hope for even amongst the trash.

Anyone we know who found it?  haha  How big?