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Gold Racer Or Gold Bug Pro For Placer Mine


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Hello and thank you - large, for the excellent information. This is pretty exciting for someone who's sighting in on his first detector.

I've followed countless threads here and on Tom's forum, and was about to buy a Gold Bug Pro. With experience and a few ounces gained, the intention is to add a gpz or gpx to the quiver. 

My first detector will be a complementary tool for my placer mine. I hope to qualify and outline pay-streaks in succession with stripping ops. If the detector in question can also help in prospecting some nearby quartz veins, that would rock. Regional geology appears hot, but my definition of hot is no doubt different than a detectorist's. Volcanics, greanstone, pyrite, pyrotite, arseno, tetrathedrite..., and magnetics scattered here and there. 

With this in mind, would the Gold Racer be a more appropriate tool than the Gold Bug Pro?

Tim

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Welcome to the forum Tim!

In general and quite honestly, for the true placer miner a gold pan is often a better tool than a metal detector. Detectors are useless for fine gold so need to be thought of as nugget detectors. They can however be a useful tool once the limitations are understood. Just the thought of using nothing but a detector to determine the size, outline, and value of a pay streak for mining purposes is not usually one I would recommend. There are entire mines working ground where a metal detector will find no gold at all.

Nobody can give a firm answer to your question as far as which detector will find more gold. It is too dependent on details about your ground we do not know. My answer is more based on practical matter. The Gold Bug Pro is perhaps used worldwide by more gold prospectors than any other VLF detector at this time. It is extremely popular and extremely well proven. Accessory items are widely available. The basic Gold Bug model can be had very cheap, and is easy to sell used for minimal loss if it does not work out. For these reasons alone it is my default recommendation for somebody new to nugget detecting. If you can't master and find gold with a Gold Bug Pro than maybe detecting is just not for you.

The Gold Racer is hotter and so it can do better finding very small or very dispersed gold in quartz than a Gold Bug Pro, but that extra sensitivity is offset by the machine also being more sensitive to bad ground and hot rocks. This could make it more difficult to use in hot ground and more difficult for a beginner to master. If all you had to work with was very small gold the Gold Racer could however provide the magic needed edge, so it is a tough call. It is tougher still given that very few people have used and reported on the Gold Racer. So even though I am using the Gold Racer personally and intend on continuing to do so I in good faith can't do anything at this time but tell you the Gold Bug or Gold Bug Pro are the safer options. If money is no object, do consider also the Minelab SDC 2300. It's ability to work well in almost any ground combined with small gold sensitivity that rivals the Gold Bug Pro (but not Gold Racer) makes it in my opinion the easiest machine for a beginner to learn in bad ground. VLF detectors can be very frustrating starting out in hot ground.

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Incredible forum Steve.  An immense thank you for your time and expertise.

Your response is perfect especially since presents more questions to reflect on. 

You're dead right about the importance of panning. It's the essence and heart of prospecting - whatever your mineral of choice.  I'm always amazed at some of miners that show up here asking if I can run their cleanups on my table. After table, their inexperience with the pan become all too evident.  Furthermore, the knowledge gained while panning doesn't only lay in the gold or lack thereof. The presence of associated minerals and rocks, and their orientation, (direction of mobilization) offer more layers of information for the keen prospector. 

The placer gold particle size distribution on this lease is, 50% = 0.1-0.3g;  30% = 0.3-0.7g;  10% = 0.7-1.5g;  and 10% = dust.  The ratio of silver to gold is, 30:1.  The magnetite count is immediately notable and visually impressive prior to excavation.  This brings me to the flip side of,  if gold distribution and size are too close to the "undetectable" margin, can the "ID" data from said detectors provide sufficient confidence to its operator to delineate magnetite concentrations and their potential as a pathfinders?

One more question, are Jasper, Garnets, and native Silver considered hot? Perhaps there's a standard list/link of what's hot and what's not?

Thank you

Tim

 

 

 

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On 5/16/2016 at 11:58 PM, Fevered said:

This brings me to the flip side of,  if gold distribution and size are too close to the "undetectable" margin, can the "ID" data from said detectors provide sufficient confidence to its operator to delineate magnetite concentrations and their potential as a pathfinders?

One more question, are Jasper, Garnets, and native Silver considered hot? Perhaps there's a standard list/link of what's hot and what's not?

Detectors can indicate relative mineralization via a couple different methods. The simplest is to just ground balance on a location using manual or fixed ground balance. By moving around and pumping the coil to check the ground balance setting, it the threshold nulls when pumping the coil to the ground the spot is more mineralized than where you ground balanced the detector. If the detector gives a positive signal when pumped over the ground, you have found a spot less mineralized than where you ground balanced the detector.

Machines that have a Mineral % or Fe3O4 meter can directly indicate the amount of ground mineralization. 

The catch? The indications are quite shallow, surface type indications. A small streak of magnetic black sand in a dry wash only a few inches deep would be fairly easy to locate. In general you are only talking about the top foot of the ground, depth being like all things dependent on overall mineralization. In highly mineralized ground the machine is only reacting to the shallowest soils because just the top few inches is mineralized enough to throw the detector off. In milder soils you may be getting a better bulk reading of the soil mineralization.

It is a subject discussed for decades, and much was made of it in the 1960s using old BFO detectors, but true reality over decades is the effect is so limited and difficult to use that it is just not something people do often or get much value from if they do try it. Personally I would be happier with a simple dip needle as a potential method. The best application in my opinion really would be for finding black sand streaks in dry washes to possibly locate panning or dry washing locations. Then again, a decent prospector could probably just eyeball likely locations nearly as well and with far less effort.

The loosest definition of hot rocks are just rocks that fall outside the current ground balance setting, and so signal relative to the ground they are located in. They are defined further as rocks that null when the detector goes over them (more magnetic mineral than current ground setting) which I call a negative hot rock but which most people would call a cold rock. True hot rocks give a positive indication when the detector passes over them so I refer to them as positive hot rocks. They usually have conductive mineralization but could simply be a large rock free of any magnetic minerals imbedded in ground that is highly mineralized. If a very sensitive detector is ground balanced to the hot ground it can get a slight signal off the unmineralized rock because it creates a void in the mineralization. This is the same reason why a detector will actually get a signal from an open hole in highly mineralized ground.

The best discussion of various hot rocks I have ever seen is in what is luckily a free book Advanced Nugget Hunting With the Fisher Gold Bug Metal Detector by Pieter Heydelaar & David Johnson. See Part 2 of the book starting on page 29

https://www.detectorprospector.com/files/file/55-advanced-nugget-hunting-with-the-fisher-gold-bug-metal-detector/

In a nutshell you are usually dealing with either iron mineralized rocks, magnetite being very common, or conductive suphides or conductive minerals/native metals. A common conductive sulphide would be arsenopyrite. A not so common conductive mineral would be graphite. Or you may simply be talking a copper nugget. Each mineral all you generally need to know - is it strongly conductive or strongly magnetic, or both. If not, it is not likely to be an issue with a metal detector.

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On 5/17/2016 at 2:12 PM, Hard Prospector said:

What kind of placer ground are you referring too, dry(desert) or wet as in year- round water course?

Running water all year, and the creek dictates the level of water table.  Benches higher that the creek a typically not saturated.

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Don't know that this is any help but on my only journey though Northern California back on 05, I was half lost and stopped and asked a guy standing in the yard of a home for directions.  We got to talking and he noticed my GP 3500 in my truck.  It just so happened he worked at a famous local mine and mentioned they sometimes used a minelab PI detector like mine to help locate large gold deposits.  He said they located a deposit recently with a minelab finding a 1000 ounces of gold.  He said they haven't found a lot of gold lately and a deposit like that helped keep the mine open.  

Terry

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