Fisher Metal Detector Lineup Fall 2018

[Jeff McClendon]

Hi GB_Amateur

I agree with you.  I think this whole discussion shows as many have said, that FTP and the other US manufacturers have some work to do in coming up with more modern designs and modern standard capabilities for the $300 to $500 price range and a lot more work to do for anything priced above $500. If Nokta/Makro really is producing an entry level modern designed and featured detector(initially named the Simplex) in 2019 that looks, feels and operates like an adult detector and a competitively priced simultaneous multi-frequency soon after, we may have even more complaining to do if the US manufacturers don't release something really NEW. I think the only other company that has produced anything close in the entry to mid level in 2018 that is sold in the USA and is waterproof and has built in wireless is Quest.

[Rick K - First Member]

Single frequency at every price point and capability was done decades ago.  Now the price points are coming down because of competition.

Waterproof is a new selling point, but in more than 30 years of detecting, I have only needed it at the beach and then either multifreak or PI are needed as well.

New tech is coming along, but frankly nothing really new has emerged.  More than one frequency at a time from one detector - ML did that a decade ago.  Multifreak at the same time - ML. Fisher and Whites did that decades ago.

Light multifreaker waterproof - nice combination - now done by ML.

Something which works deeper than currently available with good ID at depth - waiting.

Something which defeats “silent masking” of even tiny ferrous preventing detection of deeper non ferrous - still waiting.

there’s lots of room for improvement, but the ugly reality of enormously variable ground and enormously variable target returns mean millions still need to be spent to try and make improvements come to market.

We will see who can manage it for the relatively tiny market our hobby represents compared to the investment required.

Who wants to guess how much money is spent every year on metal detectors (excluding gold nugget hinting) which cost more than $300. My guess - way less than on fidget spinners.

 

[Guest Tnsharpshooter]

Now the price points are coming down due to some manufacturers being government subsidized and others are getting detectors made by cheaper labor rates.

Also lighter weight detectors generally take less raw materials vs the heavier.

Just look at how much First Texas was pocketing not so long ago with Fisher F75 and F70 units being sold.  Some what at least $400 cheaper per unit sold now.

 

[Rick K - First Member]

I have been to visit FT in El Paso a few times now.  Once in their new facility - it’s huge!

The first time I went there - mostly to see Dave Johnson and Carl Moreland who I had know by correspondence for several years, I got introduced to Tom Walsh, the CEO.  I had heard that when things got bad in the Great Recession, he had to lay off the less than full time folks and felt bad about it. The senior staff took a big pay cut.  Tom eliminated his salary altogether (of course, it’s a closely held corporation and so he has ownership interests).

Anyway, one of the Marketing guys took me around and introduced me to office and “touch labor” staff as we went around.  The following bit is entirely true...Out of the dozen or so folks I was introduced to at least 3-4 of them asked me “have you met Tom?”  When I answered yes - every one of them said exactly the same thing - “He’s a wonderful man”.

I have worked for a half-dozen corporations in my life.  I can’t remember ever hearing one of my fellow employees characterize the CEO as “a wonderful man”.

El Paso is a large city now, but in many ways, still a village.  A border town - two cultures, two histories, two languages - deeply and mostly happily intertwined.

FT is the result of Tom and some other folks getting involved in electronic component production via the “maquiladora” business.  US/Mexican trade regulations which made it possible for US companies to set up wholly owned operations in Mexico within X miles of the US border.  These operations could import raw material, semi finished products, etc. - add value through processing or assembly and then export/re-import to the US free of Mexican and US customs duty.  

At some point Tom figured it that Metal detectors were a sort of medium tech product that could be produced in quantity at low cost by combining the stability and quality control of an El Paso facility with the low cost of board stuffing and other touch labor operations south of the border. 

He acquired some brands - bounty hunter and Teknetics, hired Dave Johnson and others, then acquired the nearly (or completely) bankrupt Fisher.

He also hired some very savvy marketing guys who realized that to sell at volume, they would have to build on more than the classic distributor/dealer arrangements in the industry - at least in the US.

A lot of what they do and why has to do with their particular approach to the domestic market here and their different approach to the market in the rest of the world.

The other effect of the maquiladora program was to attract electronic talent to ElPaso.  Now automotive and aerospace companies design and produce lots of high to medium tech stuff in a cross-border way.  The Univ of Texas at ElPaso - UTEP hs a strong electrical engineering department as does the Instituto Technologico de Chihuahua in Chihuahua City - the nearby capitol of that Mexican state.

Anyway - don’t count them out.  Their engineering staff is solid and with the acquisition of the Manta project and the hiring of the “Euroteam” that developed it - they have leapfrogged dozens of man-years of R&D on not only PI detectors but advanced concepts for mixed mode and AI driven detection approaches.

But at the end of the day, it’s a small business, like all detector companies.  Investment funds and staff time is not unlimited and sometimes things move at a pace which shows those limits.

[LowTide]

phrunt

Here’s the reality of why First Texas is in El Paso without all of the flowery rhetoric.  “Cheap Labor” and a Free Trade Zone.  After the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed manufacturing in the industrial center of the U.S. was hollowed out, and good paying manufacturing jobs were shipped across the border to Mexico.  That is why the states in the center of the U.S. are referred to as the “Rust Belt”.  Because the factories were abandoned and left to rot, along with the people who used to work in them.

I was the Engineering Manager of a Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Company about ten years after this occurred and did my best to specify as many U.S. based parts as possible.  At the time our company was the largest consumer of a particular part line from a U.S. based manufacturer.  The failure rate on that product line was in the 0.5-1% range depending on the Lot.  Suddenly we were getting a 90%+ failure rate!

We immediately called in the company’s Manufacturers Rep, VP of Sales, and VP of QC for an emergency meeting.  We discovered that the company had closed their factory in the state of Indiana and shipped the machinery to Mexico.  But the V.P. of QC assured us that they were doing 100% QC.  I took him into our raw parts area and showed him what Mexican 100% QC looked like.  When they left I made sure that they were not happy campers because I was furious!

We were between a rock and a hard place because we had dozens of printed circuit board designs that were laid out for a particular footprint, and could not ship product because we were getting scrap from Mexico.  So we had to source a product from Taiwan because it was physically the only thing that would fit, and then scrap thousands of printed circuit boards and re-layout new ones.  A couple of years later the V.P. of sales approached me at a trade show and asked if I would give their part line another chance.  His reason.....they had moved manufacturing from Mexico to China after two years in Mexico because they could not straighten out the QC problem.  But hey the labor is cheap!

 

[Rick K - First Member]

On second thought.....

Flowery Retoric?  An engineer and a literary critic.

I wrote that stuff, not First Texas, not some spin doctor - I stand behind what I wrote. A plain description of what I believe the facts to be.  If I got a bit carried away about El Paso - go spend some time there - it’s really unique.

I guess your experiences have left you skeptical that well managed subcontracting can be of benefit to the firm as well as their customers. 

The difference here is that the Mexican facility which does board work is First Texas’ own factory. It is run by them and works to their own standards.

Sorry that the folks you worked for subcontracted out carelessly. I spent 30 years in sourcing - purchasing and sub contracting.  It can be done well, but it takes work and care.

Lots of plants in Mexico turn out quality work. Sorry your subcontractor’s one turned out crap.  

The real difference between your story and mine - If I read yours correctly - was that the management of where you worked saw an opportunity to keep pumping out their current products at much lower cost - by replacing local labor with foreign labor.

What happened at FT was quite different.  New US initiative resurrected three moribund US brands, put folks to work in El Paso - engineers, marketing folks, administrative staff, line workers. they could do that because the costs saved by having part of the process done with lower priced labor in Mexico meant that the whole thing could be profitable and grow - employing more folks in El Paso.

I hope this wasn’t too “flowery”.

 

[Dubious]

I'm glad Fisher has found a way to be successful with at least a good part of the operation still in the U.S.  I also have nothing against Mexico, and am sure it is possible to find plenty of competent people there (but probably, just as here, not necessarily at the lowest possible price).  But, I have to say I do think ordinary Americans (i.e., those who have to work for a living) have been sold out by a generation of successive administrations, all in the name of "globalization."

[Rick K - First Member]

Dubious - I couldn’t agree more - all those nice rust belt manufacturers who fired their workers - offshore their production (not to mention the online customer service) and didn’t lower the sales price a penny - pocketing profits stolen from the tables of their employees.

The other story is a bit different.  New enterprises, investing their own NEW money in innovation, design, distribution, customer service and making competively prices produced here - or overseas while building a business. Lots of them are seeing benefit in high quality production in North America.  Notice the Japanese and German car makers opening plants in the US.

My little sermon (sorry if it sounded like that) about FT was precisely because all those good jobs wouldn’t exist in El Paso if some Americans hadn’t used their brains and money to figure out how to make the best of the unique situation represented by the Rio Grande.

Our new nation had to fight another war with Great Britain in 1812 over the right to engage in international trade.  times change - we must adapt.

[Cal_Cobra]

On 11/26/2018 at 10:53 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

The CZ-3D and CZ-21 have always puzzled me. I figured job one after getting Dave Johnson on board would have been a digital redesign of the CZ into a waterproof housing that more resembles the F44. Replace the CZ3D and CZ21 with one lighter weight model waterproof to ten feet. Dave designed the original, so you would think this would be a reasonable goal, especially with the CZ being an old analog design both expensive and difficult to manufacture. I always liked the CZ.

I had and liked the CZ70 quite a bit, it was their answer to the Explorer when it came on the scene and it was my first deep coin detector.  I had some conversations with Dave J., and followed his posts, and the CZ seemed to have piqued it's technological limit as an analog technology, even when they tried to design DD coils to work on the CZ platform, they failed to achieve a production ready design (although a few prototypes went out, I remember seeing them on ebay and know a person who has one, and said it actually runs pretty well).  

I suspect a digital design of the CZ would've been a complete redesign, starting from scratch.  I do agree that, IMHO, had Dave been given a CZ 2.0 as a priority project and had the resources required at his disposal, I'm sure it would have come to fruition.  With Carl and Dave working there, I'm sure that we'll eventually see something interesting come out of FTP aside from their French PI acquisition that appears to be in the final stages of testing. 

There were rumors for years of a CZ SMF replacement, even some purported leaked slides of one on the drawing board, but their so tight lipped I could shove coal in their mouth and they'd spit out diamonds.  Kind of a pitty to be honest, as I know Dave has hinted to me that their working on cool stuff, but they won't even drop a hint as to what it is.  That I don't really understand, I mean, this isn't really top secret stuff, it's metal detecting and if you want to stay relevant in your user base, you should at a minimum give them some clues that your actually doing something innovative, else at some point people move on to someone that's actually making new and innovative detectors.  That was my case, had many FTP machines, starting with the Coin$trike, F4, F5, Omega 8000, ID Edge (great little light weight machine BTW), F70 (found my first seated half dime with it), CZ70 Pro (my first deep silver detector), F75 LTD/LTD2 (found lots of great finds with it), and a Euro Tek Pro for the wife,.  I could be missing one or two ?

Eventually I simply moved on as I found more capable detectors that far outproduced any of the FTP machines in my stable, in my dirt. 

[☠ Cipher]

On 11/27/2018 at 4:38 PM, Rick Kempf said:

Anyway - don’t count them out.  Their engineering staff is solid and with the acquisition of the Manta project and the hiring of the “Euroteam” that developed it - they have leapfrogged dozens of man-years of R&D on not only PI detectors but advanced concepts for mixed mode and AI driven detection approaches.

I'm curious how AI will come into play in metal detector technology if you have any insight. I've seen some evidence that Minelab is playing around with it, was unaware First Texas is. Find it fascinating as I love electronic technology period. 

As an aside on this overall thread it is true that US companies are having a hard time keeping up in part due to companies outsourcing labor overseas, and State funding/subsidies. Companies with state funding have a distinct advantage in many ways. This has been partly what has propelled Nokta/Makro this far, and enabled them to bring concepts like the Simplex to market. It is going to effect the low end market like the Equinox has the mid-range and outward. At some point one machine offers so much more than others it can no longer be overlooked. The Simplex will force others to offer more or get out of the game. That's not as good for US business as it is for innovation. US companies have had to cope in ways they find embarrassing and won't readily admit, like having some of their boards made overseas. I just hope they get a handle on it all and produce. So far foreign companies have benefitted more from free trade than the United States has. Forced technology transfers in China many of which are then sold to other companies in other nations have irreparably harmed US innovators.