Steve Herschbach

Hi Jim, You have been living the dream and glad to see it continuing for you. I resigned from the Board of Directors of AMDS effective Dec 2025 and so am now fully retired. My goal for 2026? Piddle fart around as I please. You take care, and best of luck to you in 2026!

Looks like a great 2025 Gerry, thanks for posting. And wishing the best for you and your team in 2026!

I'm house cleaning and ended up with a small problem. I started a business with a high school buddy in Alaska in 1976 selling mining gear. Our main supplier was Keene Engineering. When I retired I grabbed a lot of the old documents that were no longer of interest to those running the place. This was mainly a large notebook I made containing catalogs, parts breakdowns, and other information I used almost daily in the course of doing my job selling gold dredges and such. So I'm looking at this pile and it seemed a genuine loss to just toss it all in the garbage. Much of this has never been made available on the internet in any form. Granted, it will have a tiny audience, things like parts breakdowns for gold dredges from the 1980s. Yet it is history that I hate to see lost and if I do not do it nobody else likely ever will. I am also sure it will be a real help to at least a few people who find old dredges and other related gear in garages and backyards. I also have complete Keene catalogs much older than anything currently on the internet, and more. Some of it is in poor shape, but I decided to scan everything I have, clean it up as best I can, and publish it here before tossing it in the garbage. It will take quite a bit of time so this thread will be an ongoing thing, with a new post from me as I get each new document done. For starters here is what is already out there. I'm not going to duplicate anything already available at two places. First we have the current Keene collection of pdf files of mostly new stuff though there are docs going back to around 2014 and earlier: https://keeneeng.com/pdfFiles/ Next, we have what I already placed online in the downloads section of this website for Keene Engineering. The new stuff will be added here but as I said, I'll note each new addition also on this thread with a link. https://www.detectorprospector.com/files/category/14-keene-engineering/ I'm just getting started with this but here is an example of what I am talking about. This is the first I am working on and not quite done, the model 2002 2" gold dredge from the early 1980s. I scan these, then do what can be some pretty laborious cleanup work in Paint.net, as some are copies of copies, hole punched, torn, etc. When done with the cleanup I will then be converting to pdf for upload. I'm also going to do ocr on the parts/price list images to make them easier to copy and edit. Probably going to too much effort in some sense but I always think if I am going to do something may as well do it right. Keene 2002 2" Dredge Early 1980s

Purity and shape also matter, as do the settings and conditions of the test site - testing a PI at home in a EMI rich environment is generally not a good idea. Long story short I'd neither be surprised that a .08 gram nugget could be detected by the SDC nor surprised if it was not. You are on the edge in several ways.

Welcome to the forum. Gone and nothing to replace it. Site search is in upper right.

And maybe you did not notice his issues were from 5 years ago, before all the flaws were fully revealed. Maybe you should read a little more carefully yourself before blaming a person for thinking a device should not need extra measures to do what it is supposedly designed to do in the first place. To this day, people being sold a prototype as a finished product. Are these extra required protections outlined in the manual for new purchasers or is it that they must search the internet to find out for themselves? And if they do not, I suppose that's their fault also?

More videos. The second one shows a dredge being used for something other than gold. Note all the video of nozzles at work... no spades, cutters heads, just good old suction doing its job.

No such thing is needed, the suction does all the work. At most you need a pry bar to break up hard pack material. Watch the video I posted. A large dredge can break fingers if you get them between the nozzle and a large rock, the suction is so strong it takes great effort to remove a rock from a nozzle. Long story short the entire premise of the original post is flawed as regards normal small scale suction dredges. Cutter heads are more applicable to dredges where there is no operator at the nozzle, which usually means barge mounted commercial rigs. Certainly nothing you'd want to use for relic recovery unless you like your relics chopped up! Which is why I was trying to warn you not to buy the book and posted a free one instead.

I tried to point out how this book should probably be avoided by people who are interested in the type of dredging this forum is about, next comment is "I'll buy it" so it did make me feel like "why bother". Sorry, just in a bad mood I guess, hit me wrong at the time. But your excellent post came about Bill, great stuff, so there you go, good results. Dredges as seen by this forum: Cutter head dredge: A much better beginners' book on gold dredging would be The Gold Dredgers Handbook by Dave McCracken

This thread reminds me why I decided my taking the time to post is a waste of that time.

The mention of cutterhead technology, straight pipes to surface, and the statement above leads me to believe this book is about large barge-based dredge systems, which are completely different than the small suction dredges employed by the people on this forum. There is little issue with getting gold into a normal dredge nozzle and the gold is certainly not diving like clams into sand. It’s usually hard pack rocks and gravels, the biggest issue perhaps getting the material to break up. Since this first post by a new member is clearly an advertising effort by somebody who did not take the time to investigate the forum before posting, I thought this was important for me to highlight. As a person with decades of dredging experience, the above quoted statement appears non-sensical to me from a small gold dredging perspective, with no connection to reality. Again, the statement and therefore book appear to be about barge mounted remote operated dredge systems. It sounds like a book by a person who has never done the type of dredging done by people on this forum and therefore probably not very applicable for most people here. Normally I'd simply delete it as a violation of forum advertising policy, but in this case maybe there is something to be learned here about how dredges differ is size and scale. Mention gold dredge to a layman, and first image that comes to mind is probably a factory size bucket line dredge. If you are interested in cutter head dredges, here is a free book that goes into extreme detail on the subject: https://dredging.org/media/ceda/org/documents/resources/othersonline/vlasblom3-the-cutter-suction-dredger.pdf This videos shows real dredging as done on this forum, though with a larger dredge than most here might use. Me and my old 6" dredge at Crow Creek Mine, Alaska

I’ve been happy with mine, would buy again.

Whether AI is any good or not is kind of beside the point. I personally think it is transformative technology, an extremely powerful tool when used properly by knowledgeable people. People who really understand it and how to leverage it for results. Like all tools you need to know how to use them or damage can result. My observation is that if used to mine for facts, AI accuracy tends to be limited by the depth of the available data. Metal detecting has a thin available data set full of misinformation, and that leads to issues. That means the user has to be knowledgeable in the first place to make effective use of it. A person with little knowledge will be easily mislead. That said, it’s now official forum policy that you can expect pushback on anything that smells of “the AI said” up to and including deletion of posted content that has been copied and pasted from AI. Please stick with your personal experiences, questions about detecting and prospecting, and information gained personally. As the cops say…. thank you for your cooperation.

I set this forum up for people to speak from personal experience and knowledge. I’m not interested in it being a place to share what AI thinks. If people want to share finds, please do. If people have question for knowledgeable people here, please ask. If you want to help answer those questions based on personal experience - you’re the best! Thanks!! AI will use the information it mined from forums like this to replace them soon enough. Let’s not rush the process.