Steve Herschbach

I decided to upgrade my scoop from the broken rake handle I was using to an ash shovel handle. I picked up an Ames True Temper 2037400 46-Inch ash shovel replacement handle at Home Depot for about $15. I cut the taper off at the shovel end at an angle to match the scoop angle and bolted in place. Still happy with the scoop. It is holding up well.... but as I mentioned earlier I do not brute force my digging. More like wiggle and work in the rocks and hardpack.

The gold oriented machines have a 0-40 ferrous range. The coin machines starting with Racer 2 they compressed the ferrous to give more room to non-ferrous. The Impact let's you choose between the two ranges. Other models may - not sure.

On my Gold Kruzer: Nickel 60 Zinc Penny 81 Clad Dime 85 Clad Quarter 87 So yes, more or less normalized to the 14 kHz numbers used on earlier Makro units. Nokta FORS & Makro Racer VDI Chart 0 - 5 Hot Rocks 5 -25 Mineralized Ground 25 - 35 Salty and Alkali Soils 10 - 40 Ferrous Targets (Iron, nails) 40 - 50 Foil, Small Gold 56 - 58 US Nickel 82 - 83 Zinc Penny 84 - 86 US Dime 88 - 92 US Quarter 95 - 99 Hot Rocks

Excellent Jim, thank you!

If coil sizes are identical than a DD will generally handle bad ground better than a concentric. Also, since small coils “see” less ground than a large coil, small coils will often handle bad ground better than larger coils. So you gain by going DD but lose by going larger. Going DD will help, but going to a larger DD may be no better and a much larger DD may be worse.

They expand to lock into place once installed, but can be compressed and pushed back out. Not easy though - try the survivor of your two to see how that goes. They are called a Nylatch Panel Fastener. There are different sizes to contend with and I'm not sure which you have. Google Search

Looks like this? https://detector.replacementbattery.org/tesoro-metal-detector-brown-lobo-replacement-battery-door.html

I never bought here but they looked like a good place to do so. I saw some good buys there, and listing was free. But now they are gone? Seems to be happening a lot in metal detector land these days. http://www.treasureclassifieds.com/

That’s what it is all about! I’ve yet to find a decent quality diamond of real size. Congratulations Mitchel!

Over three ounces of silver - great score!

Great report Jeff. I’m glad to hear the Simplex software is shaping up. Seems a clear case of pushed to market too soon, and only now is the machine getting properly dialed in. I like update facilities but an unforeseen side effect is it allows manufacturers to release things sooner than they would back in the analog days. It might not be too hard to find a thin tube or even a light wood dowel to drive in as a stiffener. Even a round tube would work as long as you got contact on four sides. I wonder how much the weight would increase if you shot it full of expandable foam? And whether that would add enough stiffness to be worth the extra weight? Contact Dilek for sure just in case there was a known run of wimpy rods.

Are you saying you have tried the Apex in MF in your ground and it does not perform? Or that you are making that assumption based on other machines? Good to hear about the recovery speed. 👍🏻

I can’t help you with the drywasher, but I did put a link in the other forum to this thread.

Bummer George, but at least he has several to choose from and should be able to hook you up ASAP.

Interesting for sure and probably first thing people will want to check. It would not surprise me for a couple reasons. First, the low price. Why? What is missing? Second, it took Minelab a couple decades to come up with fast multifrequency that separates well in iron. The previous BBS and FBS machines are very good at rejecting ferrous, but also slow machines with slow recovery speeds. XP exploited this weakness with great success when they came out with the Deus. In order for the empire to strike back at XP the number one design requirement was fast multifrequency. But before Multi-IQ one of the weaknesses of multifrequency, including Fisher CZ and White’s DFX/V3 models, has been slow recovery / poor ferrous separation. It should not surprise that a low price first effort at multifrequency by Garrett may be weak in this area. Third, the new narrower profile Viper coil should separate better than wider Garrett coils. Was this a necessity to help a machine that might otherwise be lackluster? But there it is in the specifications check list below - Fast Target Separation / Recovery. So does it have the goods in this department, or not? As a marketing type I will point out the missing info in the specification claim. Fast compared to what? Luckily abenson is on it, and will come to some conclusions quite rapidly on this question.

I was concerned you were JP and am happy to hear that’s not the case. Hopefully you are able to round up some stock soon.

Thank you Mike, I appreciate that. I need to do a better job at keeping up with it, but have created an index to these kind of deluxe forum posts here.

It’s a forum and speculating, suppositions, and guess work about new products is a large part of the show. Like Simon notes I don’t know that you follow it JP, but the same thing goes on and always has with every new product by every manufacturer on the forum. Apex has been hot, the stuff around the Impulse AQ is just nuts, and NokMak Multi is up next. This is a lot of free advertising for Nugget Finder (over 22,000 views) so something tells me they and others don’t mind. NF, Minelab, or any other company is welcome to step in at any time to clear up anything they want. But they won’t, and if anything they feed the fires by telling us about product far in advance of arrival. This sort of thing went on for half a year with Equinox. Nobody made Minelab jump out of the plane with one at Detectival, and nobody made Nugget Finder announce this coil so early. The fact they did tells me they want this kind of social media speculation and coverage. Free advertising and a chance to keep people from buying something else while the work continues. Anyway, I’m sorry it all stresses you out so much JP. The reality for me as forum owner is I will continue to encourage early information and posting about it here, for the express purpose of stirring up speculation, suppositions, and guess work!

No worries Jason, great info, and not a lot more to say about the NF coil until somebody gets their hands on one. Minelab GPZ 14 guts:

John is not a shill but what I’d call a brand loyalist, uses Garrett pretty much exclusively. Informative posts, never talks down the competition. Good guy, but don’t expect he’ll ever say anything but nice things about Garrett. The Apex shipped out to “influencers” like John is boxed with a Apex hat and shirt... another smart marketing move by Garrett.

Tom is more sophisticated than I am, especially with the notch settings. Mine come in three flavors: 1. All non-ferrous 2. All non-ferrous up to but not including zinc pennies, rejecting all coins except nickels (optional - notch quarters in) 3. All non-ferrous above a small aluminum cut- off point and up to but not including zinc pennies I often use option 2 with quarters notched in, and if I want to narrow it further I may only dig targets that deliver a single, tight target id number. I like the SpectraGraph display ability to display multiple target id numbers at once, and those that hit hard on a single target id with the bar graph nailed to the top are the prime targets when chasing rings. Other jewelry it’s all over the place as to the responses a person might get. Using Correlate to Separate Ring Responses Normalization Effects On Jewelry Best book I have seen on the subject is DFX Gold Methods by Clive Clynick. It is not a DFX only book, and describes many methods and strategies for hunting gold jewelry. Everything in it apples to the V3i.

Welcome to the forum Gypsy! I hung out a little on Finders Forum and a couple other Oz forums before they went off the rails. Seeing politics and trolls destroy forums was a reason I started this one, where as much as possible I keep a lid on such things. I do recall Janet being famous for hunting the salt areas. And may she Rest In Peace.

Welcome to the forum Stu!

The 19 kHz series ground balances into the salt range. ”Ground Balance Range : From Ferrite to Salt Water Inclusive” There is a performance hit obviously, but the machine at least functions on the wet sand. Get up on the dry sand with a small coil, and you have a great micro jewelry machine.

Like I said, there are few options. The sensitivity control is really your main control for ground noise, assuming you are ground balanced. You can start with MF but all the other frequency options are there to try if multi is too noisy. Finally, if you have a particular false signal from a hot rock or other troublesome target, you can as a last resort notch that segment out.