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RedDirtDigger

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  1. Thanks Ash. When you are corralled off the side of the road with all the others cars, waiting for some wide component loads to move past on the highway you can usually meet other prospectors.... that's when you know how many people are prospecting in WA now. RDD
  2. Great nugget Jen. Its always good when your son or daughter finds a good nuggie. cheers steve
  3. 16 feet deep!!! If I was reading these adds back in the day I would be asking the dealer what sized excavator they were throwing in with the 24" coil. Like the teaser of a title you gave to the thread Steve cheers RDD
  4. Great finds Lunk. 2 or 3 look like they are worn crystalline pieces?
  5. After I picked up my 19 coil I ran it over some deep ground for a few days that has produced some good gold for me however it contains some deep trash targets as well. The coil does catch on rough ground with the eight square sided holes in the coil and sticks get caught up in it. It does not slide easily over the ground. The coil found 8 signals over 2 feet deep for me. The ground had rocks and I had a crowbar ready to dig the holes. I needed my little sadie coil on my 4500 to centre the targets when the holes got deep. All the targets were 1850's miners trash (including a saddle stirrup)...no slugs this time. I did find a micro nugget with my sadie on the dirt I dug from one of the holes. The 19 did find half a dozen micro small shallow nuggets while I was looking for bigger nuggets. Swinging the 19 coil all day and digging deeper holes did make me a bit sore and it will take me a few more weeks to get used too. You really need a good harness setup/custom harness to swing the 19 comfortably. I added 5 inches to my detector shaft (using purchased carbon fibre tube) to also keep the coil further away from my pick when swinging. I like the coil. It ran smooth on HY and general with high gain 10-13 in low/moderate ground noise ground . Its a coil for deep nuggets with some size.. the 14 inch coil is for most general detecting and rough/steep ground. cheers RDD
  6. I,m with Fred, after using most of the earlier Minelab gold detectors I have learnt a new skill with the Zed that some gold signals are mere missed beats in the tone...almost undiscernible changes in audio. I always have used speakers with earlier models but I don't like the audio clarity on the WM unit or speakers run through it. I am now always using headphones, swinging very slowly on high "gain" and could not be happier finding smallish nuggets at depth. I am slowly getting better at hearing the subtle missed beat signals the Zed gives on nuggets at the limit of its detecting depth. Cheers RDD
  7. Good luck Benny. Try to get out with some experienced people when you get a chance and they should help you out with settings, swing speeds, efficient target recovery etc etc. Learning from experienced users will really help you on your gold journey. Cheers RDD
  8. Hi Benny, I would recommend the 4500, after detecting with it since its release and detecting regularly with friends who have the 2300. The 2300 will find you lots of small nuggets as you wander over the millions of mullock heaps in the triangle and you will be happy. I have friends who use 2300's and simply like worked ground and quartz reefs above the diggings and they can score dozens of nuggets a day in some spots but they only tally to a couple of grams. The 2300 is not the tool for covering ground and searching areas. But if you want to cover some ground searching out runs and patches and want to give yourself a chance at finding deeper bigger gold get the 4500. In have had my 4500 since its release date and it is now my back up detector after the Zed. It has paid itself off 38 times. The 4500 is deadly and if you learn the machine, do your research and detect regularly you will succeed. If you purchase a small sadie type coil for the 4500 you can still crumb for very small nuggies on the mullock heaps with success The biggest factor for me is the 2300 has a very small coil and just does not have the ground coverage or depth to make it useful for searching bigger areas or looking for deeper nuggets. Cheers RDD
  9. Hi Condor, re coil interference from metal on your body,a solution that helped me was to make a longer upper shaft. I mainly did it because I am tall and the standard Zed shaft is too short for tall operators to use the machine with a comfortable upright stance. I purchased a 1 Metre length of 28mm OD rolled carbon fibre tube (from ebay -china if none available locally) . Its exactly the same tube Minelab use on their GPZ shaft. I have cut it down to 810mm (that makes it 160mm/6+inches longer then the standard Zed shaft). I needed some thin auto cable to pull the coil cable connector up the shaft a few inches so I could connect it. I checked out the coil cable stretch/tension on a tape measure before I cut the shaft to length. The extra length is stretching the curley coil lead to about the max tension that I am happy with. The shaft clamps hold the tube snuggly in place with no guides needed to be glued on the tube. Actually I had to lightly sand off the tube slightly where the lower clamp risers make contact to allow the clamp to be locked down. I have marked the upper end of the tube to tell me when it is extended to the max length I can have. (not having the positioning guides on the shaft like the Minelab one does not matter at all as they are only there to align the coil horizontally...the clamps hold the shaft in position) The longer shaft keeps the coil a further 6-8 inches away from my body and has stopped most interference. I connect my shock cord at the top of the coil shaft and it gives me comfortable coil control when swinging. I have used the longer shaft setup for months in rough conditions and it works well. The longer shaft should help a lot when the 19 inch coil finally arrives. Cheers RDD PS. nice nuggies, keep em coming.
  10. I too am amazed at how the Zed picks up small nuggets at depth. I also run my Zed on high sensitivity with a very slow swing speed and find I am digging deep for pitiful small pieces. I dig down ...and down only to be shocked how small the nugget is when recovered. And the best thing is that among the small gold you can still get the deep broad signals and score 2 foot plus targets. The best of both worlds. Re scales, I don't worry too much about weighing the super small nuggets, but if you buy a Zed, the scales I recommend you should buy to keep in the car are 5 kg kitchen scales. There's nothing worse then sitting in camp for days trying to guess the weight of a slug or specimen you found that is too big for your 200 gram scales. cheers RDD PS. Zed owners should also buy a crowbar and keep it in the car.
  11. Hi Roughwater, re detecting trashy areas, in some (a few) specific spots where the trash is maybe in the top few inches of unworked/virgin ground the 7000 has the ability to discriminate out shallow trash. You ignore all the double blip (shallow signals) and very loud signals (big bits of iron) and listen for only the deep mellow single blip signals. This has worked for me in trashy areas with surface trash down to about 5 inches, however if you are working mullock heaps/dug up ground then it won't work and you will obviously go with a true discriminating detector. Cheers RDD
  12. Hi Goldenoldie, The crowbar was for digging in hard clay with quartz debris in it and other hard soil locations. . I have been digging targets 2 feet deep and deeper with the Zed regularly and a crowbar is a must in some ground types. All the very deep crowbar dig targets I have dug with the Zed were scrap iron from the 1850's diggers unfortunately. The deepest piece of gold I have found Zed was around 20-24 inches deep....a 3 ouncer.
  13. I can't wait for the 19 inch coil to come out. Since upgrading from a 4500 to a 7000 I have had to drag the crowbar out of the truck to dig holes many more times compared to when I used the 4500. With a 19 inch coil I am sure the crowbar will get a good work out. I am busting to look for deep large gold on some old patches with the new coil. In virgin deep ground where the gold is over 5 inches deep (99% of the time) and the surface of the paddocks/slopes are full of BB's and wire I have been using the double target response of the Zed coil to discriminate out shallow rubbish and I have been only digging the deeper single signal targets with success. I can cover a lot of ground and am possibly only missing the odd bit of shallow gold. I am guessing with the 19 inch coil the double target response will occur down deeper to say 7-8 inches?. This will be a benefit in some particular spots I have where deep gold lays but the surface is absolutely trash filled. cheers RedDirtDigger
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