AzViper

Here are a few other photos of the trommel. All those holes were drilled by hand, total of 1434 holes.

Hi Steve, thank you. If you decide drop me a PM if you have any questions.

Some additional photos of where my quad is at. This center carbon fiber rails will support the gimbal / camera while counter balancing the forward weight with a second battery on the rear.

Steve another amazing find, as you said its all about putting the coil over the target and very likely any quality VLF's would have found those nuggets, but amazingly two of your best finds have come to you in the last few months with the Nokta FORS Gold in your hands. Steve of the VLF's that you have kept in your MD lineup while deposing of others, on this particular trip why did you reach for the FORS?

Steve I am in the process of building a drone now. Lots more advance than the DJI, its all carbon fiber and will have live video back to ground station. This quad will fly out to about 5 miles. and with the HD video down link the image quality will be outstanding. Two cameras will be on-board. One to show where I am flying and the second on a controllable gimbal where I can point the camera in all directions. Has a failsafe system so I flip the switch and the copter returns to the GPS cords. where it took off from and lands on its own. The quad will have 17" carbon fiber props so to cut down on noise and have about 30 minute flight time per charge. With rapid Lipo batteries can be back in the air in short time or have another set of batteries to switch out to fly while the other battery is charging. The uses of a quad with video is endless. Movie studios are using them over helicopters due to the expense. GoPro is in the stages of developing a quad to sell using their famous GoPro. Click on this link to see a great video. Make sure to expand to full screen. Shot from a DJI quad shown above... http://vimeo.com/107258028

Steve, this post will open Nokta's eyes. They seem willing to listen to the needs of the end user, that being those who purchase their equipment. Maybe Nokta will fly you out to Istanbul and you work with the engineers to get a chest mounted control box with all the controls, screen, earphone jack all in the correct positions.

Nokta, is out to make a name for themselves and it's this type of customer care that will make Nokta rise above the others.

How cool is that. What other company would step up and do that. Wow!!!

I found the $20.00 gold piece in an old farm house in Missouri when I was back where I was born.

Steve I bet you would like to find one of these,1877 Twenty Dollar Double Eagle. The coin is worth the weight in gold due to the wear on the coin. Looks to have been carried in the pocket a lot.

I am set to go swing the FORS Gold this Saturday. Been a long time coming after so many obstacles from knee surgery, shoulder replacement surgery, and the passing of my father. The plan is to hit an old mining camp and hit the trashy areas and some areas Barry “Clay Diggins” has told me about. This will be the first outing with the FORS before heading up to Rich Hill sometime next month. I did go out to a local park and play with the FORS Gold to get familiarize to the controls. You can bet I will be wearing knee pads as I cannot risk shearing off the knee cap again as I did on the replaced knee back in April while out prospecting.

Sorry to hear of your problems. Call Garrett and explain your issue to them. They will pay for the return shipping and fix the problem and your MD will be back in your hands in short time. Garrett has great service as I found out on a ATX.

Hi Dilek & Gene, It’s nice to see that Nokta and Kellyco are in the forums and backing up concerns of warranty service and knowing that those who purchase a Nokta MD have someone to contact in the event of service. Dilek I will be contacting you soon, life is beginning to get back to normal after my father’s passing and great news from my brother in his battle with cancer. Keith

Rick the other websites may have been outside of the USA, remember it was a Google search.

I have seen other websites selling the Nokia line. Can't recall who but I found them after a Google search.

Here are a couple of videos of another concept for recovery gold. The idea is that you can run all day or weekend before a clean out as the gold will stay in the bottom of the drum until you’re ready to do a final clean out. Obviously running wet is better. Much smaller version using the drum wet or dry. Anyone interested in building the Drum its based on a mixer sold by Home Depot. The front cone is removed and the paddles inside are removed. Then a 14" or 16" trommel basket is installed with the back of the basket raised off of the back of the mixer. Then a 3/4" or 1" ring is installed on the front edge of the large drum to retain the heavies. Link to the cement mixer at Home Depot. Any quality steel shop would have the means to cut the 1" ring to the diameter of the front edge of the drum as well as rolling the expanded metal or get a pipe and start drilling holes. If you need a drill pattern contact me as I got the pattern to center punch and drill the holes and have evenly spaced holes. http://www.homedepot.com/p/Proforce-1-2-HP-Portable-Cement-Mixer-105890DPT/202081851?N=5yc1vZc7qb Rather cheap way to have a gold recovery machine running wet or dry... You would have to have a small generator of maybe 1500 watts as the motor is only a 1/2 hp of which generally pulls on the high end of 8.5 amps. If your running wet you would want to place a GFIC outlet between the generator and motor. I have never seen one in use but it does look interesting.

Bob, 4 AA should not scares you away. It all depends on how the circuit is designed. Here is an example I see and hear all the time. Years ago rechargeable drills were 7.4 VDC and over the years the the voltage has increased up to 32VDC. Higher voltage means nothing other than the drill has more battery cells at the cost of having lower milliampere-hours. If the internal motor is designed to run at 12VDC and the battery pack has ten 1.2 volt cells with each cell being 2400 mAh and a drill that runs on 32VDC and the battery pack has twenty seven 1.2 volt cells with each cell having 1600 mAh the 12 volt drill will have longer run time. Now if you get into the torque of the drills this breaks down to the gear reduction. I have an old 12VDC Ridge drill that has more torque and last longer than the crap thats on the market today due to the cells holding more mAh. The Fisher Gold Bug Pro runs on a single 9 volt battery. Depending on the chemistry of the battery it can deliver 300 to nearly 600 mAh. This 9v battery can power the GBP like 18 hours I believe. I have never really checked as I throw a new cell in every outing.

Hi Rick, You and others can see the entire Viper-Trom build at the link below. The build was only to take a few months, but took nearly a year due to lots of family issues and me having a new shoulder installed, then falling and breaking my knew cap off from the surgical replaced knee. The 1434 holes were drilled by hand after the the flat plate was rolled into a 12" pipe. In my signature of where the trommel is hosted are links to my other builds. Hopefully I can spend some time and get my builds hosted on Steve's Forums. Just need to spend some time and see if these forums allow HTML coding so that I can wrap text around photos. Link To Viper-Trom, http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/gold-prospecting/364420-12-inch-trommel-build.html

This photo shows the blower removed from the bucket. Bottom line you have a vac, a blower to be used for drywashing, and a blower for around the house.

The Viper-Vac was a work in process until the Viper-Vac arrive in the state its in today. The entire project was to build a better gas vac that currently on the market today. While all other Vac's on the market were using 5 gallon buckets with push on lids I knew that there was a better method. I choose to use a 1/4 turn locking sealing lid using a 6 gallon bucket. The vac's using five gallon buckets were limited to the amount of dirt and rock that could be vacuumed up before the dirt reach the inlet and suction was lost. With the 6 gallon bucket the vacuum inlet was moved to a higher point on the bucket allowing the nearly twice amount dirt and rock before clean out. The concept of the Viper-Vac was to have the most suction power by having a sealed system out to the end of the hose. Using a Neoprene Grommet and the machined elbow the placement of the inlet was place as I high on the bucket without any fear of pulling dirt into the blower intake. The 6 gallon bucket being slightly taller allowed room for the hose, crevice tools, hand tools, etc. to be stored in the bucket with the blower head attached. The entire system can be strapped to a pack frame where the prospector can put some distance between his or her vehicle into the back country and have a powerful tool. With the 1/4 turn lid the prospector can carry the Viper-Vac using the handles on the Echo blower even with a full bucket of 40 pounds of rock and dirt and not worry that the lid will pop off. I only use the Echo PB-255 gas blower due to the simplicity of how the blower mounts to the lid. The Echo PB-251 is the same blower with the same three mounting screws. There is no difference other than its been discontinued but can be found on CL or eBay. In the second photo I have made a rubber seal that fits over the intake of the Echo blower. This seal sits into the recess area of the bulkhead adding to a sealed system. The fourth photo shows the inside of the lid with the stock finger guard in place. Using stainless steel machine screws and lock nuts. The lid is reinforced with 5/16" Nylon on both side of the lid. Link to how to build the Viper-Vac - http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/drywashing/331022-build-your-own-vacuum-blower.html

Hi Chris, here is the link as I don't want to load a bunch of photos and waste Steve's server space. If you have questions please post them here at DP. Keithhttp://www.treasurenet.com/forums/drywashing/331022-build-your-own-vacuum-blower.html

I got into prospecting kinda hot and heavy. I like to build all my own equipment mainly cause I can at a much lower cost and have a better product than whats being sold commercially. I know this forum is mainly geared towards the prospector swinging a metal detector, if Steve does not mind I would like to post the how to build the Viper-Vac here in these forums. I also built this trommel and many other tools I use.

One of the items that was not touch on by Steve or Ray and most likely they do not have this problem with the FORS. Once the FORS was in my hands and adjusted for my height my forearm did not fit into the armrest once my hand was gripping the handle no matter what position the control box was mounted on the handle. I have to admit I have huge forearms. I assume the FORS is being marketed to be adjustable to all users. The armrest was not wide enough for my forearm, this may be something that Nokta may want to address as I had to bend the forearm rest outward to fit my forearm. What really bent was the rail that the two piece forearm bracket attaches to. Also the included nylon belt was not long enough to go over my forearm then fold back over the top to secure to the other half of Velcro, the belt needs to be 4 inches longer for those that have large forearms such as I do. The FORS shaft length can be adjusted a total 9.750 inches or 24.765cm in 2.125 inch or 5.3975cm increments. A nice added touch would have been to offer adjustments in 1 inch or 2.54cm increments.

Steve very very nice. I am sure Dilek was waiting for this review as well as the entire team at Nokta. Over at T Net I was the advocate to push to have Ray, yourself, and others to test the FORS Gold. Since posting Dilek's email address at this other forum I am sure emails flooded this account, I have since removed the email address from that original post. Ray has already posted his results with more to follow. His accounts are much like yours of the FORS.

I suppose if you own the SDC 2300 the adapter is a must if you want to use your favorite 1/4" plug headphones. Yet the price of the adapter is really overpriced if you just consider the material used, but having said that the SDC is water proof and the adapter could easily been made water proof out to the 1/4" female adapter with a rubber boot that rolls over onto the 1/4" male plug to seal this connection provided that the connector is sealed at the MD connection and using water proof phones. The Sun Ray Pro Gold headphones is a great choice, but they are not water proof. They have a mode selector switch (polarity switch I would call it) so that they can be used on virtually any MD. The separate volume controls for left and right have multi position click adjustments for those that do not hear everything perfectly balance and you want to keep the settings secured. Very comfortable headphone to wear due to their soft leather muffs. The manufacture says the foam/leather covered muffs yields a 26 decibel reduction in ambient noise from the outside world. I own a pair and I can say they do block the outside noise and very comfortable to wear especially out here in Arizona in the heat where perspiration is a problem. http://www.sunraydetector.com/sun_ray_pro__headphones.htm