afreakofnature

Is that title click bait or what! LOL

After 4 years of talking about it, Gerry finally comes to South Dakota!  Yes I am "Brian" in Gerry's Part 1 post.

It all started in 2018, at that time, I had been detecting for 4-5 years learning on my own along with a one-day lesson from Gary Drayton (before Oak Island) during my first year.  I was well versed in book smarts and had done a bunch of research but never received formal instruction on gold detecting.  See I was spoiled, my first nugget ever detecting was a ¼ ozT beauty on the first day and I thought they all were all going come like that.  Nope LOL.  I decided that it was time for formal instruction on metal detecting and had reached out to Gerry at Gerry’s Metal Detectors and signed up for one of his 3-day courses.  Gerry’s lessons, along with his quality fellow instructors was priceless! It was during those lessons Gerry asked where everyone was from.  When it came to me, I said South Dakota.  I remember very vividly him saying.  “Brian doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to invite me to SD because I have yet to detect gold there.” Or something like that.  We all laughed but that stuck with me.  A year later I called and said let’s put that trip on hold for a year as I was getting married and had a lot going on.  The next year we had planned very tentatively, but Covid hit.  Finally, after 4 years, the trip was established.  Now, the hard part was to figure out where to put Gerry on some gold.  I mean I had a hard enough time putting myself on the gold and this would be the first time I have ever invited someone to come detect.  I was a little nervous that Gerry would come out on over a 2 day - 1000+ mile drive, 5-day trip and not find a thing!  We all know gold is never a guarantee but, c’mon this is the first time I have ever invited someone to come out and detect and I wanted to impress somewhat. 😊 When it got closer he said that he was hopeful to have a 6k with him, and when it was a couple weeks out, we knew we would have at least one.  My friend “Dan” was on the early list and Gerry would bring his out – hand delivered.  Not until about Gerry being 6 hours away did he spill the beans and said he had one for me too.  I was on a later list and just before he was about to leave, a shipment arrived.  He knew that I would want this, even though I was acting like a doubting Thomas.  I needed to put my fingers in the nail holes of Jesus’s hands to believe.  I needed to see the Zed up against the 6k.  Sure enough I did.  Gerry explained it all in his post.  11 nuggets left behind in the first patch.   Then I got to hold it and wow, Idaho Peg explains that really well in her post too LOL.  It was being set free.  Now like Gerry said, the ground on that patch was very saturated, wet down almost a foot.  That patch is never like that, it was so humid it felt like being in FL.  Very uncharacteristic.  Power lines 250’ away.  And he still pulled out 11 nuggets.  I grided that patch 3 times with the Zed using 3 different settings for the ground I was on, ranging from a high sensitivity setting to a smoother threshold setting to a deep target setting.  I was confident that that patch was worked out.  Gerry uses a 6k and gets out 11 more nuggets.  We ran the Zed over quite a few of Gerry’s targets with different settings and nothing.  It would not have stopped me and obviously it didn’t.  Would it have stopped me using the 6k, you bet.  Very clear signal even through the SDC like threshold.  That patch also had an SDC2300, Equinox 800 with 10 x 5 coil and a Gold Bug 2 ran over it as well, still 11 nuggets left behind.  To me, seeing the GPX work in real life was what was needed for me to believe.

It is hard to explain everything on a forum, but having Gerry stay with us for 5 days was in itself a 5 day personal lesson.  We were able to talk freely, bounce ideas, theories, scenarios, ground conditions, you name it!  It was so much fun, so informing and the most important we had a ton ‘o’ fun.  I won’t tell you how my wife and I spoiled Gerry on this trip (let’s just say no one went hungry LOL), but we tried to give him the best South Dakota hospitality that we could.  I wanted this to be a trip to remember and hopefully something that he would want to come back to.  We took Gerry to 4 different spots overall and we had a success rate of 75% gold found.  On the last day that we went detecting, I made the plunge and opted for the 6k.  We went to a “new” area that that the SDC and the Gold Bug found a piece each in only 2 hrs of a recon detecting trip.  By the end of a 5-hour session we had a new patch, “The Six Patch.”  I added 3 more pieces as seen in Gerry’s post.   Gerry I just want to say that we had a blast!  It was so much fun, extremely entertaining 😉, and an overall great time!  We forgot to take a group pic so you are definitely gonna need to come back!

Now the rest of the story……..

So Day One on the 6k and I find gold.  I am now so excited to start going over old patches and see what we missed.  Well I can honestly say this--I have found gold every day I have used the 6k since owning it.  Now granted it is only 6 outings, but that is 5-6 weeks of detecting for me.  I have a job, I can only go out detecting on weekends and usually it is just one day on the weekend.  So if I get skunked at least 4 times in a row that is a month of no gold and months are limited up here.  So not only do we need to do massive amounts of research, you also better be using the best equipment you can as well and you better know how to use it properly.  My Dad always told me “The poor man pays twice.”  You can interpret that how you would like, but to me if you don’t get the best you’re going to end up paying for it in the end anyways (repairs, upgrades, etc.).  So for me, when the 6k came out, I had to know I was making the right decision.  Two reasons:  1.) I have a Zed, it is still considered the flagship detector, do I NEED a 6k or can my Zed do the job.  2.) If I want a 6k, the Zed had to go, because of my financial positioning, I must sell in order to “upgrade.”  So I researched, read all I could and watched.  For me though in the end, I really had to see it in person, I had to touch it, I had to use it.  I mean if it was as mind blowing as the Zed was when it came out, I think it would have been a no brainer.  In my research one of the things that really stood out to me was the star chart, believe it or not.  Doc kind of opened my eyes to it analytically and with a combination of Nugget Heads statistics videos and seeing it in person replicating the same analytics, it was like a eureka moment.  It finally made sense.  See everything that Steve and JP told us about the detector was accurate, right on the money.  I believed them, but doubted them as well for some reason, I needed to somehow verify this for myself.  It is just my personality and I also learned some personal lessons along the way and also apologies had to be made.    In the end the 6k is by far the best detector for me, it made sense to me, it works the way I want it too and it finds the gold just like it says it does. 

So onto Day 2 with the 6k, I go back to the patch Gerry covered, Memorial Day Patch.  I grid it nice and slow, he was nice enough to leave 3 behind for me 😊.  One of them was a nice 0.5g piece but I blame “Dan” and Gerry for leaving me this one.  It was by a rake “Dan” had used for his Gold Bug.  Nobody moved it LOL.  It was hiding that nice nugget but go figure the other detectors did not hear that before the rake was there.  I can’t explain it other than the 6k heard it and the others did not (matches the star chart BTW). None of the targets were super deep, about 4-5 inches.

Day 3 with the 6k, I go back to Stank Patch.  It was overgrown so this one will need much better covering in the fall or early spring, but in 3 hours I pulled out two pieces that I missed that again had an SDC2300, Gold Bug 2 and a Zed over.  Depth on those two were at 6.”

Day 4 with the 6k, I go to the E Patch.  Lots of garbage at this patch so I go to the top and BOOM, hit 7 pieces to 3 pieces of garbage.  This was one of our first patches.  It has been hit a lot with again the SDC2300, GB2 and the GPZ.  That was a fun 4 hours.

Day 5 with the 6k, I go back to the E Patch.  I continue down and again another 7-piece day, more garbage this time and the garbage that I am picking up are flakes of rust 12” down.  14 pieces now, it just tripled the amount of nuggets on this patch.  I will let “Dan” fill in his story here LOL.

Day 6 with the 6k, I go back again to the E Patch.  Working a little further down found two more pieces in less than 3 hours with my wife.  I love when we go together, it is such a…..joy.  Just kidding.  She likes to do some of the work but if you remember that video of the kid I posted a while back.  Yeah it is kind of like that LOL.

So here are my thoughts on the 6k:  Overall I absolutely love this machine.  We all know how awesome the ergonomics are. One arm, no harness, detect all day.  Matter of fact I have had to relearn coil control all over again because of this being so light.  I was swinging way to fast! LOL.  At first I was racing all over the place, the Zed was so heavy and cumbersome that it MADE you go slow, not with the 6k.  Most of the time I was running Auto+ in Normal with Threshold on.  I would test my targets in Difficult and also had no problem hearing them.  Only once did Normal give a signal that Difficult did not hear and it was a rust flake about a foot deep.  Like Gerry noted, if you hear a signal in Normal and switch over to Difficult and there is nothing there, switch back to Normal and that signal tends to breakdown and disappear.  We found this to usually be ground noise or iron rich ground pockets.  I would always give these a boot scrape and double check.  As of now, I play the odds.  If the signal is still there when switching back to normal, I dig.  If not, I move on.  The cam locks I think are a huge upgrade compared to what we used to see, they have been remodeled and I crank down on them extremely hard.  It is pretty hard to break carbon fiber.  The shaft might flex but it does not wobble, I only notice the flex if you swing the thing like a golf club.  Regarding EMI, it is there sometimes, but I “grew up” with the SDC2300 and to me the threshold/EMI is smoother.  We were even detecting by power lines and when you got to about 250’ from them you had to stop.  Haven’t tried the DD coil yet.  Matter of fact the EMI saved me from a massive thunderstorm that hit just as I got back to the truck LOL.  I only run the external speaker and usually at 1 or 2 so that might help and I also extend my coil to the max (just the way I like it), so that might help too.  I did notice that if I have my phone on and sometimes my Garmin inReach that I would get some EMI, so I just turned them off completely and did not have problems after.  Breaks in the threshold are very clear so you just need to “listen through” the chatter, but like I said I learned this a long time ago with the SDC.  In regards to depth, I have found 0.03 g pieces with a max depth of 4 inches, a flake of rust at 12 inches.  Overall the average of the pieces are 0.15 g at an overall average depth of 7 inches.  I have not found a 2-foot-deep nugget yet, but never have with my Zed either.  Most of all of my multi-gram nuggets were found between 6-8 inches so I have no concern about the 6k not picking them up and since I believe in the analytics of the star chart I am confident that the 6k will pick up the big deep nuggets 4 out of 5 times vs the Zed.  I have no problem in that trade off vs everything else that the 6k offers.  But for me here is the best thing, instant out the door detecting.  Charge one battery the night before, grab your detector, pick, scoop and finds bottle and away you go.  Less than 15 minutes and I am out the door.  Before I had to grab a harness, grab a WM12, obviously grab the heavy detector, make sure both of them are charged, grab a bungy, make sure I have all the parts to the harness, grab a ferrite, etc.  Then when I got there, I had to gear all up, no more.  Out of the truck and detecting in minutes.  Oh, and for the long hikes in, this is awesome as well, beats the SDC at this as well.  With a small Camelbak on my back, I have my lunch and water, scoop and finds bottle.  Put the pick in one hand and I collapse the detector shaft down all the way, turn the coil vertical and hold on to the detector like you are detecting.  It just becomes a part of your arm then and makes hiking in way easier than carrying it the old-fashioned way.  Matter of fact it is kind of off balance if you carry it the old-fashioned way.  Now I do have a couple cons as with any detector: The main one being where the coil attaches to the unit, it is plastic, that seems like an easy breaking point to me.  Gerry said they always used to be metal.  So do take care not to grab there when grabbing the shaft at that spot.  Also, it is so sensitive that it goes off really easy now on my wife’s metal hip.  She used to like helping me, especially the scoop part.  She can’t get close to the coil now like most of us normally would, so just keep that in mind if you have metal parts in your body.  Yeah, the stupid rubber door for the headphones sucks and comes open easily if you rub on it, but thankfully, Steve showed us how we can “fix” that easy and cheap.  The last con is one that I cannot really put experience on because I never had a GPX previously, but it lacks the Iron Discriminate that all the old GPX, GP and SD machines had.  Talking with Gerry I can see how this would come in handy as just another tool in the box.  I am crossing my fingers that it could be added as a software/firmware upgrade.  I mean they are already halfway there with the Double D coil and it sure would make the coil more “useable” at least for a couple of my situations.

Well there it is for me.  I am completely at peace dropping the Zed for the 6k.  Keep in mind though, as we always talk about, this is for my conditions, my soil and my type of gold detecting.  Everyone has their own conditions, ground and style and needs to make their own decisions and be comfortable with them.  Seek advice, ask questions, do your own research, come to your own conclusions.  Most importantly get out there and enjoy metal detecting and finding gold.  The 6k taken that for me to the next level.

Probably the most educational one in awhile too. 😉