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Reg Wilson

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Posts posted by Reg Wilson

  1. All I can say is 'sod Codan'. Codan was the end of Minelab as far as the 'little Aussie battler' that started in an Adelaide shed. I was proud to be there at the start, when Bruce Candy and a few mates took on the world's top metal detector manufacturers and beat them at their own game. Punching above their weight? You bet! And the world took note.

    Now what have we got? Just another money grabbing multi national that manufactures in the cheapest country they can find.  They employ the business ethics of a 'hamburger chain', and stick it to the public pricewise as far as they think they can get away with. Whoops! "Perhaps we over did it", so we back off the price of the 7000 a bit just after releasing it. "our R&D is very expensive". BS. Greed is the over riding factor.

    Codan introduced a whole new ball game. Most of the old crew left Minelab, and a new batch of 'yes men' and other assorted sycophants replaced them. American styled advertising and promotion took over with such BS as "opening up the goldfields again", and "Minelab doesn't make gold, but it is as if it does".

    Now the game is looking after the share holder and to hell with the customer. I still use a Minelab product, but brand loyalty? Loyalty is something that is reciprocated, and mine went down the 'gurgler' some time ago.

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  2. I think you will find that the lino setup will soon wear out on the highly abrasive ground in WA. I suggest you get in touch with Jason Cornish who is the Central Vic president of the PMAV. I loaned him my sled some time back, and he may be able to give you some advice based on his experience.

    From my trip to WA with the sled I found that the GPX4000 was the detector of choice for the job.

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  3. The big change came with the Codan takeover and Malaysian production. Shareholders became the priority rather than the customer. All the old crew disappeared to be replaced by hard headed business people, contracted staff, sycophant underlings, and associated 'yes men'. Pretty sad, but a familiar business pattern.

    A once inspiring Aussie company, now like so many others that prostrate themselves at the alter of the dollar. 

    Hopes of a challenge to what is close to a monopoly have so far ended up 'on the rocks'. No one has managed a leap forward, at best the Axiom may have been the nearest attempt so far.

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  4. Bruce Candy and Minelab brought out the vlf GS15000 in 1985 and then the first auto ground tracking GT16000 in 1987, when I was fortunate enough to test the prototype, pulling a couple of hundred ounces with it, so by my calculations Minelab has produced the worlds best detectors for forty eight years.

    In 1989 I got to play with the first Minelab pulse induction machine (SD2000 prototype) resulting in a few more hundred ounces.

    I had to pay for my first GS15000 up front because in those days they were just starting out and things were tight. In my opinion (for what it's worth) Minelab still produce the best detectors, but have lost a certain amount of the pioneer and revolutionary zeal that they once had. Now they are just another multi national behemoth producing in Asia, with the charisma of a 'pressed rat'.

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  5. A few years back I had a lady producer for one of these so called reality gold shows approach me about being involved. I told her that I was a prospector and had given up small scale mining for a number of reasons. Red tape, sabotage, and 'moonlighters' being just part of the negatives. I told her that they could follow me around for weeks or even months without anything of consequence being unearthed because I spent my time in the field attempting to prove up mainly new ground where little or nothing had been found previously. If the country was of geological interest regardless of proof of being auriferous it was worth a look. I was not interested in fossicking or using machinery but did occasionally turn up some nice stuff.

    She told me that they were 'flexible' and that it is entertainment. In other words they could fake it and do an enactment of my finds, and they would pay me for my time. I told her, "sorry, but not interested". I could just see my friends and real prospectors laughing themselves silly at such obvious fraud.

    Since then I have seen a few episodes of this nonsense, although I do not follow or subscribe. Some of the participants are known to me and to be honest it is no shock to see them making fools of themselves, although the gullible just soak up this crap, and can't seem to get enough of it.

    Was it P T Barnham who said "You will never go broke by underestimating the taste of the public", or something along those lines? The production companies that make this fiction know to "never give a sucker an even break" and reap the rewards. You only have to see how popular the most ridiculous 'action' movies are these days to know that the public thrive on fantasy.

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  6. Xcoils, who undoubtedly make the worlds best detector coils dropped dealers and have for some time now have supplied direct. The price has been the same as dealer price, so they have picked up extra profit and don't seem to be too much effected by the change. GPZ coil sales have been such that the earlier GPX (5000) coils are no longer being made. A shame, as adding an Xcoil really picked up the performance of GPX and earlier PI models.

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  7. To put it crudely,... Minelab have us by the short and curli's. 

    Due to one man who with some mates in a shed in Adelaide put together a metal detector to challenge the big American boys to now being the detector company that totally dominates the scene. Impressive? Hell yes.

    What is going on now though is any body's guess. It all changed with Codan take over, and how much of the original genius has been retained? Going offshore to produce cheaper would have been abhorrent to the original Minelab crew (and I knew most of them). They were not the sort of team that was out to make huge money, but to prove that good old Aussie ingenuity was as good as the best. 

    All changed now I guess, and no going back to an age of challenge above making the buck. 

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  8. The wheeled rig in the photo might be okay for finding cannon balls but useless for prospecting. Note how far the ATV is from the coil. That is because it is 4 stroke and would play hell with the electronics, plus the lead being so long would suffer from voltage drop.

    I've tried the wheel setup but found it impractical. Too much jolting resulting in false signalling. The conveyer belt is very smooth, partly because of the weight, which makes it impractical for towing by hand. (unless you are Hercules)

    One option is to build a large coil like Jim Stewart's 'Bismarck' only instead of wearing it in a bulky harness swing it like a line trimmer using a sling and counter balance it with a battery. I have seen this method used to great success in central Victoria and WA by John-Hider Smith, one of the best and most talented prospectors who ever swung a coil.

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  9. A problem with drag coils is that the bigger you build the more that the problem develops, being that the ground balance varies from one side of the coil to the other. 

    Unless you have a detector that can handle such electronic variations and still give accurate readings you will find 'sledding' (drag coils) challenging.

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  10. Being 33 years ago, my memory of the details of Bruce's experiment is not great, but he certainly had some intriguing ideas. At one time he developed a system that could tell definitely whether a tennis ball was inside the line or not.

    This involved a wire mesh beneath the court and balls impregnated with metal. A clever but expensive concept that got as far as a prototype before the far less expensive 'Hawkeye' system was developed and accepted. I have a foggy recollection of a partner being involved in that project who left Bruce holding all the debt involved.

    Another experiment that I was involved in was the EMDAR (electronic metal detecting and recovery) project. This was a hopper (with grizzly's) that fed a conveyer belt with a metal detector (VLF in those days) positioned beneath the belt. When a signal was detected a gate at the end of the belt directed that portion of material into a holding drum before returning to directing into the reject heap. The whole apparatus was on skids so that it could be moved with the use of a backhoe - loader which also fed the hopper and moved the reject pile as it accumulated.

    The whole idea was to use EMDAR to separate oversize material in a mining operation. I had access to a deep lead mullock heap that contained metal (gads, machinery bits, broken picks etc). It also had quite a few bits of gold up to an ounce and even better.  This had been a very rich mine and the miners had been a bit careless with recovery. There were a few bugs in the system, but eventually it was up and away. 

    At the end of a trial period I used a small dozer that I owned at the time to push out a similar amount of material and detect it by hand. I then pushed out the EMDAR reject heap. The result was that it took less time to push, detect and then re pile the material than to put it through the EMDAR and this method also recovered metal (gold included) in the reject heap that EMDAR had missed.

    I then made the mistake of voicing the opinion that they had developed 'technology for technologies' sake'. I should have shut up as I could tell that the Minelab crew were not impressed with me. 'Shoot the messenger". Minelab went on to actually persevere with EMDAR and I did see one unit for sale in a mining magazine at one time. I remember that the machinery was priced at Au$80,000 new. I have no idea of how many were built.

    Up until that point I had been fairly closely involved with Minelab, but after not quite much so. Possibly just coincidence.

    What not many people know is that Bruce's passion was not metal detectors at all, but HiFi, and he went on to develop high end sound systems.

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  11. Back in 1990 I was sharing a house with John Hider Smith and Ian Jacques just out of  Maryborough in central Victoria. We were involved in testing a new type of metal detector called pulse induction when Bruce Candy paid us a visit with an experimental system that he had been working on. This involved a large cable that would loop around a patch of ground that was suspected of holding big gold at a depth that conventional detectors would be incapable of hearing.

    The idea was to have this Tx cable connected to the electronics while an operator would work within the circle of of cable with what appeared to be a conventional hand held detector, but would only be Rx. Hopefully the Tx would be powerful enough to induce a strong electro magnetic field within the loop, while the Rx would pick up the target response when passed over it.

    My memory is a bit foggy on  the results, but for whatever reason it was not a 'goer'. In those days Bruce was always thinking of new ways to achieve results.

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