Jim in Idaho

Good info, Steve...thanks1 Jim

John, that trap Kiwi showed, and the one I found are leghold traps. They're not designed to kill, they're designed to close on the leg, and as the leg is pulled up, they're made to grab whatever they can...usually toes. What Fred said is the truth. I'd love to find one of those old grizzly bear traps, with the big teeth. That would be worth some bucks. Jim

Last winter, I was exploring the McCullough Range in southern Nevada, and found a double spring # 3 Victor trap. Probably set for coyotes back when they still allowed grazing in there. It was on the edge of a drywash, and probably drug there by the critter. Still had the stake and chain attached. It was on top of the ground, so I didn't have to worry about getting "bit"..LOL It still works, too. Jim

You can count on that. I got tangled up on another project, and ran out of time on the black sand thing. Hoping to get back at it soon, assuming the weather doesn't get me. Jim

Chris, the only real use I can see for this feature is trying to locate pay streaks of flour gold. That's what I really wanted it for. I live very close to the Snake River, and the river is full of very tiny flour gold.....the amount is estimated in the billions of dollars worth. Because of its shape factor, that flour rides well up in the water column, and is deposited on the surface as the high water goes down. The follow the black sand feature could be useful, if it worked, to find those surface paystreaks. As far as finding deeper larger gold with that feature, I agree with you...not much benefit.

LOL...yes, John, they did. And I've still got my old Garrett Master Hunter BFO, with two double coil sets for it. Jim

Thanks, Chris. I was under the impression that while you might see through one, you can't read text or see a straight line through one. Jim

I'm with Chris. A simple test is to look at at text through it. Or even a straight line, or some sort of edge. If you can see it, it's not a diamond. You can't see through diamonds. Also, it doesn't have the luster of a raw diamond. jim

John, the RNB packs for the GMT, DFX, MXT, etc. are 3-cell packs. max voltage is 12.6...perfectly safe in those models. RNB doesn't make a 4-cell pack in that configuration. To my knowledge, the only person making, and selling the 4-cell pack is Reidman. You defintely don't want to put a 4-cell pack in the aforementioned detectors, but it works terrific in the TDISL. Jim

yes, and sadly, it's still too slow to change the numbers. Required several pumps over my samples to get the numbers to change....not good. This whole discussion makes me wonder why no mfg. has offered a simple machine to do nothing but track black sand concentrations? Maybe it's more complicated than it appears.

Thanks, Steve...good read!

I figured it was time to do some serious testing on this, Steve. I've seen tidbits here and there, but nothing very definitive. I'd read that you had to pump the coil to make it work. Nobody is going to spend more than few minutes doing that! Talk about arm-weary...LOL. There's a branch of the Snake not far away, that is now dry. River hasn't run there for thousands of years. I thought it might be a good place to look for black sand streaks, and collect some material to pan. I decided I needed to know just what the GMT could do for me in that regard. When I get some time on the dry channel, I'll be sure and post it. Jim

I've been planning on some testing of the GMT's ability to find paystreaks of black sand. Finally went down near the Utah border and collected some sand to use. I was disappointed in how slow the GMT's indicator changed over the sand I used. Much too slow, unless you want to die of boredom before finding any. That's probably why so little is written about it. It only works in "autotrack", too. I tried various levels of V-Sat, Gain, etc., but nothing worked in a way I'd spend much effort doing. But, I DID find something that works.` I put the GB in Manual, and cranked the GB as POSITIVE as it goes (99). That way, it only responds to REALLY strong positive signals, and most negative signals. I turned the THRESHOLD all the way down. At those setting you hear very little ground noise, but still get a good response on the black sand. The gain can be adjusted to ignore the general levels of blacksand on a bar, but still respond to a higher concentration of it. The response is fast, so you can run the detector as if looking for gold. Of course, you won't hear any non-ferrous targets at these settings...they're strictly for finding concentrations of bs. The concentric coils had a definite advantage over the DD, but I would have no problem using the DD for this. I was using blends of pure magnetite,or at least ALL of the black sand I used could be picked up with a magnet, mixed with sand that had no magnetic iron in it. I used both a 1:5 ratio of bs to white sand, and a 1: 10 ratio. Both were detected at nearly 4". I didn't try any ratios below 1:10, but I'm sure a ratio of 1: 20 would be detected, but might be only at shallower depth, depending on where the gain was set, and that would depend on the level of bs in the general run of the bar being detected. Another thing on the mixes used....I used a teaspoon of magnetite in each mix. Put them in sandwich bags, and spread it into a thin layer. But, to be fair, the coils could always see the entire teaspoon of magnetite, as the test blend, even spread out, was smaller than the area of the coil. All of the sand used was smaller than #50. I tried using the "learn accept" function on the DFX, but could make nothing work on that for finding black sand. Tried several different programs and settings, with complete lack of success. Jim

Many thanks, Steve! Jim

Well do, John, assuming I can figure out how to do it. Maybe I'll just email you a couple. Jim

LOL.. I'm afraid Noah would have canned my old backside, John. My new to me GM 3 is supposed to be here today. Really looking forward to that! Jim

Yup, swamp, old like me...LOL. We should make a good pair. With the little 5.3 concentric I bought this spring, this GM 2 beats the GMT with the same coil by about 30% on my 1 grain bar. Of course, have to manually balance, but I don't mind that. Jim

Bought a GM 2 a couple of weeks ago. $120. Nice-looking unit, but had a tough time getting it ground balanced. Finally figured out the Sensitivity (gain) pot was shot. Every time I touched it I got loud howls from the machine. The pot is soldered into the circuit board, so I needed that specific pot. Couldn't find one on the 'net, so called Whites, with the intention of buying one. tech said...no problem I'll put one in the mail. No charge! So I got it yesterday, and took things apart last night and got the new one installed. Took about 1 1/2 hours. had a tough time getting the old one out (5 pins). Then had to drill out the holes with a #59 drill to allow the new one to go in. The rest was easy. Now I've got a nice backup unit for the GMT, and for a buddy to use when I'm out and about. Whites never ceases to amaze me with their service. Jim

You can buy a 4 cell Li-ion pack, that includes a built-in balancer from a guy that goes by Reidman. Be aware that you will be at a higher voltage, when freshly charged, than the rating on the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply, which are only rated for 16 volts. The pack will supply about 16.8 volts when fully charged. I've used his pack for over a year with no problems. I don't have a link to Reidman....you'll have to do a search. Jim

Yup...I agree with all of that. Jim.

I think Reg has come around on this, now, John. but he doesn't know, from what he's told me, exactly whats going on either. This whole thing may be just an "unintended consequence" of something Whites changed when shifting to the SL version. Jim

Man, that's great! I never find that gold like that! Jim

It surprised me, too. When I first started testing my coils, before the battery tests, I just wanted to know what to expect from my detector. I was disappointed when I tried cutting nickels into small pieces, and the detector couldn't see them very well. Then I tried lead shot, sometimes flattening it. That also wasn't very promising. I usually couldn't see anything smaller than 3 or 4 grains. Then Reg Sniff told me the pulse width used by Whites was optimized to get a reaction on gold. So, I bought that little 1 grain gold bullion bar. I was really shocked that the TDI SL had no problem seeing that....even with the 12" DF coil. I guess, from an engineering standpoint, it's possible to optimize the pulse width for whatever metal you wanted to find. Nickels electrical reaction is similar to gold, but nickel is much lighter (lower SG), so a 1 grain piece of nickel would be 2X or 3X the size of the same weight in gold.So when you're testing, there's no substitute for gold when testing a PI. in my experience, the VLF's are less critical about the metal used...but that's just my opinion. Jim.

Steve, I can't explain it either. When John first mentioned that to me, maybe a year ago, I thought he'd been smoking old kangaroo hides. Everything I'd read had said that GB off gives the best depth. I needed mine on for the places I detected, so never thought about it much. I hadn't communicated with John for several months prior to the tests, and he had no idea I was doing them. I was as surprised as anybody with the results.....kept redoing them thinking I'd made a mistake. But Reg told me, after I gave him the results, that he thought Whites had changed something in the GB circuit on the SL. I've never heard from Whites on the subject, though I've heard from them on the voltage comparisons. Maybe they've figured something out on GB? Who knows? All I can do is post my results. I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. Jim

The GB works fine. I've never had a problem getting it to balance anywhere I've used it. Jim