Goldseeker5000

Very nice nugget!

Oneguy doesn't have any problems finding the big ones! He has proved that. He knows what he is doing. Congrats Scott.

Northern Idaho has good gold to detect. Hit the creeks where bedrock is exposed, hit the hillsides in the vacinity of old workings. The monster will work very well in heavily wooded regions in Northern Idaho. Contact Idaho Geological survey and get as much publications from them as you can on the placer and hard rock production journals as you can. Also my book will talk alot about detecting in heavily wooded mountains. The gold is there and the monster is capable of finding it.

Absolute hogwash!

Glad you received it Northeast. If you have any questions on anything in the book, feel free to email me. My email address is in the book somewhere. Preferably the reesetownes@yahoo.com email. I will answer all questions you may have. Thanks Chuck for getting the book to Northeast, that was a kind gesture indeed. That particular book has had quite the travel story. I too am surprised it arrived in such good condition.

Absolutely, I use a scoop to dig. Mine never wear down that far because at some point, any given day out detecting, I usually end up walking away and leaving it on the ground by the hole I filled, never to find it again. Oneguy did stumble across one of my scoops I wasn't successful at backtracking to find.

Three phones later and I still can't download this article.

Geof, sounds like a good story for all to hear. Better to learn from others mistakes when dealing with the topic we all are talking about. Words of wisdom, you know. You have a good point with that comment. When I first started to use muriatic acid years ago, it was for the purpose of identifying carbonate rocks. I kept the jug in a side compartment in the back of a Subaru I used to have and in the compartment I had other items, knit gloves, a topo map of a good area for gold which was doctored up with likely spots by the chief mining engineer from the Montana bureau of mines, and a larger for

If you want to strip the quartz from gold completely, then hydrofluoric acid will do the trick, but this stuff is far beyond just dangerous, it is deadly. You absolutely have to neutralize it in a strong solution of baking soda water for triple the time in acid and at least two or three times with in the triple time period you should pour out the soda water and pour in a fresh solution of soda water. Hydrofluoric will pass rapidly through your skin and go to your blood stream and continually wreck havock on all your internal organs and eventually kill you. I had a very close call with this stu

If you are wanting to clean your specimens and turn the quartz snow white then the only acid or cleaner you need is muriatic acid. Period. If you want to clean the gold and lightly clean iron deposits off the specimen then something else that is less agressive. Maybe nitric acid or wink. If you want the manganese staining to go way, muriatic is the way to go. To neutralize the muriatic acid thoroughly, you need to soak it triple the time with baking soda water, that you had it in the acid. You can soak it in muriatic longer to turn quartz snow white or less time if you want some of the colori

Clay, so what do you charge to help someone stake a claim?

So Clay I have a question for you. Would it be easier to just get a seven minute topo maps of an area someone wants to find the boundaries of claims and physically take it to the county recorders office and point out to the recorder where you want to locate a claim and see if it is open or not?

I spoke with the leading woman who oversees the claims and minerals with the BLM in Montana two days ago and she said they are so swamped with new claims that it will take over two years or more to get caught up. There are over 1000 new claims filed in Montana within the last few months. She said their goal is to get to a point where they and all of us can pull up the MLRS map of an area and see the claim boundaries without going to a separate data page to get the coordinates. She also said they are working more with latitudes and longitudinal coordinates to log where a claim is with this new

I totally agree with you Clay. The blm lady, though she is very helpful and willing to share her knowledge on this stuff made it sound like a milestone in userablility. It's not. I get better visual identification from land matters than this. Our claim is the first claim that got input into this new system for Montana at end of January or first part of February. I want to be able to see what claims are around our claim.

The blm made it sound like it was a big improvement over lr2000. So far I am not impressed. It really lacks features that could be beneficial for sure.