Goldseeker5000

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 forest service map. A few weeks after I put it in there I opened up the compartment to get the map and I saw the maps were missing sections. It looked like a mouse got to it. I picked them up and they just crumbled into tiny pieces. The gloves also became brittle. Don't store it near anything you don't want destroyed by the fumes venting off of it, even if the cap is on and secure. It will still affect it.

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 stuff dripping down a chemical glove and came about a half inch to an inch from dripping onto my forearm. At that point I said never again will I mess with hydrofluoric acid again. If you get it on your skin even a small drop, spraying it with soda water is not going to help you. A better alternative to it is hydro-shocking the specimen. I wrote an article on this in the icmj mining journal and it is also in my book.

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 coloring in the quartz to stay such as rose coloring or yellowing from alteration.

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 system the BLM has gone to.

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.

Does anyone on here know how to navigate the new BLM MLRS claims database, and how to navigate and utilize the features on the map program? It is supposed to be alot easier than LR2000 which is gone now. Perhaps a video on here would be good for everyone. It is still confusing.

I agree with you 100%.

Brian, what is the dementions of your iPad? And have you ever had one of those things break or crack a screen in a backpack?

I'll keep looking into it Brian. I got one quote for reconfiguring the layout of my book for ebook and it was aroun $800-$1000 just to do that. I am still waiting for my publisher to get an answer back from the bigger publisher that can put it in ebook format. Also as far as carrying it in the field in a pack, that is why I made my book 6x9. I will keep looking though. There has to be a good company out there with decent prices.

You have to get a PDF in order to send the book to the printer. That is what they use to get the printing adjustments from. Chris is right with the ebook not being viable. It is easy to pirate, it will hamstring your paperback book sales, it doesn't work well will books like Chris's and mine. Like Chris, my book has 170 full color photos and it screws up the whole flow of the book because of the dementions of devices being viewed on. My next book, "Strategic Gold Detecting - The Art & Science Of Gold Nugget Exploration and Recovery" will have around 350 full color photos. As an ebook that would make the length of the book enormous. The issue of the book being pirated is a huge discission for Chris and myself we have put an enormous amount of time into writing these books, taking the photos which can take years to acquire, then after it is written it still has to be layed out in a format that is appealing and flowing as you read it. The bigger the book the bigger the challenge. Then you have someone in China or someplace else stealing the book, printing off pages, triming things off of it and making a new PDF and reprinting it and distributing it around the world. A week after I received my book from the printer, someone from China got ahold of my book, and when I looked this guy up on the internet I found that he takes images and recreate them. My book got pirated a week after it was released. This will really tick you off. Chris is right to not want to do ebook versions. I have dealers in several States plus I have my website. I looked into distributors but they will severely destroy your profit margin, and that is something I myself am not willing to do. Print on demand is a money making venture for the company printing the book, not the author, plus the books are made by high end copiers, not by web press. You will always have a higher quality product by going the route of a web press.The print on demand was going to cost me four times more to print than getting printed on a web press. At those costs you can't create a book and make a profit.

I talked with Maxwell at Minelab America a couple weeks ago and I asked him if the Gpx5000 was going out and he said not any time soon. I asked him do we still have at least 2 years and he said yes.

Of course he does!😁

I have used spray paint years ago but the one problem with spray paint is it leads someone else that hunts the same area to where you are finding nuggets. Or not, if you are digging junk.

Hey Steve what size coils do you have exactly? If you don't know if there is gold in the area evident of old workings then use the larger coil to cover more ground in area and depth. If you know there are workings where you are hunting then either elliptical or the small 5 or 6 inch coil. Experiment play with each coil to find out what each can do. It never hurts to go over an area you want to hunt with multiple coils.

I agree with hotsauce, have you ever had your battery plugged into car cigarette outlet and then started the vehicle? Doing this can damage the battery. Here is an option, get the 6000 and with gold you find save it, when you get enough buy a 5000 new for a backup, if the price on them drops again. Sometimes problem machines, no matter what it is, will always be just that, a problem even when fixed.

Steve, are those tasty bite food bags good? I have two flavored pouches of those and I still haven't tried them. It's been over a year and a half now.