schoolofhardNox

On 12/7/2022 at 4:27 PM, F350Platinum said:

As usual, great stuff. 👍 And the gold substitute is a 400ish year old earring!

Is it copper, shell, stone? To my untrained eye it almost looks like Tombac 😀

The other question is whether it was worn by a man or a woman, it seems the men adorned themselves as much.

Thanks. The earring is most likely brass. The soil makes it look different, kind of like stone.  I'm assuming it could be worn by either. Kind of fun going from beach hunting one day to relic hunting the next day.

Beach hunt # 14 is "round two" at the same beach invite as the last hunt. It turned out just as good as the last time. This place has a lot of potential for silver and gold, and it produced in the silver category. Once again thanks to one of our members for the invite. It’s kind of hard digging, so about 4 ½ hours was enough for me. I wandered around for the first hour or so with the anti-interference coil, but it was not quite what I wanted at that location. So I switched back to the 12 ½” coil and things got better. The day started off well with 2 silvers, but then the little junk targets showed up. Towards the end of the hunt, the rest of the silver and all the wheat cents were found. All in all, a great day, even the weather held up. The following day I was at a 17^th century Native American / English occupation site, doing some metal detecting survey for archaeologists. I found round ball, scrap brass, etc.…. but this earring was associated with Native American presence at that site. Fun stuff this metal detecting is. 😄

Beautiful work. Great idea using all found items to make a new one.

That will be great news for Axiom owners!! I use Detech coils on my 5000 for fields and beaches. Great coils.

White's Coinmaster V Supreme with G.E.B. (Ground Exclusion Balance) was the first detector for me that would ground balance hot rocks that previously read like coins. This changed everything for an amusement park we were the first to hunt circa 1969. The next detector is the Minelab GPX 5000. It allowed me to coin hunt and relic hunt like never before. I know gold guys had previous versions, so it may not be revolutionary for them, but that was the first GPX I had tried. An honorable mention (kinda revolutionary) was Minelab's E Trac for deep silver in parks. There are other great models, but not revolutionary in my experience.

21 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Heckuva haul! Nice that someone invited you to their digs, I've been hoping someone will bring along a PI to some of mine 🙄

From a '42 Walker half, to 10k. 👍 Ya got it all!

Thank You. I'm going back for round II soon. It's not often you get to go back to the spot after a first hunt like that. 😄 He's a nice guy and isn't worried about what I find. He did excellent on the last hunt as well. If you can move VA  up to CT or closer, I'll let you try the 5000. 😊

11 hours ago, Calmark said:

Nice haul on hunt #13 and great you got to meet up with a fellow member.  He led you to a great spot with coins and jewelry with good age.  Way to go!

Thanks. It was very nice of him to share his spot with me. It's always fun when you figure out there is stuff deep that is missed. It usually leads to silver and hopefully gold. What got me the most was the number of rings (silver and junk) that impressed me. It's unusual for me to get that many rings in one hunt.

7 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

Great finds and it looks like a much lower trash to treasure ratio than usual. Congrats on the silver and gold, well done!

Thanks. This spot gets hit by others when it's available, so the shallow finds are gone.  Also, it's kind of rough on VLF/Multi Frequency machines. Hard to get any depth because of the rocks and sand composition. EMI is about normal, maybe a bit higher than usual.

Great hunt and done in record time too. Nice gold!

59 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

A direct replacement for the Equinox 800 and 600. 800 at least. Manticore replaces the E-Trac.

oops I thought the topic was the manticore just being a nox II. Sorry about that..... I need more turkey!!!

My main interest is to see if the 2 D screen separates iron better, since they have split it up above and below the 12 line. If it acknowledges bottle caps, rusty tin shards (from cans) large solid iron and stainless steel from non ferrous items and has fast recovery, it will be a winner at relic sites. If it's just a Nox II, addressing the known flaws, they will have a huge public outcry. So far Minelab has always delivered something different, but limited, so I'm expecting a bit better than the Nox and most or all of what the E Trac/ CTX had to offer. We'll find out shortly, I'm sure.

3 minutes ago, phrunt said:

If it is a new improved lighter GPZ there will be a lot of disappointed 6000 owners.

Maybe, but will it find small gold better than the 6000? Seems like Minelab keeps there machines separate enough for people to not sell them 😄 Maybe it will be designed for something the 6000 is not.

I finally got around to putting on a carbon fiber shaft that steveg designed for my GPX 5000. Sorry for the long delay Steve 😶. I put it on the backup GPX and finally tried it out. The shaft breaks down in the center for easier travel. The 3rd section is a short shaft around 8" that connects to the coil. I wanted  to have short shafts on various coils so they would backpack easier when traveling deeper into the woods. We were worried about a clamp that would have to be located right next to the coil, and if that would interfere with the coil. It does not and it still pulled silver at 15+" at a beach site it was tried at. So no worries there. Design and weight of the shaft is top notch. Those of you considering this for a GPX, just remember the main 2 pieces have to be designed for your height, as there is no way to adjust them. The adjustment comes from the 8" coil shaft. So you will only have about 4-5" of usable adjustment. This is necessary to keep the shaft assembly strong. The stock Minelab handle moved slightly for me since, I'm chicken little with it due to breakage. I've cracked too many of them, and I was over cautious of tightening it fully. I will do so in the future. Even though I under tightened the handle it did not move much for the whole hunt. I'm pretty confident the handle fits on it when tightened.  Thanks Steve for the great job!

It's not just silver, the same goes for large coppers. I have only encountered one problem in 53+ years of detecting. It involved the E Trac and a stacked pile of colonial coppers (5, I think). I hit a signal that was terrible, barely registering, but was rather shallow. At colonial sites, this happens a lot with falsing iron. I reluctantly did not dig it and moved on. My buddy comes along and digs that signal a while later, and get 5 colonial coppers including the rarest Fugio variety known. Stacked on top of each other, the coppers in the middle only has side corrosion and minor surface edge corrosion. I asked him where he found them and he leads me to that same spot on a small slope. My heart sank 😞 but congratulated him none the less. Even though that happened, it is extremely rare. If I worried about that, I would never have fun detecting again. Most spills move sideways and are not stacked, so you should hit on part of the spill, otherwise no one would find coin spills. It's not a concern for me and certainly would not discourage a purchase of the machine. If one tries hard enough, you can make any machine fail a test.

Beach hunt #13 is done and the number 13 is a lucky number. I had a great invite from one of our forum members to try one of his productive beaches. How can you turn down an offer like that? 😄 It was very nice of him to offer that up. I started with the Nox and stuck with it for about 2 ½ hours. This beach had a lot of gravel type rocks showing and that made the Equinox unhappy. I finally figured out a way to hunt it by decreasing the sensitivity quite a bit lower, just to quiet it down. Things there are deep, and the Nox is not the machine for the job. So, for the last part of the hunt I used the GPX 5000. Night and day! A really good hunt with a decent amount of silver and some gold in the mix too. Also, always nice to meet up with forum members to do some hunting. Happy Thanksgiving to all. I hope you get to enjoy the day!

Just now, PSPR said:

Minelab's announcement of an announcement has certainly accomplished their goal - Make it vague and confusing enough to get everyone talking about Minelab products.

I'm not fond of Minelab's marketing tactics.  It feels like a big game to them and I really don't want to play anymore.

Agreed. Hence why I decided to not post much about new products from Minelab, since everything is speculation. We know nothing about the Manticore even after watching some of the worst videos about it 😄 I rather just buy it and find out for myself. But that's just me. Kind of tired too with the hype, lack of information, and drawn out releases -  from all companies.

4 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Yikes, guess the locals leave the stakes behind, I leave one or two 🙄

Still a nice hunt, but now you've lowered yourself to my income level 🤣

All that work makes it easier to find stuff for your pulse?

I collect stakes 😄 Not really but I guess I should start. My income level dropped to zinc status. 🙄 This won't help the pulse hunting since the areas I did were the slopes which are very deep with sand. Nowhere near the clay layer. I usually leave the pulse in areas where the clay layer is about 15" deep or less. That is where the pulse shines best for me. Who knows where I'm going next week 🤔

Beach hunt #12 was a fun hunt with the Equinox 800. I really wasn’t in the mood to lug around the GPX, 🙄 so I opted to get reacquainted with the Nox. It was basically going to be a clad hunt with hopes of some silver or gold jewelry, but clad is all I got. 😌 Things are changing since the weather is getting colder and the hours of daylight diminish. I’m 2 hours away, so the time change hurts me more that the locals, which can get there at sunrise. All in all, it was a pleasure to swing that lightweight machine. Next week it will be back to the pulse machine for some deep iron. 😄

Can't beat that around here 😄 I'll just go back to admiring my crusty zinc cents now 😟

6 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

You never cease to impress. 👍 Can't imagine what you'd find if you had a crack at some of my places, the river, the beaches, even the farms. Do you go in the water, or are these low tide hunts?

Super stuff again.

Thanks. These are all non water hunts. I rarely go near the water with the GPX. Even with the Nox, the waves will cause havoc with you. Unprotected beaches can be real mean 😄 I barely see anyone go any deeper than knee high. As for doing your places, you never know if the techniques I use here will translate to success in other areas. I always think I would do great if I ever went to nugget hunt in Australia or relic hunt in the UK, but the reality of it is I would probably struggle to keep up 🤭. One things for sure, my junk pouch would be full 😆

2 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

I assume you mean 5 or 6 times you dug iron and was rewarded with a (single) coin.  At first I thought one piece of iron hid all of them.

Still I assume this shows how the concentrating action of waves can lead to multiple targets co-located.

Four Mercs and silver GWQ.  I know you put in way more than twice as much work in a single hunt as I ever do, but still seems like a very good result (for 2022, anyway).

Thanks GB. I'm lucky that I can reach just some of the silvers that are hiding on these beaches. I have been over many of the same spots I found silver at previously and swore those spots were done for silver. It just shows that there are many smaller silvers that I could not get before for many reasons. Every time a section looses sand, I'm able to barely get some more silver. I dug a lot of ghost signals, but some of them turned out not to be empty 🥰. Yes, I dug some iron that had a coin with it about 5 or 6 times. Sometimes I heard the coin and the iron was off to the side, other times the nail was mostly centered, but the coin was off to the side. Almost all of the coin targets were very weak or sounded like ground noise. Some signals were ground noise and no coin, hence the ghost target designation. One things for sure, it's very hard for me to go that slow and not speed up. 🙄

Beach hunt #11 was at the same beach again, since I couldn’t think of another beach I wanted to take a chance on. I figured I’d try the walls again and maybe finish the day doing the grass section. I wasn’t expecting too much to be found by the wall, but I had a plan and figured I’d give it a shot. The ideas always sound better when you are at home thinking them out, but in reality they usually produce less than you thought. 😄 The wall I have been hitting did produce a couple more copper cents and one silver dime, so I moved to another section where I have found some silver in the past. This hunt was split using the small oval Commander DD coil from Minelab and the 12.5” coil from Detech.  It was the Detech that pulled the rest of the silvers shown, as well as a lot of copper cents. But I must Minelab’s small oval coil did very well depth wise and was a pleasure to swing weight wise. I spent a bit of time clearing some big iron and nails to find the co-located targets that might be found. Probably 5 or 6 coins were in the same hole with iron, so I guess if you don’t mind digging, it pays off. In one small area, all coins come out brown, whether it be clad or silver. I thought I was just digging another clad dime, but it was a Mercury. Happy days.  😊Weather was absolutely beautiful, and I got my detecting fix for the week.

I tried too. I figured it looked like something Egyptian, but didn't get any images that looked like that kind of horse. Maybe a Pegasus? Beautiful ring though.

24 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Wow, now that's a silver ring! Great find.

I can't resist...

Could it be a Manticore? 🤔

I think it is. 😊

4 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Good one! You must have quite the pile of silver. 😀 That walker half certainly adds a bit.

Almost thought you were using a 600 with a 10x5 🤣 I'm sure there was no comparison to the GPX.

Is the balled up piece a chain?

Naw, the 600 was my buddies. He could hear bits of what sounded like falsing on the targets I showed him. I only called him over if there was a chance he may get a blip from his machine. On the deeper targets I know from my 800,  I (and he) would not hear anything. This beach has produced 30 silver halves in the past couple of years for me. Others have found a lot as well. But they only come out when there is beach erosion or storm surges. Yup, that's a balled up silver chain.

That must have been a fun time. I always dream of hunting nuggets in Australia or the hammered fields of England. But I'm afraid I'd get skunked 😄 so I stick close to home.  Boy gold nuggets do have their appeal 😍