rumblefish

I've taken my SDC to the places where I usually pan and sluice and it wasn't able to detect the size of gold I was getting from the sluice box (very small specks/flakes). However, I'm yet to actually get right into the water with it and around some of the larger rocks, so that's not to say it wouldn't find stuff further out from where I usually work. The SDC is very sensitive. It will sound off on very small pieces of metal and you could be there five minutes at a time just trying to find what exactly it was that caused it to beep (shot gun pellets, fishing weights, small bits of tin foil etc). The best thing for me about the SDC is that it is a one piece machine that folds up small, isn't too heavy and is waterproof. Maybe you can borrow one to try, before buying yourself? Alternatively, how about a top quality pinpointer? I'm not up on the latest tech, but maybe there is one that would detect small gold and it would enable you to get right into the cracks.

He's South American (Mexican) - his Spanish is not European. He's funny. Just enthusiatic about his new "Monster", although he keeps calling it the "Master" (or maybe he's referring to himself), haha! Nice to see someone enjoying their new toy. I still have my SDC that sadly doesn't get much use (hours required to get to the gold patch, more than the ability of the detector), but the Monster looks a great detector for the price. Most You tube vids have subtitles you can turn on. Some of the translations are a bit "creative" but you can probably get an idea of what he's on about! Good luck out there, amigos!

How much is the claims excess though? My experience is that they always "lose" these important details in the small print. 5 dollars a month might sound great now, but not if you have to pay the first $1000 of any claim you make.

Not too shabby at all, Strick! Hope you get out more in 2017, Good luck!

Worked some of those areas myself. It's a lot of digging for very small flakes - but that makes the true pickers even more appreciated. Good Luck out there GG.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Definitely the way to go, I would say. Like most items, detectors depreciate quite heavily, especially if a new model has just been released, so you should be able to get a bargain. And those older detectors don't suddenly stop being good detectors overnight. If you have trouble with deliveries to Zimbabwe, perhaps you could get a friend (if you have one) in South Africa to receive it for you. Or pick one up from a delivery point there.

Dont forget the bug repellant. Those clouds of midges can be really annoying.

Looks good. Thanks for the heads up, Steve.

My experience of scouting rivers is that if the gold is very small (very small) your detector wont pick it up anyway. Best to take some samples from areas in the river that gold may have deposited, areas that you can work without dangering yourself. Then pan those out to see if there is any gold at all. Depending on what you find, you can then better assess if it's worth the outlay for a detector.

My (limited) experience of prospecting rivers is that it is a pain in the ass! I'm referring to the difficulty in actually digging in water. Unless the water is slow moving, shallow and very clear, it is hard to see what and where you are digging, and the flow of water makes lifting the gravels tricky, especially when you have cleared the big stones and are digging the finer, heavier material, which is what you are looking for. It's much easier to dig (where permitted) the old, dry course of the same stream or river. It's much easier to work, you don't need waders and waterproofs, you don't get attacked by so many mosquitos and you can see what you are doing. As you said in your post, most of the recently deposited gold that hasn't reached the bedrock is generally too small to detect with a machine. I have an SDC 2300 and it won't detect any of the gold that I find. The pieces are too tiny. So I would tend to agree that if you want to detect in water, you are going to have to find a spot in a gold bearing river where you can access the bedrock (false or otherwise) and hopefully get the coil of the machine over some cracks or under the edge of some large rocks. Alternatively you could just snipe the crevices, but that means getting into the water. Good luck out there! Oh, one other thing. The time of year makes a big difference. The flow of a river in Jan/Feb is very different to the flow of the same river in June/July. Detecting when the water level is at its lowest will help you a lot.

Some of these officials might want to check out the amount of lead sitting in the bottom of my sluice after a day prospecting and then explain to me exactly me how I have contributed to polluting the water.

That's a really nice video. Very inspiring. I love their appreciation for the country and the old timers who worked so hard to find the original pockets. Fascinating how they hopped from one geological clue to the next, piecing the story together. Kind of like a treasure hunt. Is there another vid showing what they found?

Wow that's a beautiful piece of rock, Lucky. What is that calculation you did to determine the gold content, I've not seen that before? rich

Hey Goldgrabber! Where in Scotland were you prospecting, near Wanlock? Your voice is very familiar. I think I might have met you a couple of years ago up there! Watching your vid, you might want to dig up the expelled stones and gravels around the head of your sluicebox once in a while. Your pump seems to be losing a bit of material before it reaches the sluicebox, and if there's gold in it, it'll probbaly fall out first. Same with the tailings. Scoop up and feed them back through the box now and again. Some of those creeks are fast flowing and can wash out the very small gold without you realising it. Nice vid! I need to get back up there soon.

There is a huge elephant in that picture Rick. The raping of mineral resources from what should be prosperous and developed countries, to feed the continuing need for gadgets and devices of the rich countries of the world. The miners in that picture are being exploited to a horrific extent, causing untold problems in their countries. Companies like Minelab should be demanding and promoting ethical mining practices across the world, to support the local communities so that they benefit from the resources taken from their own land. But this is too big a topic for this thread.

Expect to go 30% deeper into your pocket to pay for it!

Tortoises can live many years due to their slow metabolism. One like that little guy who chased Fred could live about 80 years. We had one left to the veterinary clinic in a will with enough money to look after it until it died! Same with parrots, they can also live a long time. This picture is of one of my friends sat on a giant tortoise. Tortoises are vegetarian as Fred said.

Good work Art. I love to see how well people do using the old dig and pan methods. As a matter of interest, how far away from the current river course in your photos were you digging? And how high up? I really need to get out to the river here with the sluice box again. Haven't been since October. Just so you feel better about your "little" 21/2 day haul, I'm lucky if I get something approaching that tiny pile of flakes to the far left and bottom of the gold sweep in your pan. And that's after digging my ass off in a huge hole for 6 hours straight! But just to see the first liitle ping of gold in the bottom pan makes it worth it. You convinced me. I'm going out again next week once the rain stops!

I bought my SDC2300 from a store in Austria. Very good service, fast delivery and they gave me a much better discount than anywhere else online at the time (about 400 euros cheaper than any dealer in Spain).

Mica and pyrites can be misleading if you have no gold to compare them to. Looking at your pan photos, the samples look very sharp and gritty. They also do not shine consistently like gold, especially in sunlight. Gold, even the tiniest speck, is very heavy. It will clink against the sides of a glass vial. It shouldn't float or move in the pan if you move it gently. And as others have said above, gold is also malleable, it can be bent, and flattened (like lead), mica and pyrite will just splinter and crack. Gold is also a metallic element. It will sound off with a metal detector or a good pinpointer. The mica and pyrite probably won't. You can use all these properties of gold to asses whether what you have in the pan is indeed the yellow metal, or something that only resembles it. If you have never seen any true gold, I would advise you to buy a small bag of paydirt. If you pan the contents in sunlight you will soon see how real gold behaves and how different it is to everything else. Finding stuff that looks like gold but isn't, is very frustrating. And sometimes it can be tricky to tell which is which. But it will come with practice and experience. Keep at it, and you'll get there. But I'd start by examining a small sample of the real stuff. It's the best way to know for sure what you are looking for.

I thought you had sold your 2300, Paul? I have a set of C size 5000mAh Tenergys in mine too.

I stand corrected - I didn't read the whole leaflet. The bottles and things are indeed mentioned in the bottom corner as you say. I would have gone for a 12" pan over the 10" though, but that's just a working preference and nit picking! It's a good kit (as long as it isn't too expensive, of course).

I use a 12" Estwing (black) pan in the field and a larger 15" Garrett (green) when I need to separate fine black sand from the really tiny gold dust back home. Never used a blue pan, but I expect the contrasting colour would work well. It helps a lot when your pan is under sunlight. Something about natural light and gold really makes even the tiniest fly shit gold zing out. The two banks of riffles are very useful, but I know some purists prefer pans with neither. The kit looks good, but I would perhaps have left out the 10" pan and instead added some glass sample bottles, a small blue plastic box to keep them in and to view the gold against, some plastic micropipettes for sucking up the gold and a neodymium magnet to pull out the black sand from the fines. I personally never use a classifier - I do it with my hands as I shovel the gravel into the bucket - but I can see how it would be useful. Be interested to know what the price is.

+1 on that. Folding it down requires a good belting as well. Not exactly subtle, but it works! I have used my 2300 at the beach without the collapsing shaft problem mentioned previously, although I didn't go in too deep. My biggest problem was actually trying to dig deep enough in the sand with the waves coming in and out. Found a few one euro coins though, so it works.