PimentoUK

Carbon in the form of diamond is an electrical insulator, so it cannot be detected by any electrical or magnetic device. However, some diamonds can show phosphorescence. They will glow slightly if you shine an ultra-violet light at them.

A handheld pinpoint probe would likely detect the copper sheet, and would be easy to attach to a glass-fibre rod etc. The audio beeper will be hard to hear from 15/20 feet away, you will need to use it at a quiet time. Pinpointers unfortunately tend to drift with time, this depends on the make/model , some may be better in this respect. This would mean having to turn it off, then on again to 'recalibrate' it.

Thank You for that, Monte. You've made a well-balanced decision, I'm sure.

Does Monte still have the Vanquish 540 that's listed in his signature ? If so, that would explain why he would be less keen on keeping the Equinox. I think your typical detectorist who bought an Equinox would be unlikely to subsequently buy a Vanquish, unless they were doing it for financial reasons, and were fully intending selling the Eqx. Which is a very valid reason, as the Vanquish can clearly hold its own.

It seems more likely that folks will sell one or two of their unused / underused previous detectors, and keep their new Eqx, which in many cases has become their all-round go-to machine.

I suspect this rush job did not have the desired outcome, or he'd be on here with pics of the yellow metal. Update please!

So could this seal have been used to mark the bottles of wine themselves, either on the wax sealing up the cork stopper, or applied to the bottle body? Some vintage US wine for you: Vintage bottles of plonk

A bit of background info, including another example of the spoked wheel body design: www.beachcombingmagazine.com

I'm sure the IOY is to be interpreted as JOY. It was normal in late medieval times, the letter J did not exist, but even into the 1700's the use of I continued. Here's more similar matrixes ( matrices?) on the P.A.S database: PAS_seals A google image search for "intaglio seal matrix" throws up several pinterest pages of relevance, too. Not sure about "the only glass seal on the page from Pimento ..." I counted over 25 of them, it's a shame none are a match, I felt the intaglio inscription would be a common one. It appears to be gilded brass/bronze. If you feel the urge to clean it, I would suggest a soak in a weak acid solution, with regular brushing with a soft brush, eg. worn toothbrush. There's likely to be lots of green deposits over the remaining gilding, and these should come off easily. There will be a point where the gilding is clean, which is the time to stop, too long in the solution will start to loosen the gilding. Soak in clean water afterwards, to remove acid residue. For the acid, diluted lemon juice works, or citric acid powder, available in some food stores or look online.

An early 1800's glass intaglio seal matrix. It may be 'mourning jewellery' , it has that style, though so far I can't find a match. Here's a page containing similar ones, including one with the 'spoked wheel' body design. http://www.colchestertreasurehunting.co.uk/Postmedievalseals.html

Glad I asked, I knew it would be much more involved than it originally seemed. The jar will be some 'preserving' jar, like a Kilner Jar / Mason Jar, so it will have a steel lid, I guess. Or maybe just a small 1 pound jam jar, steel lid again. It might be worth getting an empty jam jar, filling it with 30 copper coins, put the lid on, and try out some air tests, to get a handle on how big a signal it gives. Depending on how hard/sandy/dusty etc the dirt is under the house, you may be able to investigate targets by probing with a mechanical probe. A small screwdriver may work. If your engineering skills are up to it, spring steel rod, or a bicycle spoke, could also be made into probes. You'll be feeling/listening for the clink of the lid, or the squeek of the glass. And if there's two of you, make good use of both pairs of hands. One can find targets, mark them with something non-metallic ( cutout plastic/cardboard circles, gardeners plant labels etc etc ) and the other digs any likely hits.

That's a pretty obscure request. A bit of background info might help. Are you actually intending to locate one of these coins, that's been hidden in a garden and then the burial-spot 'forgotten' ? Or are you just testing out your new machine on random coins in your collection, and thought the ID of the Kruger was low, and wondered if you had a fake ? We could probably work out a ballpark ID range, by comparing it with other more common coins. They are 22 carat gold/copper alloy, the same as British Sovereigns, and they are slightly lighter than the 5 Pound 'quintuple sovereign', which weighs almost exactly 40 grams. Quote: "The Krugerrand's actual weight is 1 1⁄11 troy ounces (34 g). It is minted from gold alloy that is 91.67% pure (22 karats), so the coin contains one troy ounce (31.1035 g) of gold. The remaining 8.33% of the coin's weight of 1⁄11 ozt (2.828 g) is copper. This is an alloy which has long been used for British gold sovereigns."

Total detector power draw and coil power are not the same. What if one machine has a big colour LCD screen with backlight, and the other has none? What if one uses modern efficient components ( amplifiers/microprocessors/voltage regulators etc etc) and one uses a 20 year old design with a few tweaks?

The Fisher F2/F4 shares some of these characteristics, too. Most of the electronics is powered from a regulated voltage derived from (9V+9V)=18V , but the audio stage is run off a single 9V. So weak audio but fully functional detector is common ...

I'm pretty sure FireFox never used to remember the Zoom setting, especially if you actually shut down the browser, or the entire computer. But having experimented with it now, it seems to do it consistently. I've no idea what zoom setting I have, though, there isn't any indication I can see? Delving into About:Config shows the standard settings are zoom levels of: 0.3; 0.5; 0.67; 0.8; 0.9; 1.0; 1.1; 1.2; 1.33; 1.5; 1.7; 2.0; 2.4; 3.0 so I guess I had 0.67 set, I've no idea why. It doesn't remember zoom levels of individual images, though. I use it sometimes on Geotech1, where people often upload small images, and if you close a tab, then re-open it, it reverts back to 100%. That's the kind of inconsistency that throws me. Likewise - if you get some stupid 'out of date security certificate' nonsense, and you add an exception, it only does it for that one page, not the whole site, pretty irritating. Yet this 'remembered Zoom' seemed to apply to all the detectorprospector site, not just that one page I was viewing. Pfft.

Problem solved, I think. I'm using Firefox, which like most browsers has a 'page zoom' feature, using "ctrl +" and "ctrl-" to enlarge/shrink the text size. It would appear my machine has decided to permanently remember a 'zoom out' setting for detectorprospector, not globally for all websites, and it remembers it even when it's shut down and restarted - which it's never done before. I zoomed in, to what I assume is 'normal', and it seems to have stuck with it so far. This explains why the saved page loaded OK, as it's not on www.detectorprospector.com, it's on my C: drive. It doesn't explain the .css file effect I discovered, that's too mysterious. I found a few references to this effect on the web, with the question "how do I stop it doing this ???" , so it's not unique to me. One answer is to go into the browser settings, and edit Max -Zoom and Min-Zoom to "100", then it should always stay at 100%, regardless. Thank You for your thoughts.

Well ... after a lot of faffing about ( including clearing my forum cookies, hence logging myself out, then not being able to log in again because I didn't make a note of my password ....) I have come to some conclusions. I have a saved copy of the forum front page , from August 2019. This loads correctly, with the right font size and layout. I then saved the current small-font front page, and compared them. I had a hunch the problem was to do with .css (cascading style sheet) files. Comparing the two versions, there is an obvious difference: the old page had 11 .css files, the new page has just 8. The missing three are named: 37c6452ea623de41c991284837957128_gallery.css 22e9af7d7c6ac7ddc7db0f1b0d471efc_gallery_responsive.css and 885a2e418b87306e5ae0b62323d68d08_widgets.css My hunch was the 'widgets' one was the important one. So I copied this .css file from the old saved page to the new saved page. I then re-loaded the new page, and behold !! it displayed properly, like it did 3 days ago. Now I don't know what exactly 'widgets' does, it's related to 'gallery' in some way, but I'm no web guru. But it seems the absense of these 3 files is what's causing my problem - with missing 'style' info, my browser is not able to format the page properly. ( anyone who has ever turned off 'page style' will know it makes a mess of the layout, and usually changes fonts to basic ones. Dankowski's Forum has this problem for many folks, as the .css files are insecure, even though the main page IS secure, and security-heavy browsers don't load them up: the result is an ugly page. ) Any thoughts on this, Steve? Any automatic updates taken place that you have no control over ?

I'll be the first to ask: What happened to the forum layout ? I was using it about 3 days ago, and the page was changed to 'super-wide', about 40% of it was only readable by moving the left/right slider-bar. Then an hour later, the width was correct, but the font size had shrunk down to micro size. I can still read it, but sure don't like it. The avatars have shrunk too. Am I the only one ?

Trivia: It plays a silly little tune, then powers down, when the battery goes flat.

Perhaps when Randy said "a more powerful battery" he was wanting a higher capacity battery, with longer run-time ? While the battery life on the EQX is fine for most folks, there are definitely some who would want twice the existing run-time.

"I am not sure what you are driving at with your 'Vanquish hardware' comment" Permanent 'Beach Mode' , stripped down options, simple to operate, simpler LCD screen, less controls. And maybe an exchangeable battery pack .... though there are obvious water-tightness advantages to having a sealed-in rechargeable battery. And cordless charging would be a neat idea, like electric toothbrushes.

An 'Excal 3' has to be fairly easy to produce, based on Vanquish-level hardware. The creative bit would be making it have cordless headphones. [ have the 'receiver' in a glove/wrist-mounted unit, and the 'transmitter' near the handgrip, so they are close when in normal use ]

It may be useful when hunting for 'black sand' ? [ I have a vintage Whites machine that has the option of reversed discrimination, that allows it to be set up so it only sounds off on tiny ferrous, which is apparently good for finding black sand areas, where gold deposits may be located] It could also allow for manufacturing variations in coils. A perfect coil may require GB=0 for hunting extreme iron-rich dirt, but a different coil may need GB = -2 to achieve the same setup. It's much the same as why the Fisher F75 /Tek T2 allow GB to be set above 90.

Agreed on the MASS VOLUNTEER ID: http://www.americancivilwarrelics.com/Civil%20War%20Buttons%20Federal%20State.htm If this was just a low worth button, I would suggest a soak in diluted lemon juice, with regular brushing witha soft brush eg. worn toothbrush, This will remove the green deposits, but keep a check on it, too long in there and the gilding will also peel. But if it has any true value [ I'm not familiar with US finds] best leave it ...

Perhaps "things are progressing" is intended to reassure us that things aren't going backwards ( because some problem has occurred etc ) and they haven't stagnated ( because of bureaucracy/legal/paperwork/Wu-Flu blahblah ).? I would like to ask Rick if he will again be the first recipient of a machine ( his own one?), or if he expects to now be just another customer, and get it much the same time as every other customer ?