PimentoUK

I guess this machine will be bought by serious hunters, and such folks would want to charge two packs simultaneously, or failing that, be able to do a 2 or 3 hour charge on one, then do the other.

I don't know if FT are getting feedback from this thread, but ... a question was asked on a UK forum about charging both battery packs simultaneously. Based on the above photo, it seems that one at a time is all that's possible , with the charger supplied. Do you, Rick, have any indication of charge time, eg. 5 hours; 16 hours ? The charger's label indicates 400 mA max current output, and it seems likely the pack contains 8 or 10 x AA cells, which would suggest 5 hours is the minimum charge time ( if 2000 mAh capacity cells ).

I guess your illness means you weren't able to make a " Reboxing Video" ??? Hehe. Get well soon, Sir.

The switches are small, cheap, fairly fragile things, it's almost inevitable that they will fail at some point. You can see them on this internal photo: eqx_PCB The sealed case means no access for repair. And removing/inserting the battery isn't exactly simple, so no get-around there. And I very much doubt that it's possible to do any clever software 'work-arounds', either, like swapping the on/off and the backlight button functions.

Ring-shaped objects give a stronger signal than solid discs, and read 'higher up' the discrimination scale that most detectors have. And aluminium is a good electrical conductor. So I think it's worth experimenting with large aluminium washers, example 1" / 26mm size. A UK supplier for illustrative purposes: https://www.gwr-fasteners.co.uk/aluminium-washers-244-c.asp These should be quite distinctive and easily found with a detector, and they're reasonably cheap if you're going to be using lots of them.

A simple thing worth trying is to perform a Factory Reset on the machine, then re-set your discrim etc. You may have some inadvertent notching set up, and it's simplest to reset, rather than figure out how to untangle the notch.

That map of Europe looks a bit 'distorted' to me. I'm sure the UK isn't that big. Not to mention all of Scandinavia and the Baltic States are missing - Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania to name a few.

A process known as Bioturbation is a very significant factor in coin sink. Essentially, earthworms disturb the soil around the item, until one dry/wet/cold/whatever day, the conditions allow it to drop 2 or 3 mm. Repeat this for 100 years and your target is 20cm ( 8 inches) down. If the ground is inhospitable to worms, the sink is much slower. Unfortunately for us, earthworms tend to live in the top 30cm ( 12" ) of soil, because that's where the plant matter they eat is located.

If it's laying on the surface, or nearly, then the obvious thing to try is lowering the sensitivity right down, to 5 perhaps, then you'll only get signals from shallower stuff [ or big stuff deep ]. Try a few experiments with a 'similar' mans ring.

Sounds terribly over-complicated to me, surely a couple of bent coat-hangers, maybe with a pocket calculator hot-melt glued on top, would find all these targets?

Sorry to hear about the accident, it sounds serious , was fire involved? How damaged is the search-coil for the Equinox ? I would actually be interested in obtaining it if it was not destroyed, I'm wanting the electronics board out of it for a tinkering project. Thanks.

Now that is clever, and funny, thanks for posting it. And there's definitely aspects of LRL innards in this diagram. Not just the hot melt glue - there's the non-functional 'decoy' component; the impenetrable jumble-of-wires; the 'Holy Water' and the magic smoke container; the switch that's glued in the 'open' state so it never functions. An obvious omission is a frog's leg, possibly the first electronic component. And a jar of 'Gypsy tears'. I like the inclusion of the electric eel, an under-rated component, for definite. A few in-jokes appear too: you can use a sandal in place of the 'flip-flop' circuit.

The raw material is expensive; cutting/bending/drilling/grinding is difficult. Welding is not easy, then the heat-treatment needed for some of these fancy steels is quite elaborate. Not just heating to fairly high temperatures then slowly cooled, as you might expect - but it can also include immersion in liquid nitrogen baths to force the 'age-hardening' process. There is a 'How it's made' episode on top-end kitchen knives, they get the nitrogen treatment, I think it's this one: kitchen knives Some background on these steels: wiki maraging steel

This is what they should be made of: Maraging stainless steel. 250-stainless Reynolds953 Super strong, and (reasonably) corrosion-resistant And marketing it would be easy, simply saying it's used in military aircraft landing gear should be enough. Some baboon would no doubt manage to bend a digger made from it.....

Well I've just purchased a couple of EBL Lithium 9V batteries from one of the big sellers on eBay UK. The price is reasonable, at 5 GB Pounds each, many of the NiMH ones are 7-12 Pounds, even the ones I could get from trade suppliers like Farnell Electronics were expensive. I also had a rummage around in my electronics stuff, and remembered I had 5 small foil-pouch Li-polymer cells, brand new. When I found them I tried them in the Propointer battery compartment, and found they actuall fit, at a jaunty angle... . So that's a little project, making a custom lithium PP3, I will post pics when it's done. mh9 probably won't like it, hehe, but the economics make sense, these cells were 1 Pound for all 5, I recall. Capacity is 300mAh, perfectly decent.

I recommend the low-profile type, such as these on eBay: adaptor The longer ones, like in Steve's photo above become a potential hazard when the 3.5mm plug is inserted, I feel.

Newton was also "Master of the Mint" at the Royal Mint, another reason for him featuring on the coin. You're correct about aluminium, or alloys of it, being corrosion-resistant. I've dug a French coin from 1922, and it came up shiny and pale gold coloured. It had me puzzled for a while, the weight was clearly light, so I suspected aluminium. It turned out to be aluminium-bronze, which was a new alloy at the time, though it has been used for a great many coin issues worldwide since then.

You will struggle to get a bi-metallic 2 Pound coin to look decent, mechanical methods are the most viable. The cupro-nickel centre is the same metal as your US 5 cent coin. The pale gold outer ring is 'nickel bronze', both have an enthusiasm for turning brown quite quickly. Some pictures: two pounds The theme of the coin is Science, and the UK's contribution to it. It features gears (the Industrial Revolution), computer chips, and a representation of the Internet. The "STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" edge inscription is a reference to British scientist Isaac Newton using it. Though it turns out to have a history much older than that: s.o.t.s.o.g

I thought someone would ask! To recharge alkaline 9V batteries: You need to do it at 2 milliamps, or thereabouts, and obviously for a long time, like 12 - 24 hours. It's generally thought best to charge them soon after discharge, rather than days after. A practical way is to make up a break-in charging cable, to go between the standard 9V charger terminals and the battery, with a suitably chosen resistor in series, to drop down the current. From memory, I think my cable had a 820 Ohm resistor. The two battery connectors could be the commercially available 'snaps' with two flying leads, or the end of a dead battery can often be salvaged, and wires soldered onto it. Sketch of adaptor:

It's not so much 'recommend', you already have the 9.6V ones, so there's no point changing or buying more. It's just that the 9.6V ones don't offer any obvious advantage in a pinpointer. You probably take the battery out and recharge it after nearly every session anyway, so it never gets near flat, and so the lower capacity is not relevant. I usually carry a spare 9V with me, in case the one in the pointer dies [or I leave it at home in the charger ..]. My spare is typically an alkaline non-rechargeable, due to the shelf life. ( and I recharge my non-rechargeable 9V batteries too. If you do it with a low current, it seems to work )

It's a shame it's pretty tricky to modify the pointer so the power switch controls the boost regulator input. You would have to remove the switch from the PCB, then re-fit it on its own isolated board. This would then require the button shaft to be trimmed in length, due to the height increase. It would be easier to do on the original black propointer. I don't share your dislike of 9V batteries in quite the same way. I don't like NiMH 9V's in high-drain applications, like pinpointers. The cells are rather small, and the heavy current draw causes problems, usually high internal resistance failure. And with 7 cells in series, they have poor reliability and life, as when one cell fails, so does the whole battery, of course. I'm looking at Lithium 9V batteries at the moment ( for pinpointer use ), the EBL ones specifically. They only have two cells, and they are pretty large cells, so they can easily handle the power requirements. What is intriguing is how they are charged. Only the two main terminals are brought out, there's no obvious 'hidden' third terminal ( for the internal connection of the cells ). Yet they can be charged at 600 mA in the dedicated charger. There must be some 'clever electronics' inside the battery, to take care of charge-balancing somehow.

I think you'll find it's the Placebo effect, Simon. The beeper and vibe motor are likely to be driven 'directly' from the 9 volt supply, and not from a regulated 5 volt rail, so it's going to beep louder and shake more with one of those batteries, maybe fooling you. I've not seen any reverse-engineering on the 'carrot', only the original model. But in that, nearly everything is powered from a 5 volt linear regulated supply. So you would be better off with a 7-cell "8.4V" NiMH battery, as they have a greater capacity than the 8-cell "9.6V" type. I'm also curious as to which specific boost regulator was used. Pointers take a hefty current draw when vibe-motor / beeper activate, eg. the turn-on routine. I imagine many of these modules would keel over as soon as you switched on the pointer. It seems odd that you have no power switch between the NiMH cells and the boost regulator. Isn't this going to flatten the battery, even with the pointer turned off ? I've played around with similar modules for driving high-power LED's. I have some GU10 5 watt lights, that are 5 x 1 Watt LED's in series, so would need about 16 volts to drive them. I used a boost regulator module, modified for current feedback, so it regulates the output at 280mA. Input power is likely to be two 18650 Li cells in series ( laptop battery salvages ). I had some similar cunning plans to re-use some LED backlight strips from a defunct LCD television.

There are great number of these "Lesche-alike's" out there, everyone from Garrett, Whites, Deteknix/Quest through to Predator, Raven, and names that you've never heard of. The detail is what's important - in this case it's the blade material and any associated heat-treatment/induction-hardening etc. It would be pretty easy to make a copy cat tool from mild steel, maybe make it thick to make up for the lack of strength, paint it a cool colour and sell it. Far better to make it from something like 4130 cro-moly steel, but the public don't seem very clued up on materials. It's commonly thought that stainless steel is really strong stuff .... no it's not, really. It's better than plain carbon steel, definitely, but still some way below 4130 cro-moly. It would be too expensive to make these tools out of anything more exotic, I think, like EN24 (4340); and the fancy Aermet and Maraging steels all require careful complicated heat-treatment, liquid nitrogen baths to do the age-hardening, and of course being very hard, they require more effort to bend, punch, cut, grind.

I saw that Stanley digger mentioned on a forum a year or two ago. Knowing that Stanley/Black&Decker stuff is commonly available here, I searched online. Only to find that this digger is not available in the UK - no UK retailer sells it, and Stanley's UK website doesn't mention it either.

Maybe place a 'Wanted' advert in the 'Classified' section, rather than the 'Advice' section ? More people are likely to see it then, as it will appear in the 'Recent Classifieds' block on the right side of the page, too.