Reno Chris

Still a few smaller mineral closures enacted by fiat in the last days of the Obama administration. I hope they will ultimately meet the same fate as this one.

Here is a link to a map of the area that was withdrawn - https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/Proposed_Action_Withdrawal_Map_PubMeeting.pdf

I know of at least one guy who has successfully beeped some very nice gold within that area. Its good news to hear and as the new BLM appointee said " The proposal to withdraw 10 million acres to prevent potential mineral development was a complete overreach". I have a copy of a BLM report on the study used to justify the withdrawal and even in a report generated by Obama era BLM appointees, the data shows that roughly 90% of the 10 million areas had little or no potential as Sage Grouse nesting ground. Before that they had concluded that the Sage Grouse did not qualify for protection as an endangered species.

What was the ring made of? Silver? Gold? or ????? the coating of dirt made it hard to tell.

The GB Pro is a good, all around, basic nugget detecting VLF - but that price for the F19 (an equivalent to the GB Pro with a few improvements) is a very good one. Less than $500 for such a very capable detector is impressive and very hard to beat. I remember the first F19 I saw was in pink Cammo - and I guess they still offer that option. Also Steve, it doesn't seem like you are shrinking your detector collection very fast.... Hope all is going well...

There is a bit of skill to pinpointing. Just waving a coil over a target to see if a target is present is not the same thing as pinpointing. He never really did an actual pinpoint of the target so he only had a vague idea of where it was - and in the end that was not good enough. The other thing is that when you are underground and chipping stuff off the walls of a working, you are crazy if you dont first lay down a canvas tarp or something like that to catch the rocks you are chipping off the walls. Often the floor of old workings are loaded with gobs of trash that can make your detecting the gold bearing chips you knocked off very difficult. Some sort of catch will make your lives about 10 times easier because you can see the stuff you knocked down on top of the tarp and keep it separate from the junk on the floor.

You know we will pay you for those stories if you write a bit more length than a forum post. Another alternative is to invite me down for a tour and I'll write a story. Let me know if you are interested. The Colorado has produced some very nice specimens over the years - I'm sure you will be finding more..... Chris

You may really be overthinking this. The guy really isn't saying much in the quote you cited. All of what he is listing are oxides, and they are not likely present as pure oxides, but combined in with other minerals. Soda and potassium feldspars are aluminum silicates as well, and loads of minerals have magnesium (magnesia is the oxide) in them. So basically he says that the rocks are made of typical rock forming chemicals, although that varies. He might as well say the pockets are associated with various types of common rocks and minerals - though that varies from place to place. it is a low information statement.

Steve - Its the American Mining and Exploration show (the organization was formerly the Northwest Mining Assn.) its more a commercial oriented mining show, but the magazine attends to pass out free copies. Its not really oriented to individual prospectors but more exploration and mining companies. A few mineral dealers attend to sell nice specimens. You attended the show with me a few years back. See: https://www.miningamerica.org/2017-annual-meeting/

Some of the gold I got on this trip was also like that - a chunk of quartz with no visible gold - but if the GM1000 says its a non-ferrous target inside, you can pretty well bet its going to be gold even if you cant see it from the outside.

Well, while I would agree that some of the special headphones maybe are a little better, but its like you get a 5% improvement for a 5,000% price increase. I do have a couple broken old ML Koss headphones, so I will send them into Koss, so Mitchell thanks for the heads up. Its very handy to have extras. I guess my fat head is swelled up enough that I just dont have a problem with the UR30 headphones falling off.

Great to see that Mad Mutha was there - he finds some good wire gold specimens. Miners lunch box should be here at a show here in Sparks in December. I will just note also how difficult it is to get a well focused image of the Olinghouse gold specimens - I have lots of fuzzy pics of those specimens.

Mine falses even with very mild, very low mineral ground. It is only a very tiny percentage of the total number of GM1000 units that have this issue.

To be clear, I have talked to Minelab, and I am sending my GM1000 in. Like you I will send in a note with it saying what I have observed. However I am out prospecting and am using it for a few more days before I send it back.

Chuck, I dont know about you, but I also have a problem with both coils and for me when I turn the unit on for the day it is a little touchy but not terrible. It only becomes really bad after a couple hours use. If your problem is similar, the tech could turn it on and find it was OK, while you noticed that running it for a time it was extra touchy. Mine, once having run for a half day will make dozens of chirps when slid lightly over the ground (chirp every time it touches a little rock. It does this with both the small and large coils.

I took a friend out for a couple days in central Nevada to some hard rock mines (just got back). He got his first gold specimen with a GB2 within a couple hours, several more afterward and some more really nice ones the following day. I got some nice pieces using the Gold Monster 1000. The GM100 is actually a really good machine on the dumps for picking out specimens. The very effective discrimination did a fine job of eliminating all the nails and other bits of iron trash so common in old hard rock dumps. Look for a more detailed article on using the GM 1000 to scan old hard rock dumps maybe as a treasure Talk feature or in the ICMJ magazine or both . Hard rock mines are overlooked by many prospectors and they have real potential. Its interesting that we got both pieces where the gold was quite yellow and others where it was silver rich and very much in the electrum range. The gold rich stuff tended to be more platy and the silver rich electrum was more wiry. Fun to pick this kind of thing off an old mine dump - this is a nice specimen of wiry, silver rich electrum gold - the gold comes out the back side of the specimen as well, so it goes clear through. You know the old miners didn't intend to throw this stuff away.

When you give it a try, let us know how it works.

Again, its a debate. The fact that Kevin found no gold with the mineralization method does not prove there is no gold there. I expect Kevin would not take them to a place to film his show unless he knew there was gold there. I have never heard of anyone who has been truly successful with the method. I have heard of plenty of stories of competent prospectors who tried and were not successful. That does not prove it could never work, but there are plenty of reasons to believe that it would take just the perfect unusual set of rare circumstances to make it work. Jeff does not do a lot of detecting in and around streams, so I am not sure he has had actual success with it. Its almost like an old wives tale that everyone has heard and repeated but no one has ever seen it actually work under real field conditions. If Mythbusters was still running, perhaps I could refer it to them.

Nope - its this one: http://www.goldprospectors.org/Learn/Video/VideoId/325/Gold-Trails-Gold-Trails-Season-2--Episode-1-Soldier-Boy The part I am interested in is roughly in the first 4 minutes.

I have a sort of running disagreement with a very respected detectorist-prospector (not Steve) over the usefulness of these iron / black sand functions. I argue that while theoretically they could be used if conditions were just perfect, there are virtually no conditions in the real world that are perfect. In addition to what Jim mentioned, there are loads of other things like accumulations of hot rocks, change in the bedrock, etc. which would indicate as mineralization to a detector but have nothing to do with any useful accumulation of gold. Also, because of the fact that metal can be detected much deeper than mineralization, the black sand accumulation needs to be pretty close to the surface. Also, you have the effect of detecting many tiny objects - just as your detector responds better to a small half gram nugget than 10,000 pieces of gold dust that weigh 1/100th of a grain, your detector will see one golf ball sized chunk of magnetite far better than 10,000 pieces that weigh 1/100th of a gram spread out in a stream. I have never heard of anyone actually successfully using this function (and its on a number of detectors and mentioned in a number of books) to actually find gold. Kevin Hoagland tried unsuccessfully to find gold tracing black sand / mineralization on one of his Gold Trails videos. He found some mineralization but no gold to speak of. I think I could have done better just looking at the ground and picking sample spots on the basis of inside bends, rocks outcrops, boulders, etc. In my opinion, its a design engineer's theoretical way to find gold accumulations which just is not practical for real life gold detecting.

I've found one nugget this year with my GB2. All the rest have been with ML products - the GM-1000, the SDC 2300 and the GPZ 7000

In using my GM 1000 with the larger coil, I am finding that when I turn it on cold, its fine, but after a few hours use, every touch on the coil, no matter how slight, is a false sound, so at that point it must be held far enough above the ground that it wont possibly touch anything, which means I am holding it so high that I am losing significant depth. As I am hunting areas with lots of stacked rock, so its an issue. At that point it's not long and I am switching to the SDC or the GPZ. I have tied down the coil wire very carefully with multiple velcro ties, so its not the wire moving. Turning down the gain does help a little, but it does not eliminate the problem. Besides, if the ground is mild, I should not need to turn the gain way down to 4 - 5 because of bad bump falsing. I plan on fiddling with it some more and I would like to remove the coil cover to see if anything has gotten in there, but if more fiddling does not resolve the issue, then yes, I will contact ML. Steve pointed out it is not a universal problem, so it may be some spotty manufacturing quality issue.

I dug a half ounce nugget with the SDC at just over a foot - like maybe 13-14 inches. It was an extremely faint signal.

I read the article and thought to myself - This is from the perspective of a diamond cutter - only they call the dodecahedral faces "grain" - and sure enough I looked at the author's name and it said "master diamond cutter". There is nothing wrong with the article but it fails to note important things a layperson would use to identify a diamond, including hardness. Sapphire is hardness 9 and will easily scratch quartz at hardness 7. It will do nothing to a diamond. Note that all the crystals in the Fake diamond picture are all quartz crystals. Years ago I had a guy bring me a quartz crystal he acquired. It was the size of an egg and very clean and clear. He was convinced it was a diamond of great value. I told him it was quartz and he refused to believe me. I explained to him the characteristics of why it was a quartz crystal. He still refused to believe. I told him he could think whatever he liked but if he wanted me to identify it, I had already done that and he left.

Some rough diamonds can be seen through. Its a minority, but some can, so that's not really a good test. Check this link for images of rough diamonds. https://www.google.com/search?q=google+rough+diamond+images&safe=active&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihkpKb3fLVAhVS3mMKHTZsAsAQsAQIJw&biw=1280&bih=915 There are a few non-diamonds in there, with at least one quartz crystal, but there are a load of real rough diamond images. Chris