Reno Chris

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Some CA gold from a 2015 patch.

A few SDC's have issues with the waterproof connecting plug. It is possible you are having an intermittent connection issue which is showing when the detector is jostled. 

It is sensitive to household EMI - However EMI problems make no difference if you are moving the machine or not, when there is an EMI problem, the waves are moving past your coil even if you are perfectly still. I am assuming you did a noise cancel run on it. If the machine is quiet in the bush when held still and makes noise in the air when moved (held say a couple feet above the ground), then I thin you have a repair problem that needs to go to ML.

A while back I made a Youtube video with my friend Steve Hamilton of Make Your Own Gold Bars (link to his business) on pouring your own button of gold - the one in the video is about 2 ounces. We did two that day and I ended up with two buttons, both around 2 ounces.

Go with Technical and industry - hard rock mining.

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I just woke up from a near 4 year absence

So Gary - are we going to see you out at RP this year?

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the Minelab Monster 1000 headphone jack is a 1/8"...  Any insight or commentary on this?

We know that the primary market for which the detector is targeted is Africa (though it certainly will be available elsewhere as well) and the African guys have little modern head sets that use 1/8 inch jacks. The don't own Grey Ghosts they bought 6 or 8 years ago.

You can buy cheaply UR-20 headphones which are the old UR-30s with a 1/8 inch jack. I bought a pair a few years ago for general use because I liked the UR-30s. Check Amazon. Also, if you check general headphones at places like Best Buy, you will see that the old 1/4 inch jack is rare - almost all that is new on the market is 1/8th. That is the future. I bought a pair a sound canceling headphones a while back, they don't come in 1/4 inch - they are 1/8 inch.

I know all you guys who bought special headphones for your detectors years ago all have 1/4 inch jack equipment.  I guess you can update with new stuff on the market or use the external speaker. Why don't more makers build in both 1/4 and 1/8th? for the same reason you cant hardly buy a TV player that does both CDs and VHS. Your 1/4 inch jack equipment is so 1990s - they are the VHS of headphones.

I am sure Garrett will see the humor in using a Whites battery holder. In know its done because the Whites battery box is simple, practical and easy to use but it would be funny to have a sticker on the side which says "Powered by Whites Electronics".

I look forward to seeing this new Franken-tector out in the field soon when - "Its Alive!".

Happy birthday from all us pain-in-the-neck Yanks.

Hope you and the family had a good one.

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Usually you know by the big mullock heaps that the Old Timers have left behind with no obvious diggings.

Similar here - in the sense of piles of old rock and sometimes smooth water worn bedrock up near the top of mountains with rounded river worn boulders.

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That looks more like a California style old channel nugget than most Australian gold I have seen.

There are ancient channels in Victoria state similar to the tertiary channels of California.

44 minutes ago, DolanDave said:

Remember to put in the lease agreement you want shares of stock also...

Maybe, maybe not. I took one year of my lease payment on my claim and bought stock. It seemed like a pretty good bet. My claims are alongside a known ore body just to the west of it, and the original mining company did not drill beyond but just a little ways onto my claims. The new mining company had done surface samples and found good indications of mineralization. They were going to drill my claims, and I figured the increased ore found would up the value of the stock.  Not very much ore was found and today, with the way the price of gold and silver have gone down since I bought the stock in 2012, the stock is worth about 15 cents on the dollar.

Another friend I know had several mining claim leases and took a lot of stock. His stock was worth over a million, and he retired, figuring that plus cash he had would last him a long time. The million + of stock is worth less than $50,000 now.

So yes, while some have made much on penny mining exploration stocks, still others have lost much. My preference is to take cash over stock.

A patch I dry washed a couple years ago, I detected the piles and got a signal which seemed to come from a rock - not a piece of quartz, just a piece of country rock. I looked at the rock and it seemed clean, but it was the source of the target sound. I looked real close and at one end there was a tiny crack in the rock and a tiny pinch of dirt in the crack. I cleaned out the crack with my fingernail and sure enough, there was a little flake of gold in there that my SDC was sounding off on. That kind of thing can hardly be avoided when dry washing even if you smash all the clods. That is why its always good to go over your piles - both over size and the stuff that goes across the dry washer - with a metal detector to make sure you didn't miss anything big enough to detect.

11 hours ago, jasong said:

Would you say there is any mineral sector you see as underexploited right now as gold was back then?

Lithium. There are guys I know who have sold claim blocks for Lithium exploration within the last year. Half the dry lake beds in Nevada have been staked in the last year. Even the dry lake bed where they hold the Burning Man event. These things are related to spikes in commodity prices - lithium prices have been rising as demand for car and other batteries increase.  Look for an article on Lithium prospecting in this next issue of the ICMJ. If you don't subscribe, well, you should.

On REEs, you are 5 years too late - they spiked 5 years ago and exploration companies were mad for potential REE properties. On the other hand, as I said you have to go against the flow, staking property when prices are bottoming and no one has any interest. REEs will spike again someday.

As a real rough ball park number, I'd say that 20 mesh is about the number you are looking for. However, if there is not loads of clay in the material, Ive seen them recover a decent percentage (not close to 100 percent by any means) of stuff as small as 50 mesh by folks dry washing old hard rock mine dumps. The problem with clay is that small flakes will stick to little rocks by the dry clay and then roll right out of the dry washer attached to a rock. The more the clay and the more the clods, the lower your recovery is going to be. Dry with heavy clay will still give you a recovery that is not so good. You can see some of the gold in my photo below is pretty small.

6 hours ago, jasong said:

Have you had any luck finding and then selling claims to mining companies after like 2012 or so?

As I mentioned in the original post, the market now is poor for selling and also poor for finding new ones. You have to go counter to the market. around 2004 and for a few years before that there were a number of good properties you cold have picked up for the time and effort of staking and filing. Gold was considered a dead holdover from the past, it had wafted down and further down for years. No one was interested in gold mining. But 5 years later when the fed started pumping money into the system, the price and market for gold boomed for a few years in selling properties - there were buyers. Now darn near everything is staked but no one can raise money to explore, few are letting property go, but just holding on in case things get better. Most of the stuff being let go is the dregs of the dregs, and no one is interested.

Its a hard rock property adjacent to an open pit mine that was worked in the 1980s and early 1990s. The biggest huge pieces of gold there are half a millimeter in size (and not many of them), so no placer. It was valuable mostly for its location. I did some assays, but its pretty low grade - but that's what it was - a low grade open pit mine. I think I staked it around 2004 when the price of gold was still low and no one was interested. A mining company acquired the adjoining property and they contacted me. A day's work of staking and a few hundred of filing fees - worked out to be a pretty good investment.

It's a gold and silver deposit, with gold being the more important and silver as a by product. 

Prospecting can be profitable, but there is more than one way to make money in the prospecting game beyond just finding gold. Leasing out prospective claims to mining companies is a subject I have written about several times in the ICMJ and also in my book on prospecting. I know people who have made big money doing this - a lot more than this check. Its a serious effort to find claims mining companies want. Right now, the market to lease them off is not good.

I am publishing this check with critical areas blanked out for security reasons - it would be a waste try to copy it. I also greatly altered the colors of the check, the company who issued it is out of business and I am guessing there is no significant money that is left in their account. So all things considered, I figure its safe to show. As one can see from the date, the issue was two years ago in 2015. I'll get my 2017 payment in a few weeks from a different company.

A few years back in Alaska, Steve found a patch that yielded just shy of 100 small nuggets on a stream bench. Afew days later, another friend (George) and I dug it up and ran it through a high banker. It took a few days to dig and run, but we got a little over 2 ounces of fines.

It does go both ways worth it and not - it just depends. If you get a bunch of nuggets close together, its well worth taking a few samples to see if its worth processing.

Arizona is getting some good water - I saw some pictures of the AZ desert the other day all green with new growth. Nevada is getting much more water than usual, but flooding is limited to a few specific flood prone areas mostly. We've actually had more than a normal year's worth of rain in these first few weeks of 2017.

Lots of different places to live in NV and AZ, just depends on what you like and what your budget is.

Very true, Steve. The prospector will also always need to deal with the fact that the detector will see a target farther than it can discriminate accurately. This is true for both VLF and PI types and I am sure that if and when it arrives on the GPZ platform, it will be a factor there too.

Actually, I think the GM1000 will end up becoming a very popular detector. I know that at the Minelab dealers conference, the dealers who looked at it were very excited about the GM1000 coming on the market.

I don't know the mass, but its small as you can see the individual loops of the shag carpet it is sitting on. I'd guess its not more than 2 inches long. It belongs to John B. - meteorite expert and all around good guy.

Hope all goes well for you Scott. Looks like on the forecast I am watching that they are downgrading it a little so lets hope you stay dry.