jasong

These Wolverines have become my standard metal free, slip on, composite toe, waterproof detecting boot now. They go on sale for like $85 occasionally, in places. I have 2 pairs and haven't worn either out yet, the soles are vastly superior to the military/duty boots most people use for detecting, and the stitching stays together far longer too. The insole is also better, and the composite toe seems stronger than the Bates. These have lasted me 1.5 years with no major damage while the Reebok/Bates/5.11 style duty boots are usually nearing the end of their usability after 2-3 months in the field with me. Tom (forgot his handle) who used to work for White's recommended these Wolverine in another thread a while back, and no one else seems to talk about them. But in my mind are the best all around boot for detecting, machine/construction work, and the swiss army knife of footwear for people who like to wear boots instead of shoes daily.

Don't happen to have the vibrating stand for that stack you want to sell separately do you? I have a set of 8" sieves but no shaker.

Is the X Coil more sensitive than the smallest stock coil in mild to medium ground at sacrifice of reducing ground balancing in hot ground? Or is it about the same sensitivity as the stock coils in mild ground but also failing to ground balance in hot ground? I'm just kinda curious as a general point of interest if either of the 2nd gen PI's have any performance to be gained by coils at all, or if they are both already maxed out internally and coils are more just for geometry/size preference on both the 6000 and Axiom. I guess that is already clear for the 6000, wasn't sure if it was demonstrated for the Axiom or not yet?

Too cool, nice find. I've never seen something like that before and you are kinda in my neighborhood there on the Yellowstone too. If you find a name for it, post it back here? That would definitely be something to go hunting for the source! Almost wonder if it was agatized as part of a sea shell or something?

$1000 increase on the 15 year old 5000? Hilarious. That machine could sell for $1000 total and still make them a profit, not to mention it's patents are going to expire soon, if some haven't already. $1000 increase on the SDC isn't much better. Brutally greedy moves there. I'd guess the US price list won't be so shocking, but will be interesting to see.

Almost looks like a septarian nodule, but not quite. Maybe something similar though. It looks like calcite and siderite inside. Try scratching some of the whitish crystal to powder with a knife or nail, and put vinegar on the powder and see if it reacts (some crystalline structures can act to resist rapid acid reactions). Might try a stronger acid if you have one too, like hydrochloric, or maybe even CLR (or heat up the vinegar - acid is stronger the hotter it is). I suspect researching Pennsylvania specific geology would expose some suspects though, or maybe someone more familiar with East Coast geology would know specifics. Anything East of the Rockies is foreign to me.

What do you mean by "makes your hand feel funny"? Can you take a photo in focus on the mineral? Does it float in water? I'd guess based off no real data here something like pumice or maybe vermiculite (mineral, not expanded). Or maybe just some man-made cinder, clinker, or other slag type stuff.

For sure, I'm thinking about making something for the science center here too since they don't have a geology section. These would be more useful I think though if they were much larger, which is why I was thinking a CNC router might be better. I could make something like almost 2ftx4ft, which would be like a table top size. The 3D printed route though you can place colors at specific elevations, highlighting layers/topographic features, which you can't do with CNC, also the "topo lines" of relief are automatically added by slicer since it prints in layers. The ISU site does have a tiling feature which I haven't tried yet, so you can print and then glue multiple models together to make a larger model. I'll just answer your PM questions here in case others are curious - the size of the one I showed is roughly 4"x6", but I've made a few 6"x9" ones too (whatever the 160mm and 200mm ISU sizes work out to be). My printer bed maxes out at 10" but you need room for the extrusion tower if using multiple colors. They take anywhere from 2 to 10 hours to print depending on the topography/size. Way less time if single color, but I only did multi-color so far. Printer is a Bambu X1C w/AMS. It's overkill, a P1 would work equally well. The Bambu slicer does a crazy good job calculating infill - it's 10% infill using adaptive cubic. No supports. PLA for filament, PLA Carbon Fiber for the black parts (not shown on this print). 0.4mm nozzle, 0.3mm layer height (0.2 gives you more "topo lines" of relief, but slower). Ironing on top layer w/15% flow - but I'm getting top layer inconsistencies on the widest flat parts. Sometimes the slicer adds a raft or brim, other times it randomly doesn't. Definitely ways to improve, but I'm still learning, and those settings seem to produce a decent model. More infill would make a more weighty model, these are pretty light, but I set it low to reduce printing time.

Never know... I'm taking the first ship off this planet to Mars if such a thing happens before I die. 😄 Well good luck with the move, I know how that lab chaos goes... there is an underlying order to the chaos.

Where you guys moving to Jim? Just into town, or like to the tropics?

Thanks, and yeah I definitely threw in the towel on detecting for dollars, it was brief but fun. 😄 Gold is easy to get motivated by and to keep a guy walking/ATV'ing around all day though, it's not easy to wake up in the morning and be like "heck yeah, I wanna go find some phosphates!" day in and day out in the same way gold will keep calling a guy back daily, but some of those secondary discoveries actually are quite valuable. Nowadays I try to use gold exploration as an excuse to get out and see what other things I can find while I'm out there.

Agree with others. Another issue I found with the auto setting on the 6000 is that it appears to "remember" past auto adjustments beyond the point of time those adjustments were needed. And you have no way of knowing what it's currently set to. For instance if you hit some massive iron, leave your coil over it, it will back off the sensitivity. Sometimes it adjusts back quickly, other times it takes longer, and in one case where I was testing that phenomenon in air it simply never readjusted, even after turning off and back on! I was suspecting for a while it was doing this while detecting highly variable ground too - going from magnetite saturated soils to regular soil (stream banks/bottoms, etc), and the machine was desensitizing itself and staying that way. It also appears to adjust sensitivity based on varying EMI conditions too, but I'm not 100% positive on that. It's impossible to know what's happening, and it seems to have a mind of it's own, it's hard for me to get some measure of repeatability to say anything specific. There is no graphical readout displaying the current settings in Auto either, so who knows. And I alllllmost suspect it's doing this same adjusting to a lesser degree in Manual too. In fact, I was confident that was happening to some degree last year, but I forget exactly why I drew that conclusion now. I think this is part of what "Geosense" is. That said - I use the 6000 for 90% of my detecting now, and I'd say most of that time I still use Auto+. For general exploration it's just not required to try to catch everything, and most the targets are easy targets anyways. So, I just use the quietest, fastest method, and that is Auto+. If you are reworking patches or small areas though, Manual would be the way to go.

Haha nah, detecting not in the cards for me this winter, most my time is taken with non-gold mineral projects now. Rich Hill area just has some visually interesting topography and is somewhat recognizable. I actually already printed one of NNV but I put a bunch of super duper top secret info on it, so I didn't photo it. 😁 Problem I'm still trying to solve with the flatter areas like NNV is that sometimes the top surface gets little missed surface spots (you can see some in the bottom left of the photo above too). It appears to be a glitch with the printer since it only happens sometimes, but in any event the quality I'm not sure is high enough to sell unless I figured that out. But I think maybe a CNC version might be higher quality instead of 3D printed? That's next Christmas I guess haha. However, I used carbon fiber filament on one last night and it looks ultra finished like a cast model, and no missed spots, so maybe that's the trick. That filament is pricey though, and destroys nozzles too, especially over large prints that take 4-12 hours. On mine I put one color at the topmost shoreline of Lake Lahontan, so you can easily see where it was over a large area. Similarly on another map, I have at an elevation I've found via field work to host a paleoplacer which is mostly buried, but the colors show locally eroded places beneath that to ATV to and investigate if the river might be exposed there. Etc, etc. You can see this stuff on Google Earth with a lot of scanning/zooming, but it takes like 5 seconds to see it all at once on these models. Thanks, I'd love to be able to drape graphics over these. I just can't find a good way yet short of hand painting. In my mind I think it might be possible to hack a method by adding a final layer option into an open source slicer and have it draw "pixels" composed of 3 dots of varying size - red, green, and blue. Essentially - emulate a TV or monitor. This is beyond my skillset though, and I think would require a nozzle to change to something as small as possible. I have a simpler hack idea that might work, but it'd be basic paths/shapes only and not nice aerial imagery. But I have a million ideas for a million things and it's rare for me to ever get to actually finishing one so I'll probably never get to it. 😄

I bought myself an early Christmas present in order to make a few specialized brackets/clamps that I didn't want to pay to get manufactured. Finishing that, I decided to print myself a desk ornament. And here it is complete, I just spitballed the coloration at the point the old gravels stop and meet the granites. These models are pretty useful for estimating paleo surface and drainages and whatnot if you spend the time and get more accurate with the coloring and go to 4 colors. I'm still trying to work out a hack to get a topo map or a geologic map printing on the top surface, haven't figure out how yet though. These are good for scaling up to like 500 square miles and mapping specific elevations with different colors, and quick visualization of that sort of data, for exploration purposes. You can do similar in Google Earth but it's plane feature in 3D view is buggy and shifts heights, which has caused me to unknowingly miss some areas on aerial research. Also, there is just something more intuitive about having the physical model in hand and seeing the topographic relation of all the terrain. You can make your own .STL's from DEM data for any location in the world here: https://touchterrain.geol.iastate.edu/

Re-read my post. A person doesn't use the kind of tools I'm talking about for finding nuggets directly. You use large scale, low resolution tools to cover large swaths of land to find indicators, then go in with a 6000 or 7000 and do the higher resolution work. And not everywhere is the Sierras. I posted the STMR only as an example that Minelab is working on stuff other than coil on a stick paradigms, things which over the last few years now might be adaptable to something more mobile like drone whereas not long ago it was thought impossible. GPR already is being used on drones. Other stuff too. If they have the bulk designed for military applications, my point is they might be able to do some sort of drone based consumer product as well. There are tons of examples you can use this equipment to find nuggets by proxy, some of which I'm not at liberty to disclose at the moment. But for example you can use drone mounted GPR to search for buried paleoplacer and paleoriver channels (you are finding the gravel/boulders, not the nuggets), then use that map to go in with a detector or even an excavator. Saving years of boots on the ground surveying/test holes/exploration. Similar techniques abound with other sensor arrays (spectral, radiation, magnetic, etc) which a creative and knowledgable prospector can apply in new ways. You can use these survey techniques to find gold, or almost any other mineral, limited only by your creativity and ability to find new ways to correlated specific types of survey data to indicators or minerals of interest. I'm not guessing, I'm saying this based on real experience, most of which unfortunately at the moment is under NDA but I may detail further in the future if I can. This is the direction the future of general prospecting is going. Most people here think detectors have reached maturity - I'm saying with first hand experience that there are still ways to find both more gold as well as other minerals with some of this tech that is now available. If Minelab is charging pro prices and marketing as pro equipment, I'd like to see them offer some of these at a consumer level now. Those who just want to "swing and hike" are free to do so in any event with what exists already.