jasong

That white could be caliche recementing old fractures - that gneiss is quite fractured everywhere. Or it could just be something like chemical weathering of the consitutent feldspars. Will be interesting to see what you get. Good luck!

Nice wisdom, and you find some of the most unique looking nuggets man, righteous find.

I'm with Redz too, can't tell you how many times I've thought I was in solid rock just to hike the 5ft bar and chisel in and find a little nuggie in some tiny crack that was resealed up with caliche or something. That kind of rock is what I'd go after with the cold chisel and 2lb hammer myself, especially if the pointer is already gettng the target, chisel a radius around it and then flake it off chunk by chunk and rescan the hole and the flake with the pointer. Last time I did that in Wyoming it was an 1860's bullet. I still swear there was no crack for it to have gotten in there, but...

Here is an example of what happens when you use too small of wedges and go perpindicular to the foliation of the rock, so to speak rather than along the natural grain/fracture planes (with this rock it may not be exactly the right term). My first time trying it with 1/2" wedges. This was with jade though, notoriously tough rock. Wedges get stuck and just small pressure flaking on the surface. It's possible to get them back out once they bottom out, but I just kept it as a reminder to myself of what not to do. 😄

I use 5/8" for stuff like that and 3/4" to break boulders in half, depends on how competent your rock is. You don't want your tools to get stuck in the rock without it fracturing. So I like having plenty of length on the wedges personally. If you are trying to basically pop off a chunk, drill your holes at angles so that the force of the wedge presses both back against the rock wall and out into open air so the rock has somewhere to flake off/move into. Try to find the natural foliation of the rock and use that to your advantage. Gneisses will have some you can use as long as they aren't too strongly folded/deformed.

I think it would be cheaper to make an updated machine based on the 4500 (or base it off the 6000 instead) and offload much of the signal processing to firmware these days. Modern components, less noise, more configurability, faster processing. It's pretty affordable to get custom circuit boards manufactured these days, even 1-offs, in bulk that much more so. If I had to guess I would say manufacturing old 4500's with old design and components would cost a fair bit more than manufacturing something new, faster, and better with newer DSP's, etc.

The Czur Shine is working well, but I can't seem to get it to consistently eliminate the finger cots that are used to hold the pages flat, and the page curve removal feature does not seem to be as effective as advertised. The foot switch does speed things up though a lot, and the resolution is pretty good. For the highest quality scans, the scanners you mention where you cut the magazine spine I think may be the way to go. But due to ongoing health bills and my primary source of income going kaput, I need to resell any magazines I bought which means they have to stay intact, so for these reasons I decided to go with this style scanner. If I can determine they are public domain for sure, then I will probably build some kind of searchable database with limited free access, and then some inexpensive unlimited access download or other type of full access to try to recoup some of the costs and time. I am already at 7.5GB or so and only at maybe 125 scanned in, so the bandwidth would be expensive and I've have to charge to pay for it. But it'll be a while I think, the time to scan these is significantly longer than I expected - I'm not very good at repetitive tasks so I lose interest quickly, I can do about 5 or 6 and then have to do something else for a while. 😁 And I have many hundreds of these... Hmm dang yeah, wish I was doing this sooner and saw your post on all the mags you had. I suspect you had quite a few that I don't have and may never find, I have more or less exhausted the large lots for sale now and my funds are exhausted too. The treasure magazines woulda been pretty interesting to have too, I intend to expand into stuff like that if I can find it. All of this type of knowledge in a searchable database would be a significant resource. I intend to slowly create a massive database of knowledge as my resources allow, the kind of stuff that doesn't tend to stick around on the internet or never was published.

No, I have a CZUR Shine book scanner. It does much the same thing. However, I think my own image to text code probably does a better job. However, once I'm done scanning I plan on doing some experiments to see which OCR is the most accurate, the scanner's, Adobe's, my own, etc... Just glancing through articles some of these just have some random stuff I never would have considered. Qualitiative assay-substitute with RADAR? Eh, ok... But once I saw the general idea they put forward, I understood what they were getting at though. And today (that article was in the 70's I think) everyone has a cheapo little device that are remarkably similar to high power RADAR transmitters in terms of high power energy in wave guides or similar confinement, we call them microwaves. And so, another experiment is born... 😁

From what I can tell, many of these issues up until some date in the 90's (I forget when exactly, I'll have to look it up again) may be in the public domain because they never claimed copyright or included the copyright symbol as the law required, and I don't see a record of them renewing the default copyright by hand in the books of record either. But my attempts to contact the past and current owners to inquire about the status of these older copyrights and to determine if my reading of the ownership is incorrect or not, has been futile so far. If they are public domain now up to a certain date then I would host and provide access to them. I am scanning both into PDF and jpg, and from the jpgs I already made a Python script to batch run OCR on it and make a complete searchable text database of every issue, which I fully intend to do for my own use anyways. Scanning these takes quite a large amount of repetitive work though, it's been more of a task than I predicted. Knowledge and data are definitely power in the prospecting/exploration world though, so it's worth it.

Thanks, I appreciate it! 👍PM sent.

Hi, yes that is one I'm missing. But the cost of shipping now makes it infeasible to trade or buy single issues unfortunately. 👍

I didn't have any luck getting anyone to trade or sell me any missing issues. But I was able to buy enough issues on Ebay to piece together a semi comprehensive collection spanning 1970 to current (an updated list is in my first post). I am still looking for various issues to fill in what's missing. I am slowly listing mine for resale on Ebay in larger lots as I scan them in now. The digital library was my goal. If any forum member wants to create their own collection of hard copies, I will give you a better deal than Ebay (I am USMiner on there if you want to browse) and combine shipping cheaply with media mail too. Just throwing this out there, if no interest in another week then this can probably just be deleted.

posted this response by accident, meant to update the first post.

I didn't get his number...? I did just get a big lot of 1970's issues though, probably half+ the decade's issues in total. If anyone is interested in trading for issues from this era, the ones I am principally missing are 2000-2010 stuff I think, along with the 90's ones listed above. I thought I had multiple boxes of the 2000-2010's stuff from my own subscriptions, but it either got stolen with the rest of my mining stuff in AZ or misplaced during my many relocations.

Pretty cool, that's beyond just DIY that these projects often are, it actually had a lot of thought and work put into it. That pump housing and impeller design is sharp. Love that we can do stuff like this with modern tools today. Wish he woulda shown it at work in the stream though. One thing I run into with durability of 3d printed parts is it's really hard to print stuff like tube/elongated things because they come apart at the layer lines. I'd be curious what the durability of the subsurface housing and nozzle is like. I use carbon fiber nylon for my stuff, sounds like that's what he's using too. It's pretty burly, but still has layer line adhesion issues under force.