jasong

Yep, exactly.

They didn't bother posting it to the US Minelab site. You can only get it on the AUS site with an AUS IP address. It's under the "updates" tab on the 6000 page there. The US site doesn't even have an "updates" tab for the 6000. At least, I assume it's still there, I saw it myself posted by using an Australian web proxy, but that proxy has stopped working for Minelab's site now so I can't check anymore.

Too many. The 14x13 without shaft I believe is 1250 grams or so. With the shaft I think it was 1360 grams, so you could subtract the shaft weight from that if you want it exactly. I don't have the 19", but online it gives the weight as 4.03lbs - or 1828 grams. It doesn't say if that's with or without the shaft, but I assume it's without the shaft.

Still no US fix availability on the website. Any dealers out there heard anything about when the fix is going to be offered in the US? Or, if we send a machine in, can we just get a newer fixed machine exchanged for it, or will it be a waste of a month with them just sending the same old machine back? Can we at least get a serial # checker or range to verify in the US what machines are affected?

Good information and demonstration of the strengths weaknesses of different machines. People struggling to make consistent finds and looking to improve could learn a lot from information like this, understanding the relative performance of the various machines better. Basically any time I get a new detector I do almost exactly what you are doing here to see how it's performing relative to my older machines on a range of targets, and combination of targets/hotrocks and gold/trash at various depths in the grounds I am planning to work, with just about every combination of settings. I do that before actually swinging for gold, just so I know first where/how to best use new equipment and what it might be missing. On a separate note, are you guys filming this with an entire laptop instead of cell/cam? Get 'er done any way you can, all for it!

Nice, that's basically acceptable living wages off working heavily flogged patches. Well, if you ignore the expenses of getting there first...

Hey David, I preordered one back in August, they never shipped it out though?

Garrett's Australian site (posted in that thread above by Geof_Junk) went from Sept to now saying Oct 2022. Their US site doesn't have any dates, and the dealer in my town said they haven't heard any updates from Garrett.

We got a guy for that.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here. But I think gold actually is still an inflation hedge and everything is still working as normal for the rest of the world. Just not in the US right now, because our currency is at historic levels of strength right now. IE - the rest of the world has much worse inflation than we do. Consider how strong the dollar has been against the Euro and Pound, here is a 1 year chart: Now look at the price of gold when priced in British Pounds - gold appears to have hedged against inflation nicely for Brits. Same with most of Europe, and Australia. Because gold has stayed more or less stable or gone down just slightly in USD, but the USD went way up compared to the pound and other currencies. So it depends on what lens one looks at gold through, it seems. As it stands now, it appears that even though US inflation is a major concern, it's a bigger concern almost everywhere else, and so for us - gold isn't hedging anything at the moment since our currency is so strong, relatively speaking. Which means it's been better to own US dollars than gold here lately. Also, in a global society with instant currency trading, gold no longer seems to be a hedge against inflation at a national level, it's more a multi-national inflation hedge now since one's own inflation rate doesn't matter but instead one's inflation rate compared to the rest of the world. Which brings up the question what exactly is the proper hedge against our local USD inflation on the smaller national (US) level now? Some commodity that isn't traded globally? Does it even exist? Real estate? Or, just owning USD is paradoxically a hedge against it's own inflation as long as it's better than the inflation elsewhere?

Ok, so it's still in space so not quite a meteorite technically speaking. First person view of the craft impacting directly into Dimorphos, I linked a few seconds before impact here. For those who don't know what this is - DART is NASA's test craft built to "Armageddon" an asteroid, which is to say it's meant to crash into an asteroid and divert it's course so that it won't catastrophically hit Earth and usher humans out like the dinosaurs. This is the kind of stuff I'm happy my tax dollars go to.

No, it's not the same thing as what you posted - look again.

Yep. Exactly what I've been saying for a while now too - that it wasn't just my machine but it must affect a lot of machines at once since I've noticed it on other machines I've run around/with too, even sometimes when the owners themselves didn't know what they were hearing. At least some aggravated people can stop inferring I was making something up now or saying I'm whining because they can't see it on their specific machine. I take a lot of pride in the accuracy of my field observations with regards to equipment and didn't much appreciate the inferrence that I was just whining or even lying about something that ML already knew was an issue. The 4500 upon first release had a recall to replace mainboards due stability issues, mine was one of them. ML was upfront about it and didn't hide the announcement in a place no one would find and half the world didn't even have access to, so when people reported problems with the 4500 they didn't look like pariahs. Would be nice to see them do the same with the 6000. Some (if not all?) US dealers aren't even aware of this fix yet and it's been out for a while.

I don't really like to talk about specific places I detect on forums, just brings too much of the wrong kind of attention to places. But so much of that area is private, state, or claimed that I guess it doesn't really hurt to say something here, it'd be difficult to prospect without knowing ranchers, getting a prospecting permit from the state, or running into that mining company's claims. Anyways, there were small nuggets and fine gold found on Crow Creek and it's forks going all the way into Cheyenne, reported all the way back to the days of the Transcontinental Railroad. A farmer used to find nuggets in his chicken's crops on one of the forks too. The propensity for poultry to peck up shiny things including nuggets, IMO was the likely origin of the "golden goose" myth, separately. Pretty much all of Wyoming is an intensely interesting area, geologically. The Wyoming Craton was basically it's own little subcontinent in the Archean times, is some of the oldest rock on Earth (some gneiss is 3.6 billion year old), so the suture zone where it long ago collided with the later rock that is now North America can host all nature of interesting mineralogical features. That mine is basically on or very near that suture zone. I believe some of the Montana mineralization is on that same suture zone as it extends north out of Wyoming too.

It's the first here in longer than I've been alive. Hopefully more projects to come too, Wyoming is a great state for mining. Lots of rare earth exploration going on right now too, plus a few large precious metals exploration projects in their infancy as well. Scottsdale Mint is opening up some kind of gold minting and crypto trading facility in Casper too. I believe they are minting a few dozen country's coinage, as well as a lot of raw gold/silver bullion for commodity and dealers. I'm pretty stoked to see that, going to have to visit them and see if they want to mint some coins or bars out of some of my native Wyoming gold.

Wow, that's one of the coolest nuggets I've ever seen!

Gold production still near all time highs plus the world's largest gold/copper mine (Oyu Tolgoi) about to open up, so lots of supply. Demand for gold jewelry going down as other metals come into popularity. Investments in gold is also decreasing both in banking and individual investors as more investment options are created - why own gold when you can own a mining ETF and diversify? Maybe some people put some of that money towards Bitcoin or real estate now, or other potential inflation hedges? And then we have Russia and China both possessing tons of gold to pivot from the dollar, and it's in the best interest of the West to make sure those holdings don't skyrocket in value and fund aggressions. Those are some of the major factors affecting downward prices near as I can tell, but man who knows the days.

Looks like slag and/or smelting glass to me. Maybe a piece of clinker brick in there too. IIRC, the green comes from fluxes that get oversaturated with Fe, reds were often Pb. Unevaporated zinc films gave opalescence. It's been a year since I was playing around with smelting, can't remember exactly. One photo (the one that appears copied from a webpage) is the only real looking rock to me, and it's some kind of sage green quartzite or grainy chert.

Unfortunately no yellow gold in these, just an unusual looking bookend or desk rock basically. These things come out of a deep marine shale that isn't really noted for any precious metals...but it is noted for black gold (oil).

Nothing of great value here, just something fun to do while taking a break from prepping a house to put siding up and paint. I knew that there was septarian nodules found in Wyoming and Utah, so last night I decided to do a bit of research and figure out where they might be coming from. It's been raining lately so I didn't want to make a long journey just to get stuck or not be able to get all the way to my destination, so I decided to just go right outside of town now that I knew what I was looking for and where they might be, geologically speaking. There were a couple areas that seemed like they'd host septarian right close in. Actually I was so close to town still that there were houses within sight! Yet this location seems to be entirely unknown and uncollected. In a few minutes I was able to locate some highly fractured septarians. A bit more poking around and I was able to find some nodule fragments that were competent enough to not fall apart entirely. I decided to dig into the fragments a bit more and came out with on larger, seemingly unfractured large chunk which I spent about 15 minutes digging out with my rock hammer. It's bigger than it looks, it's about 75lbs. I have a 3ft rock saw that is big enough to cut this one with, but it's not set up just yet as I've moved and need to fix my new place up first with water, a proper electrical outlet, etc. I'll cut it later on though, along with the first two pieces. The big one will be a mystery since it's so covered with dirt that I can't see what kind of veining or crystals it has in it through the grime yet. I love cutting rocks, every one is like a surprise inside, never know what you will get. I did cut some of the smaller hand sized fragments I found. Unfortunately, at this locality all the nodules are extremely fractured. Even some of the more compentent rock still displays small fractures inside when cut. So the specimens aren't the greatest, but still kinda cool. And it's like a 5 minute trip from town too. Anyways, this is what the smaller ones look like. I think the cutting oil vs using water to cut them turns the grayish limestone part darker than normal septarians. They'd probably look a bit lighter and more gray/less brown if polished. This one turned out pretty nice I think. I wish I would have cut it about 3/4" further into the center and exposed that calcite geode effect a bit more though. Cutting rocks is like my zen time, I like it a lot. There is a real bonsai type art to sizing up a rock, looking it over carefully, and figuring out exactly where to put the cut. I have a long way to go to reach master bonsai cutter level. Anyways, a bit of a change from ID requests. Figured I'd post some more everyday prospecting/rockhounding type stuff here, just stuff to keep an eye out for. Maybe someone will see this and recognize them in the rough while out on a hike now too, as they are definitely one of those rocks easy to walk right past but that can look really cool when cut.

Good luck, hopefully adventure and treasure await.

Could it be done in theory? Yes. Is it feasible for exploration? No. I want to cover a lot of ground and process a lot of dirt exploring, if I find a place where there is a good concentration of gems eventually, I'd probably try hauling water. I was using about 300 gallons per cubic yard when I hauled water into a pond in AZ for a gold operation before silting up. I've heard figures of 100 gallons per cubic yard recirculating, but that must be for clean gravel. That was a place I already knew where gold was and didn't have to set up/break down/move around, and I hauled 5000 gallons in at once. I'd never do that for exploration. Yep, actually it was easier/closer to get water in to places I was working in Arizona than it is to the places I want to explore in Wyoming. I agree, I think the classify method is the best bet/quickest/easiest now. I might just classify into labelled buckets and bags, and bring everything home with me. Of course last night and today we are getting rain and cold weather now...haha oh well. Not enough to make washes run, but enough to dampen all the dirt.

Working lamproites or kimberlites? For diamonds, my intention was to explore all those lamproites since they appear underexplored (also hence the total lack of water out there). Working wet is not an option to me. I hadn't, though Dan Hurd is one of the few prospecting channels I do occasionally watch. But he is on a river here. Working with water and gems is much easier. He's using a saruca basically, or in other words doing a sort of hand jigging similar to the process Off Grid posted, except with no machine. Also, in his case the sand is already filled with garnets in every handful. Some places I want to explore will be like 1/4 to 1/2 yard of dirt to maybe 1 gem, it's quite a bit harder to recover the latter vs the former, the lack of water makes it more so. Processing the amount of dirt I need to process would just require a crazy amount of water hauling if I did that in a tub, and the remoteness makes hauling water infeasible in any quantity. Wyoming is similar to Nevada in terms of remoteness of some areas, except often the roads are rougher/rockier since there is less "basin", and a lot of "range" (or rocky hills), comparitively.

Yep, read all of Hausel's stuff long ago. Definitely a lot of good information to get started. Most of what he wrote about was just field investigating stuff in the WSGS files or old various reports to sent to them though, near as I can tell, so I've found it's best just to locate those original reports directly and sometimes therein is information there which Hausel didn't publish, which leads to other things, which leads to other things, etc and few people have found that stuff. Here's some pale blue sapphire in vermiculte/mica that I discovered in situ in a place you won't find in any writings today. As far as I know, I'm the only person who has found this area in modern times, though there is an old prospect pit which appears to be from the 30's so I wasn't the first. This is mostly reaction rims, with small pale blue sapphires buried deep inside each one. You can only see the reaction rims in the photo mostly, it takes quite some work to get the sapphires out, and unfortunately they are usually fractured (much like the more well known red rubies of WY). I plan on working the dry washes under this deposit for placer sapphires to see if it's easier to recover a lot of them that way. So far nothing I would consider gem grade though as the Wyoming Craton contains among the oldest rock in the world and has undergone a substantial amount of both tectonic movement as well as various stages of metamorphism or just plain old chemical/weathering alteration for billions of years, and so a lot of stuff tends to change or get shattered unfortunately.

Hmm not a bad idea, yeah I'll see if he's come up with any interesting dry gizmos. I just ordered a wide array of 5 gallon classifiers so I can get an initial trip done as I'm rearing to go investigate some research right now, but this winter, a gem recovery building project sounds like a fun way to spend some time when snowed in. Like 20 years ago or whenever it was when I met you when we were all dredging, I found what I suspected to be a diamond. It came from another smaller tributary that I was test panning on my way back home though. It would scratch anything I could find and nothing would scratch it. That thing sat in the little change nook in my truck for years and years, kept meaning to get it tested. One day I realized it was just gone, couldn't find it anywhere, think it fell on the floor and I vacuumed it up. It haunts me to this day hahaha. I think it was actually sapphire though, not diamond, now that I've seen a lot more, but I'll never know.