jasong

Mine wouldn't even initialize or work when I got it, it'd turn on but no detect or only detect randomly. Occasionally if I tapped it against a hard surface, or put the battery out and then back in it would start, and then inevitably stop working again after 5 or 10 seconds even though the power stayed on. After a day or two of doing that it kinda started "working". In the time I had it "working" it still barely worked. Falsed constantly set to any sensitivity I would consider remotely useful, and would need to be oriented perfectly straight, which is useless for working bedrock, wash sides, or really anywhere. Sometimes it'd just flip out and go crazy and I'd have to pull the battery out to stop it. I PM'ed Simon at the time since he buys all kinds of stuff just to see if he had the same experience. He bought a Pro Find that day just to see since he didn't have one, which is what later started his big pinpointer thread. He had the same results as I had. He said his dealer told him many of those are returned with the same result. The two other people I know with a Pro Find said the same problems, and both returned them. It's kiiiiiinda useable if you really baby it and go slow and low sensitivity and keep it vertical. But it's incredibly frustrating to use, incredibly slow, and better to not use a pinpointer at all in that case IMO. Whereas the Garrett just works. Quick, done. When I say it's garbage, I mean if I could not have returned it I literally would have thrown it away, it was totally useless to me and I would not feel right reselling it used. I seriously cannot tell the difference between a working and broken unit, even now. It's far below Minelab standards IMO. 7 years ago they might have had a different one or different manufacturing, the one I used was the Pro Find 35 and it was about 8 months ago.

That's cool, I saw a similar one except it was on a forum back in 2003 or so that dealt with building coilguns and railguns and a guy posted a SEM DIY tutorial. These newer ones look like better designs, and easier. I actually have most the stuff in the SEM guide other than the HV Arduino shield, I even have that finite element analysis program they are using, it's not really needed though. I've been thinking about making videos again except not prospecting/detecting since so many people are making those nowadays. I thought it'd be fun to build amazing stuff like this that few have heard of, out of stuff laying around. My first project is going to be building a laser out of common household trash I find laying around McGuyver style (semi cheating since I've done this before out of 50% trash basically so I have a rough idea ahead of time what to look for), then I might look at a microscope. Those crystalline gold STM photos are cool. I wonder if cryptocrystalline structure pattern analysis could be used to track/match placer gold to it's lode source. I don't think anyone has ever studied that, mostly they just do elemental fingerprinting.

I've been thinking about trying to build a homebrew scanning electron microscope for like 15 years. One of those things that will probably always be a month off in the horizon and never get around to though. Like cleaning out my garage. I was in school in the early 2000's and even then XRF's were totally beyond the range of affordability even for the university so we never could play with them, though we did have a SEM which was cool. The last 5 years or so have really brought units that could be used for prospecting onto the used market finally. It really feels like a Star Trek tri-corder type device to me in many ways, sorta unreal. Discrim only works to a whopping 1/100th of a inch or so though unfortunately on the GPXRF 8000.

XRF's hold sort a mysterious place on the shelf of semi-unobtainable prospecting equipment. 99% of prospectors don't need one. Maybe this post will help clear up some of mystery around these devices, and show where they can actually be worth the outlay of capital. And why for almost all recreational/hobby prospectors, they are not worth the money. What does an XRF do? In very simple terms you point it at an object and it will tell you what elements are in that object. More on this, and why it isn't this simple, momentarily... After sometime over 5 years of searching, I was finally able to find a used XRF I could afford to finance recently. These are not tools for recreation. They are expensive and require understanding how they work, what tasks you need to accomplish, and understanding the limits of XRF. The trick with these units is to find one with the proper calibrations already installed as they can be many thousands of dollars to send to the manufacturer to get configured correctly for mining/prospecting uses and to add/subtract elements or to calibrate for certain matrixes (silicates/iron/etc). X ray tubes and X ray detectors are about $6k each to replace, and recalibrations are about $1500 a pop, so even maintenance is crazy expensive. It's a tool you need be certain you need or can put to good use before buying one. And buying used, it's probably best to find one with as few hours use as possible to delay the inevitable tube replacement, as well as with a recent calibration certificate. My unit is an XMET 7500 made by Oxford (now Hitachi). The more common units people generally see are the Olympus and Niton guns. This unit has basically every mining calibration Oxford offered on it in addition to soil and other specialized mining related modes, which is very valuable and very useful for prospecting. It also detects down to magnesium without any fancy helium purge techniques. The guns sold on ebay with only alloy calibrations are pretty useless for prospecting without spending a lot of $$$ on additional calibrations. Some other things to consider are the machines themselves vary greatly between model numbers and some models may be unsuitable for specific uses in prospecting. A few things to educate yourself on are: Beam energy and detector type (determines if certain elements can be detected at all, and how accurately) Electrode composition (Gold electrodes have lower sensitivity to gold in ores, for instance) Calibration to light elements, or ability to detect certain elements I don't think an XRF is particularly useful for people who are only looking for gold. Due to the electrode limitations, the PPM minimum to detect gold in ores can often be above what would be an economic (and thus desirable) concentration in gold ores. But, looking for tracer elements (stuff like Pb, Cu, As, Zn, etc) can be quite useful. It can also help outline buried ore bodies which can then be explored mechanically via drilling or other methods. For prospectors branching out beyond just gold however, an XRF can be even more useful. And that's when one needs to understand the elemental limitations and what your application specific uses are. Any affordable XRF today will not detect lighter elements than magnesium. Some will detect to magnesium, but then do not contain calibrations to allow it (extra $$) and some require helium purging to measure light elements. Elements like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and sodium are very common "rock building" elements. But XRF readings will lack these measurements. So, when a looking at a rock your readings will often give fractional (less than 100%) results. This is why - the missing mass is tied up in atoms lighter than magnesium. Fortuantely, a lot of common rock types have unique fingerprints still in elements such as Mg, Al, Si, P, S, Cl, K, Ca, and Fe. But some don't. This is why it's important to understand what you are looking for first in the field, and then find a tool that is going to match your needs. Further, a lot of minerals in certain locations but not other locations will also have further fingerprints in other elements such as Cr, Co, Mo, Nb, certain compositions of rare earths, etc. To make it more complex (this part took me a while to wrap my head around), each calibration within the machine may or may not be configured for some of these elements - even if they are within the range of detection of the machine! Like, an alloy calibration will have little use for silicon or calcium. Conversely, a mining calibration without magnesium or calcium may be next to useless depending what you are looking for. Of course, it costs extra money to add elements and even if you have for instance a precious metals calibration that includes platinum, the mining mode may not itself include platinum and that's more $. That is why the matrix matters, each mode can be calibrated to a specific matrix. Like mining modes are generally going to assume that the sample is mostly silicon, whereas precious metals mode might assume the only things that exist in the universe are metals. So if you analyze solid metal with mining mode it may misidentify elements thinking they have to be metals when they aren't, same as if you analyzed a piece of gold ore in precious metals mode where it will try to assign certain non-metallic spectra in the ore to something like gold or platinum, giving you false positives. This is why calibrations available and elements assigned to that calibration is so very important when it comes to XRF and accurate results. Why else is XRF bad for gold-specific uses? (I emphasized this because this is primarily a gold prospecting site, even though I prospect for many other things myself). First one needs to understand how XRF works - simply put it kicks a few electrons out of a few different orbitals around an atom at discrete energy intervals (these are spectral "lines"). When another electron falls into the empty orbital to replace the vacancy, another X Ray is emitted at this discreet energy. Unfortunately, some elements have some very close to identical spectral lines. Look here at some lighter elements and see the overlaps on this visible spectra chart that we use to ID elements in stars? Some might be familiar with these from astronomy or high school. Well, the same happens in the X Ray realm. This is coincidentally why ionized gases look a certain color to us and how "neon" signs can be different colors (different elements inside the tubes). The same thing happens in the X ray spectrum, just not visible to our eyes. Except when the X ray spectra is reaaaaaaally crowded around the gold lines. Making it hard for specific ID's when other elements with similar lines are also present in ore, and unfortunately some of the elements are also commonly found with and around gold mineralization. Combine this with the anodes on many affordable XRF's being gold which itself interferes with really precise Au measurements, and you can see why an XRF isn't the best tool for specifically gold prospecting. Here is an actual XRF spectrum. You can see how very common accessory gold ore elements populate and crowd the gold spectral lines at various orbitals. And also how you might be missing critical lines if your X ray tube only goes to say 15kEV instead of 40kEV (EV stands for electron-volts), you might miss some Ag, Ru, Cd, or Zr fingerprints in this specific case. Now notice how iron stands all alone? That's why some elements (iron) are easier for an XRF to ID than others like gold. So for some such tracer elements in soils and ore, and identifying certain minerals which really can only be accurately identified via spectroscopy or thin sections as for some gems, an XRF can save months of time and thousands of dollars for in field qualitative assays to do first stage determinations, ie, wether a resource is simply present or not, ignoring actual concentrations. This is why it's so important for anyone considering one of these units to know exactly what they are looking for first, to know the limitations of XRF, and to know if a unit will meet their application specific needs. Almost every company I spoke with had a story about a prospector, or even a few cases some junior mining companies, who purchased an expensive unit only to find it wouldn't work at all for what they needed to do. So hopefully this clears up a little mystery about XRF's and maybe saves someone from making an expensive $15k mistake. I am by no means an XRF expert and everything I know is just self taught. So if I've included an inaccuracy then please correct me. This is not intended to be definitive, but just to share what I've learned over the years in a few pages of simpler to understand jargon for those prospectors interested in these devices. More later with some actual measurements...

Not sure what coil you are using most these days, but with the 17" I have to have my pointer at shoulder height with the pinpointer hanging over my shoulder and behind my back to not interfere. So the way it works is I grab the pinpointer from behind my armpit basically, then just let go when I'm done and it retracts back. It's attached to the top d-ring on my shoulder strap and naturally hangs on my shoulder blade/back more or less. I tried the Minelab Pro Find - which is supposed to not interfere with the GPZ when off by disconnecting the loop to avoid inductive responses on the GPZ - with no luck. That pointer is garbage and I have to assume Minelab doesn't actually manufacture them because it's beneath their usual standards. I have a Nokta pointer that is ok but has issues and I retired it. The best pointer I have is the Garrett AT Pro Pointer, and I just bought a 2nd one since I've almost worn through the plastic on my old unit. But it will interfere with the GPZ when too close, which is frustrating. Even at shoulder height with the 17" coil I can hear it with each left swing if I leave it on my chest instead of on my back. The Garrett is about the best around when it comes to depth and sensitivity to tiny bits. But due to the interference, I only use it when I'm working bedrock, in very deep areas, or around delicate specimen type gold that I don't want to risk damage, and unclip it for normal detecting. I really wish a manufacturer would make a pinpointer that doesn't interfere with the GPZ when off because then it could mount it in more accessible places.

These work pretty well for keeping track of pinpointers, $10. It auto retracts 4ft so keeps the pinpointer up high at the top of the backpack shoulder strap for running bigger coils, but long enough to get into 2+ft deep holes when kneeling down and digging. Strap is kevlar, hasn't broken on me after 3 years of field use, I just bought another one last week to put on a new pinpointer. Janitor tech for the win.

I don't want to derail the 6000 stuff so I will make it's own post when I get some time on it. XMET 7500 with a lot of mining calibrations installed. It was priced low enough I thought it might have been a scam, but it wasn't! Cheap enough I could put it on my CC like I was getting close to doing with a 6000.

The one Middle East dealer guy who made one of the early 6000 release videos is now saying it will be sold for $5500, at his store I presume. So, actually cheaper in the Middle East than the USA it seems? And will be released "starting sale beginning of 4" which I assume means at the beginning of April over there in the UAE? Translate isn't too clear. I'm dumb and I can't figure out how to direct link a FB post since I just started a bogus account to browse for 6000 info recently and never use Facebook. But it's this guy's page, post on March 21st. https://www.facebook.com/Albayati.gold/ Anyways, I think I decided against a 6000 myself today and I'll just see how it does in the field. Kinda strange to not be an early adopter on something now. But I found an awesome deal on an XRF and it'll be more useful to me. So, good luck to all buying one, and looking forward to seeing the impending micro-nug Armageddon in the field.

Look inside the 5000, 6000, and 7000. There is no effort at all to design for drops, such as shock absorption. Even just $0.25 rubber standoffs to isolate the circuitry from the exterior housing are not used at all. The circuit boards themselves do not contain anything particularly delicate or expensive. It appears the design philosophy is simply let it break and because it's cheap enough to put a new board in to fix it. It was brought up that the 6000 uses more delicate electronics than other stuff which is drop rated, but I cannot see this as the being the case from what components are visible in the FCC docs. But I didn't feel it was particularly important to press the issue. Reason I'm bringing it up again is I just happened to see this post right now, after earlier today reading and watching documentation on a much, much more delicate and sensitive device - the X-Met 8000 XRF gun. It's drop rated for 6ft though, repeatedly. And then just now I got my mail and received a thermal imaging camera (again, more delicate than a metal detector) and saw that it was also drop rated for 6ft as I was reading the specs. I felt as if it was kinda implied I (or others) was ridiculous for saying I drop my GPZ from a foot or two commonly as I dig hundreds of holes a day and walk up and down steep, uneven terrain, canyons, etc where such drops should be expected daily. But I do not feel it's ridiculous at all to expect a top level metal detector - intended as a field tool in rugged terrain - to be drop rated for minimum 2 feet, and should be more like 6ft. If they can do it with a tightly calibrated XRF gun containing a glass Xray tube and a $6000 SDD that is so sensitive that it requires yearly calibration in a lab, or with my laptop, phone, or with a thermal imaging camera, they can do it with a metal detector and it's not ridiculous or strange at all to expect it IMO. People are not expecting enough if they think it's normal for a metal detector to break if you drop it a foot or two.

Hmm. I'll sell Gold Basin meteorites for $1/gram to anyone who buys 500 grams or more at a time. So, there's a real value, right here right now.

These Easy Experts™ forgot their picks.

That's the first PI I've ever seen advertise an "operating frequency" as a specification of interest.

Plus, a house you can sell tax free after you've lived in it for 2 years. Gold has a 28% capital asset tax after 1 year, wether it's coins or nuggets. It's ineligible for the 15% long term capital gain tax. Which is another reason I find gold to be a poor investment and not a particularly effective inflation hedge. It's more effective to sell it when you find it and thus tax it as ordinary income, or operate prospecting as a business, write off tools like detectors as a business expense, and then use gold to pay down debt on prospecting tools/equipment or buy real estate.

South Dakota was the first place I found a piece of gold big enough I could grab with my fingers. There used to be to a skatepark there right in Deadwood, and Whitewood Creek flows behind it with a little concrete path next to it. I used a rock hammer, prybars, and chisels to bust up the shale bedrock and panned out a good bit of gold and mercury. A guy I met there had quite a few pickers and nuggets from right in town. Not sure if the city allows that still or not, but they used to and there was an officer there who'd walk by and was always curious what I found. I'm sure there are good places to detect in the Black Hills. I kept running into private land and claims everywhere I really wanted to go so I didn't spend much time there. Also ran into a place that felt a little too Deliverance-y for my comfort. The guy I prospected with occasionally up there had a 1 ton boulder fall on his leg and trap him for 2 days on the GPAA claim outside Deadwood and neither of us ever really went back after that. I've found some so so flour gold on the Dolores River in UT by the Colorado border, but no nuggets. There are pickers on Wilson Mesa in the La Sals, gold was better staying in Colorado though so I didn't spend much time there. Most the Utah gold production comes as a byproduct of copper mining I believe.

Do we know yet what these 6000 coils weigh? I might have missed it in the flurry of info. It's the coil weight, not the machine weight, that really wears the arm down in my experience. If this machine weighs the same or similar as a 5000 and the coils weigh the same as an 11" Commander, then I am wondering how exactly people who required a bungee on the 5000 are going to be swinging this all day with no bungee? The coils must be quite a bit lighter?

True believers could always lend a hand in the minefields of Angola or Cambodia. Minelab does.

I'm guessing asking in person is the only real way to have success. A lot of what I did was via mail or over the phone since I was working every day in the oilfield and couldn't travel except on days off. But on the selling and losing permission thing - one thing I've noticed that is happening now which wasn't happening anywhere close to as much 10-15 years ago due to the country demographics/age is a ton of land is getting inherited down and then later sold. I see a lot of land owned by kids now who will never see or even visit the land (by kids I mean people in their 40's/50's now but children of the owners who wouldn't give permission). So it's worth the time to pursue permissions again probably.

Outside CA and AK, there some likely very productive dredge tailings around the Rockies. Unfortunately all of them I've looked into have either strange city/county ownership issues or are privately owned (or claimed since before I was born). My success rate getting permission to detect the private ones here in the Rockies? 0%. Even when I first started and literally offered to give them 100% of the gold just so I could make sure I was learning on a place I knew there was a chance of nuggets existing...nope. It was the same when I lived in Oregon, I had zero success getting any permissions for places to learn to prospect or detect for gold. The places that do grant permission seem to be "already granted out" to older prospectors, and won't give any new permissions. Good luck though, may your luck be infinitely better than mine was. I gave up, realized the chances of me prospecting anywhere close to home were basically zero, and went to the desert where no one would bother me and no permission required.

Gold is worth about the same today as it was worth 10 years ago when I started selling everything I found, it was $1400ish then and about 1700ish now. Wasn't worth holding. Meanwhile the S&P 500 is up almost quadruple and home prices in some areas (Vegas, Phoenix, etc) have quadrupled or quintupled since 2010 or so when houses were selling for $75k are now selling for $300k+. I've watch land prices around places like Prescott go from $40k to $300k over that same roughly decade period too. Gold is a pretty poor investment IMO. We'll see what the future holds I guess.

Yep for sure, I get my CLR up to boiling and it speeds up the caliche removal on nuggets by like 10x. I'll dump hydrochloric into a black bucket and let it sit in the sun for various rock/gem specimens too. Hmm well since I can't find any record of anyone trying boiling lye, I might give it a try this summer when I can do it outside. I'm curious if it leaves a different look/finish to the quartz than HF does? And just to be clear, I'm not recommending this to any of the general public reading this thread. Safety issues just as bad as HF, or worse than diluted stuff like Whink. Looking forward to your next installment of photos. Seeing specimens exposed reminds me of going into older houses and stripping away 100 years of wallpaper and linoleum and exposing the original beauty, it's a fun process to watch.

I'd say easily 75% of the younger people who asked me for detector advice when I was making videos were asking about sub-$1000 range machines. It's easy to see how someone who finds themselves in that price range but then convinces themselves that they want to go all in on prospecting and get a 7000 or 6000 will be scrimping to save $800 or $1800 wherever they can. I used to be the youngest on the forums, but now I'm sort of in the middle. So I see and hear things from the young and old crowd. I am constantly amazed at the number of older people I meet in the field who are millionaires because they just sold a house in California for $1.2 million which they bought for $75k or something in 1990. I hear this story over and over every year I go to the field and start talking to the older guys around me. Unfortunately, for people my generation and younger we don't have that luxury. Most people my age were born too late to get the cheap housing, got hit by 2 recessions and layoff and real estate busts (and now a pandemic) during our prime working years when our parents had stable economies and affordable housing, and as a result almost no one I know even owns a house yet, into middle age, and probably never will barring inheritence or a family that helps out. These aren't lazy or uneducated people, most my friends have degrees in engineering, science, nursing, etc. So money tends to mean different things for different people I suppose. Some might find it ridiculous that a person like me scrimps for $1000. And I assure these people that I find it every bit as equally ridiculous when I see people with too much money spending $10,000 on a metal detector who need basic instruction on where to even start using such a machine. You can find a zero nuggets equally as well with a $800 detector as you can with a $10k detector. If you need advice on where to even begin hunting then starting with anything other than the $800 detector seems incredibly wasteful and poor financial planning to me. Learn to prospect first, you can do that with any detector, and you aren't going to learn that in a 1 to 3 day class, it takes years or a decade of boots on the ground to really learn to prospect, and to get to the point where (IMO) you really need a machine like a 6000 or 7000. Most people I've met who started from day 1 by being pointed to places to go have almost zero ability to prospect or find their own places even if they've been at it for a year or a decade. Knowing how to use a machine and knowing how to prospect are 2 different things. Unless you have someone to keep showing you new areas to go to, you run out eventually, as is the case with a large number of people I meet in the field who struggle to find even a 1/2 or 1 ounce a year now even with a 7000. So. It's all relative to who you are and the times in which you were born into I think.

Technically a strong base should dissolve quartz just like a specific acid like HF. Not saying anyone should try this, but scientifically speaking there is no reason why lye (sodium hydroxide) or maybe even potash heated up to a liquid wouldn't dissolve quartz too since they will rapidly dissolve glass when heated. There may be a chance it'd react with the silver/copper in the gold alloy though? Maybe a good reason no one ever talks about speci prep with bases, or maybe not. Glenn, you or anyone else ever tried this?

Sell, use the money to buy land or pay off a bit of bills/debt/house.

When I prospect an area, I draw little polygons around every wash I can see on Google Earth and then import that into BackCountry Navigator. At the end of the day I can see from my recorded tracks if I made it into every polygon (wash) that exists or if I need to track back and hit something. Then I'll annotate each wash polygon in Google Earth with basic notes at the end of each day with basic information like nugget weights/locations, general geology, and trash levels. Just one method to make sure all the washes are checked off the list. It's surprising how easy it is to miss some of them in rough country. And then when revisiting with new equipment years down the road it's easy to figure out which washes to go back to in order to concentrate on the best ones or the ones that had the deepest/smallest/whatever nuggets I am testing for.

That was how Minelab chose to let the early release testers talk to the public for the first time?