jasong

If I take the middle carbon fiber shaft out there is often a powdery substance on it where the clamp holds the shaft. I think it's dust from either the clamp or the shaft being ground down from the twisting. It slowly gets easier and easier for the twist to happen and I think that is why - a thousandth of a mm every week or so getting ground off and decreasing the diameter of the shaft. When I first got my detector it seemed like I was correcting the twist 1 or 2 times a day, now it's maybe every 10 minutes. So, hopefully this post here can be used as reference that the problem existed at least for some of us basically out of the box. Because I have a feeling that eventually it'll get worn down enough that the shaft will not be held in at all, and it'll probably happen past my warranty phase as luck generally goes. So it's good to get it documented. Looks like from that presentation that they've done most their expected sales of the 7000 in Australia and the US and now they are concentrating on Africa. The engineering costs were not too out of this world from their graphs, and considering you can build entire computers on palm sized boards for $20 now I don't think the materials costs are much of the $10k equation either. Sounds like your explanation is probably right Rick.

Thanks Rob for the clarification. Maybe we'll still see one in the future. Sorry Klunker, I can't hear you over the sound of the ocean breaking at the resort vacation I just bought with your my credit card number. Dang I thought I was the only one, I'm glad someone else experiences this too. Well, not glad - but I stopped mentioning this because people seemed to think I was crazy and would tell me there is no way for the shaft to twist since it's keyed. But it does!

I love the balance of the Hermit Pick and it's scooping ability especially in holes with a smaller diameter than a pick head width. But it'll stab ya in the hip in a bloody way if you fall on it when its on your belt or pack. I have to carry an Apex with the 7000, but it's head is slightly too heavy and throws the balance off. Also as mentioned the Hermit Pick has no spot for magnets so you gotta weld a holder on and also the shovel part breaks and needs rewelded often. I prefer a 32" handle but that obviously depends a lot on a person's height. If you can design a hybrid between the two that is safely belt mountable, doesn't break, has magnets included, scoops like a Hermit, and has perfect balance then please take my money!

Gerry's Detectors announced the battery thing last week, and I read it on a forum somewhere else the same day but I can't remember where it was, I think it was one of the Aussie forums though. Maybe one of the dealers that browse this forum can comment on the battery thing with more info... I'd love to have a larger battery if this info is wrong but it doesn't sound like it is. I also tried to buy just a regular sized (not the CTX one) replacement battery last week along with a shipment of other stuff I ordered and it was still not available though, so even regular ones appear to be only sparsely available every now and then depending on the dealer at this point still.

I'm guessing a lot of the griping has quieted down because it's pretty much all been said and it sure seems like Minelab just doesn't care about consumer input on this particular detector to me. But if criticism is invited, then this is my thing: Each subsequent GPX release produced a machine that completely replaced the previous one. Even though plenty of people still say their SD's, 3500's, and 4500's are every bit as good (or better) as a 5000 - I don't buy it. I've used (almost) every one of those machines and its just not true unless you are only detecting in one very specific set of conditions. If I own a 5000 and a 4500 there is no reason I'd keep swinging the 45. Objectively speaking, the 5000 is much more versatile and is a complete replacement for the 45, and the 45 is a complete replacement for the 4000/3500 and so on. The thing is, the 7000 at this point in time will not completely replace my GPX, and for that reason alone I don't think the controversy is over. Most people who spend enough time with the 7000 to become proficient with it I think will agree it is the most powerful detector on the market, but while each previous GPX model had an increase in versatility, the GPZ is to me less versatile than its predecessors. I can cover 3x more ground while patch hunting with the 45 and I spend probably 75% of my time doing that so I am still swinging the 45 constantly. I also don't have to treat my 45 like a princess. I seriously fear for my investment if i take the 7000 anywhere rough. Yes, I miss some gold that only the 7000 will hear, but $/time it's just not worth it unless I know I am in an area where most of the gold is specimen, crystalline, or extremely sharp/spongy edged. This makes up a small portion of my personal detecting regimen. The 7000 requires about a 50% slower sweep speed to be thorough, and even if I wanted to go faster the coil gives me tennis elbow if I swing to fast just from the sheer momentum of stopping and starting the sweep with the same gusto as you would do with say a 17x11 on a GPX. It's the side to side momentum and not the weight that is a problem for me. Most of the other problems have been discussed ad infinitum. For me the 3 big ones are that it's hugely, offensively overpriced, it's meant to be a professional tool but is built like a toy almost everywhere except the upper carbon fiber shaft, and to me it seems like ML released a fancy new flagship and then more or less abandoned it. I guess I have a 4th gripe too and that is that ML couldn't be bothered to include detector covers, coil covers, an extra battery, or a hardshell case on the most expensive consumer detector in the world - these are things you often find on even mid level products from detectors to tablets, but its not really a game changer like the first 3. On the abandoment though for instance, we've heard literally nothing about coils and it's 6 months in. They just announced they wouldn't produce a larger capacity battery. It's been near to completely impossible to get accesories. It appears the machine is designed for firmware updates, and its obvious to me that there are many areas they could easily improve with a simple update, yet nothing. Not even an announcement saying they are willing or able to pursue firmware updates. Hell, it took multiple months of pleading and grovelling just to get a $5 ferrite ring sent out to me, and only then because a country level manager got involved. Even if the 7000 was a complete replacement for the 5000 I'd be very hesistant to make it my only machine at this point. I honestly can't tell if ML even cares about it or the customers who chunked down the price of a good used backhoe to buy the freakin' thing. Speaking of backhoes, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to justify keeping the 7000 in the back of my truck all the time when I quite literally just had the chance to buy one for the same price I paid for the GPZ. I think its a great detector. But it has problems, some of them ML appears to have no intention of ever addressing or solving. If a person is bit richer than myself it might not be a problem to keep it, but I have to make sure that any big expenditure I own is being used to full potential, so at this point my plan is to sell it after I finish cleaning out all my old patches. I will note here though, the one used machine I saw posted for sale on this forum and Rob's forum took something like 3-4 months to sell. And it was almost brand new and had something like 3 price reductions far under MSRP. When the 5000 came out there were tons of used machines being sold and they were selling quick for much higher prices. So I'm in the camp of not seeing anywhere close to the demand for this machine that the 4500 or 5000 had when they were new.

I use the Camelbak Mule Mil Tac (the one in Chris's post), it's almost built just for detecting, I love it. Even has built in D-rings at just the right place for a bungee clip. Used the regular Mule for 6 years and still have it, they are bulletproof. The pinpointer and speaker module clip on to the front straps for easy access. Easy to strap an Estwing geology hammer and radio on the back too. The cheaper bladders always tasted like chemicals or plastic no matter how much I washed them, never had that issue with the Camelbaks. The other nice thing about these is the weight of the water stabilizes the pack, the minelab harness moves up on me but maybe it's just my body shape.

If you are after deep, economic, macro sized iron ore deposits then look into magnetometers or magnetic gradiometers. Proton precession magnetometers are cheap and easy to build. Solid state magnetometers have also gotten very cheap and can be easily interfaced to a computer or an MCU board like the Raspberry Pi, better suited for building a gradiometer. Metal detectors are for very shallow applications and are best suited for native metals, not iron ore. I'm not fully understanding your goal since you are being intentionally vague, but it doesn't sound like you are looking for shallow high grade gold veins or nuggets in Minnesota, but maybe I'm wrong. Also: LRL's are total scams. I talked with Fitzgerald in 2005, he was more than happy to use all nature of gibberish and nonsense to explain his device and wanted me to come to his shop to take a look. Until I told him I was a student at the nearby university majoring in physics and looking for a project for my engineering EM grad class which required analysis of a device of our choosing. He rescinded his offer and quickly ended the phone call. Look at Carl Moreland's teardown reports on Geotech. Some are nothing more than a wire wrapped around a crystal connected to a dead 1970's CB circuit board, or similar. But as has been mentioned already, your chances of finding any sort of economic gold deposits in Minnesota are exceedingly small. The chances of you coming up with an idea that hasn't been used by billion $ multi-national corporations are also about the same, but hey I love an entrepreneurial and inventive spirit.

Righteous! Your confidence in the machine should bring many more now too.

Here is a bit of an update for any curious: Kellyco replaced my detector with a new one, though it took quite some time to get it. The first detector had firmware issues right out of the box which I didn't know were not normal until I received the second detector, it didn't have to do with the rain. Also the "+" switch malfunctioned which I didn't mention before. Unfortunately the second detector also had issues right out of the box too. The volume control did not work, it would adjust in the software but the volume stayed stuck at full blast, which is far too loud for headphones for my ears. It also ran ratty, like I was detecting over hot ground but only in the mild soil of my front yard, the coil also seemed very sensitive to touch. So I've got my 3rd detector today and thankfully everything seems to work! Unfortunately, I bought this detector in July to prospect a few specific high alpine locations where my PI's don't work for various reasons, and it is now September. No bueno... I had been waiting for the Gold Racer but I needed a good VLF with a VDI immediately for a couple areas I can only prospect in a very limited time window which is now expired... It appears to me there may be some kinks both on the QC and customer service side to work out. Though I will say that Kellyco did make it right to me and next day air out my 3rd machine after I finally got someone to return my call and explained my frustrations. But there were also 8 or 9 calls that went completely unreturned before that too and many many weeks of waiting on nothing, so no gold star... Anyways, there it is. Another person told me he had the same issue as my first machine had and returned it too. I know these can be great machines, and from what little I've used mine in my front yard I'm impressed with the depth, speed, and target separation. But its just too excessive to lose that much prospecting time trying to get a working machine IMO for me to give it a good review overall. I'm sure for 99% of other people it will be a great machine though.

Great info, thanks for posting Coota. Do you ever get nasty hotrocks down in that cemented layer or is it pretty much always gold if you get down that far? I wonder if it's like the caliche we get out here, or maybe even harder stuff by the looks of it.

The "A" gives it away for me, but I'd never notice if someone didn't say one was different.

Do you remember what sort settings you were running with the 7000 Coota? Ground mode/gold mode/sensitivity/smoothing? And what timing/sensitivity/stabilizer setting on the 45? I've got a 4500+7000 too and I've been really hoping someone would post with some field experience on that new Coiltek Elite compared to the 7000, great to see your post. Nice gold and shooting too. Video works for me if you click and download it. Easiest way to post or embed vids is to just make a youtube account and link to your video there. I'm right there with you on the 45 as a patch hunter, same thing I do. So much faster to swing. Find em then bring the bulldozer (7000) in to clean em up.

Flavor to taste, but what I do is hit a patch two full times then start searching for patches again, when you have days that come up dry then head back to your patch for a few hours before the sun goes down so you can grab a couple nuggets and not be skunked for the day. Eventually you'll have a good handful of patches to work that always have a nugget or two left, within driving distance to wherever you are exploring and most days you will always come home with something in the poke. Also, coming back to a patch after a month or so often brings a new perspective, or maybe you just swing the coil at a different angle and hear new things. Keeping spirits high is to me the best motivator to keep looking for new patches. For me, if I am able to go home every day with at least 1 or 2 nuggets then I wake up the next morning ready to go right back out, avoid those 2 week slogs with no finds. It's good to always keep a few patches in the back pocket that haven't been hunted out totally.

Fisher just charged me $95 to replace two small switches on my GB2. Now, I didn't weigh them before I sent it in, but gram for gram thats gotta be close to spot. If the 7000 battery is only $150 then I find that surprisingly reasonable for a ML product, I hope that's right, I'll take 2.

I'm betting a lot of the data was related to coring, one of the partners is a 3D modelling program and the other does drilling programs and 3D modelling as well. Probably the trick is going to be compiling everything into one single 3D model representing their underground property and relating that to whatever sort of gold deposition method occurs on that property and finding any underexplored segments. Might be a fun challenge for a team of people with specialties in various different areas required. I joined just for fun and so I can see what a 6TB mining database looks like, when's the next time I'll ever get access to something like that... Be nice to see what these big mining companies are working with.

A mining company called Integra is offering a $1 million prize to process their 6 terabytes of data and make a new big gold discovery in a hard rock property they purchased in Canada. https://herox.com/IntegraGoldRush If anyone is into mapping, exploration, geology, hard rock mining, and data processing with computers then this may be something you are interested in. We're obviously all interested in gold already! Seems like there are a few mining engineers and geologists that post on various gold forums.

I'm more curious how the 2015 full year report looks for Codan, Seems like the half year report captures the initial release of the 7000, but it doesn't seem like there is a lot of interest in the 7000 at this point in time now months after the release, at least not in the US. There was a bunch of chatter about the 5000 for some time after the release by comparison, and it was far less of a leap over the 4500 than the 7000 is over the 5000. Gold has been down to due to the strength of our dollar too so maybe in general there isn't as much interest in prospecting as in years past in the US. Australia's dollar has declined relative to ours so gold is relatively higher there and it seems like their activity hasn't dropped like ours has compared to a few years ago. Anyways, trying not to sway the subject too much. But I suppose it's all related. Feels like maybe times are a changin' a bit in the detector world across the board. About time IMO, I was posting about how far behind companies are in technology usage 10 years ago, and it seems like until the last few years they didn't even try to get current until we started seeing machines like the XP and 7000, and detector prices until very recently haven't been going in the right direction either so it's a welcome change.

Looks like competition is finally leveling the playing field a bit and that's something this industry has needed for a long long time. Detector prices are so arbitrary... Only in detecting is it normal to pay full price for a machine released 20 years ago (GB2, etc). I know there is at least one other manufacturer new to the PI game developing a 5000 competitor right now too. Should be interesting to see if the PI field gets leveled a bit too, maybe the 4500 reintro pricing has something to do with that. Hope it doesn't stop, bring on even more competition and a healthy market!

Cool good luck with it, I'm like you and waiting to get it out into the goldfields as well! What was in the folded shell?

I am starting to doubt we'll see a coil big or small anytime soon. And honestly I almost don't even want to see one because I know the price is going to be off putting to me on a machine that honestly is still a love/hate relationship for me at this point. I'm saying that as a loyal ML user since the first day I started detecting for gold. If they come out with the coils where people have been predicting in the $1500-$2000 range I think I'm probably done buying stuff from ML in protest to their arbitrary pricing in the clouds. Anyways, what I can't ignore is that it was almost 3 months after the US release until I saw a GPZ in the field not owned by a Minelab dealer, their associates and friends, or someone related to Minelab in shape or form (except my own machine), and I was out detecting basically every day in probably the most popular general area to run GPZs after the initial release. I could be completely off base here since I know dealers are saying they sold like hotcakes, but I am starting to suspect they haven't sold enough units to make an add-on coil profitable to manufacture. Again, just me speculating, nothing more. If they drop the price on the 7000 and sell a bunch of units I think we'd see a coil come out fairly quick though. Doesn't explain why you can't buy a battery though, actually until I read this post I assumed you could since I haven't tried yet, kinda surprised you can't.

Thanks Flak and Jim, I like talking about tech related stuff, my first thought when I encounter something new is generally "how can I use this for prospecting or mining". Always glad if it's something others find interesting too.

tvanwho: In FPV you fly using a HUD (heads up display) in a similar fashion as pilots use them to fly aircraft (or military drones) with limited or no sight. It gives you roll, pitch, bearing, elevation, distances, etc and you can navigate by that without seeing anything else. They are pretty useful even within sight range, and actually kinda fun to learn and fly with them, it's like a flight simulator except more real. You usually have to add the HUD yourself, DJI makes one.The video monitor is more to just give you a sense of what you are around, you can point it in any direction you want though, and its not high enough resolution to make out fine detail with. Though you can fly by it but its easy to get disoriented. Some quadcopters come with this setup, but it's was much cheaper to build it myself when I bought mine, dunno about now though. To fly 20 miles out you'd need to go to custom radios, antennas, and high power FPV tx/rx's that operate on lower frequencies like below 1ghz. Again, not legal anymore in the US. But on the frequency subject, usually what legitimate setups use today (and what my personal setup contains) are 2.4GHZ for your radio and 5.8ghz for your FPV system. Two things: those are also frequencies that many consumer devices use (routers, phones, etc) so you get a lot of reduced range and noise near cities. Second, these high frequencies are basically line of sight, especially 5.8ghz, so in forests or areas with lots of trees your range could be greatly reduced and you'll lose your drone. I'm lucky in that all the areas I prospect and live are either praries or deserts without trees. But if you are standing in the forest and flying up and out then you won't be going very far. Different powers of transmitters and different styles of antennas all greatly increase the ranges as well. A good antenna is the cheapest way to boost range, but most of the high gain ones are also highly directional, so keep that in mind. Some have quite narrow like 5-10 degree fields, fly out of that and your HUD is gone, bam. This is one reason why the FAA enacted line of sight flight only, it makes sense, we don't want drones falling out of the sky onto our heads.

Amazing if real. Will it be sold or any details released? I'd love to see a higher res photo of that monster.

Well I am happy to say that Minelab is now mailing me a ferrite today. Maybe they read this thread or realized I was getting a bit impatient and frustrated in my last email to them, either way this time it got elevated to a manager and took about 5 minutes to get one after that, no more canned responses and everyone was very helpful this time.

Dang, glue a magnet to the bottom of it and it's the GPZ of the meteorite stick world. Kidding aside, that thing is stylin', Gatsby would approve.