1515Art

Headed back out to Gold Basin for another day oh hunting with the 7000 it was going to be a little on the warm side according to the weather reports so I got there early and by just around 5AM was firing up Zed, less than a minute later my first swing under the bush next to me I got a nice solid hit and about a foot down and out popped a nice big spongy 4 gram chunk. Then nothing but hot rocks and one little meteorite until the end of the day when I found the little .3 gram piece a boot scrape down in the side of another wash.

Now that I’ve had one in my hand it’s a lot easier to spot them, before everything was a meteorite now just half of everything looks like one, the golds a lot tougher but can’t help but love to see even the tiniest flash of shiny yellow after a long day of hot rocks, lead and bits of iron rust.

Thanks Rick, I miss the gold hunting up north, but love the trade off for the short drive and am liking it better as I begin to learn my way around. thanks Jim, I’m hoping for little patch one of these days and one of those multi ounce fatties, gotta dream in the mean time this will keep me 😃.

Dave it sounded like a soft little repeatable high/low about a deep boot scrape down up on top of a small ridge near some brush, took a few try’s to get it in the scoop and I only dropped it in my nugget jar because it was so little, but it had a definite good dig me signal. Until I got home I thought it was from a 22 snake shot, then I saw a little matrix stuck around part of the blob and the fat side had a bluish patina the small side more rusted and strangely the small side prefers the magnet. I can’t weigh it on the gram scale I’ll have to find the one that does cts to know how much but it’s amazingly small to have hit so well I think. I had a really hard time getting clear pictures with my crap phone and tablet but this is a little better, it could be anything I guess, but sure seems to look like a bit of oxidized nickel and iron with a bit of matrix and possibly a little thumbprint on the bigger blob... you have to use a little imagination here I guess.

Thanks I appreciate all your help, my guess from more poking scraping and straining the heck out of my eyes the silvery spots at the surface anyway are soft and crumbly and with tweezers I could pull off a tiny mica like silvery flake that seemed brittle? Had a little Dusting of glitter on my desk when I got done I don’t know if dunking it in CLR had any affect? One by one hopefully collecting, smashing and scratching my head eventually leads to more nuggets, 😃.

Big difference after roasting, the pre roast sample could be similar to my piece if the silvery spec in the lower left bottom piece I’m seeing is just that my sample is covered in those tiny bits as well as the clusters and feathery formations on the surface and throughout. How did you go about roasting? I have a small electric ceramic kiln that fires off a computer controller with a firing chamber roughly 18”H x 13”W that will fire up to 2350F I just need to install an electric connection in my garage to fire it.

In looking at more pictures it resembles Sylvanite or possibly calverite but I don’t detect any tinges of yellow in the silvery crystals, it also didn’t hit on the 7000 it was a sun baker I collected this visually. The total weight is 970 grams how much is matrix vs metal telluride although I’m unsure if it’s even a telluride?

The color is accurate, I was just going on other pictures found on google and there were pictures of silvery deposits on white matrix they called hydrothermal shock pyrite so without knowing I guessed the pyrite I Have no idea?

The what I thought was a conglomerate doing more research I’m thinking now is probably iron ore, a typical cut off saw blade won’t touch it, nor will my belt sander. A diamond cut off wheel cuts fairly easily spitting small fragments as it cuts, smashing it with a 3# hammer on an anvil chipped off small pieces but so far it’s resistant to breaking I’m going to need a bigger hammer if I want to put the effort into pulverizing and panning? Couple pics under the skin and one of the broken crusty oxidized surface?

Steve recently posted his opinion on one of the new Bounty Hunters, if your goal is just to have another detector for a friend without getting another for yourself with different capabilities then I’d read Steve’s thread if you haven’t already and sorry for posting this if you’ve seen this and already ruled it out.

Spent another day out in isolation in Gold Basin, it was warm at sunup but thankfully never got unbearably hot. I picked up a few more meteorites including one so tiny I didn’t realize what it was until getting home and seeing it under high magnification there I could see a tiny and tinier nickel sphere fused together with a small bit of the brown matrix circling the seam where they joined. At the end of the day frustrated with no gold to show I went exploring for someplace new to hunt and just a few minutes before sunset hit a nice signal in a wash under the edge of a small bush and roughly 12” down out popped a bright yellow chunk weighing 2.7 grams to chase the skunk away.

Went out to gold basin yesterday for a long day of hunting with the 7000 For meteorites, gold and collecting hot rocks, I saved about 30 #’s of interesting (to me) for crushing at home in a new cast iron 1qt dolly pot from Royal Mfg I just ordered. Two of the specimens I have question about the first I’m wondering if this is hydrothermal pyrite in quartz like matrix that may in fact be other than quartz? the other hit very hard on the 7000 is only very very slightly magnetic looks like a densely packed conglomerate with very small quartz pebbles cemented in the matrix and lots of mineralization weighing almost 13 #’s, is this worth the time to crush and pan?

Good eye you know your Chrysler’s. Anyway it looks a lot like the center piece from one of these.

These are replicas for a Mercury I think, could be this with the center emblem missing?

Nice hunting the bloodhounds are on scent more treasure awaits🤞👍.

It looks a pretty efficient way to strip bark.

It doesn’t look super old the green side covers look salvaged from something like an old bench grinder from around the 1950’s by the shape and color, almost the same color as my grandfathers 48 Chrysler Town and Country. Looks like something jerry rigged you could use to clean sticky clay off the bottom of your work boots.

I’m shocked and saddened also to hear of this news, I was fortunate to meet Fred up at Rye patch a few years ago and he was as personable face to face as he was on forum, his kind heart and love of the wildlife, the outdoors and never ending devotion to helping and encouraging others his absence will leave a giant hole in our hearts we can only try and fill with the wonderful memories of the life we were fortunate to share, with a tear in my eye farewell my friend farewell and a toast to you of my finest tequila, Cheers.

Cool YJ having the turbo bumps up the horse power pretty good I’ll bet nice setup, the only complaint I have with mine is fitting all my stuff into the limited space and trying to keep it all organized by the end of the day everything usually in a bit of a jumble with detectors, drywasher, tool bucked, power sweeper, portable winch and 4WD gear, picks and all the other misc crap there’s no way to accommodate camping equipment without sacrificing mobility by pulling a trailer of some sort? I put a shelf in the back that helps but it’s still a challenge so I haven’t decided what I want to do for for overnight or multiple nights out? EGO makes garden tools that do the job with some impressive run times the hedge trimmer cuts all my hedges front and back on one 2.5 amp-hr battery same with the sweeper all the dirt that day was on one battery it amazes me just how well they perform compared to corded equipment and even gas powered versions, so far I really have no complaint hopefully the service life is comparable as well.

No gold but these were other targets from the old patch area, on the 7000 I was running sen-6, vol-8, high yield, Normal, audio smoothing off, thresh-22, semi auto GB, no other filters on the 7000 and the steel phase. their was just a bit of atmospheric emi making me retrace my swings a little and I was going very slow with a second pass in some areas on deep timings just to see if anything popped out.

Surprisingly, no it throws everything to the front about 3’ or more and with wheels it’d be easy to control and take a heck of a lot less punishment, now I need to grip it about a foot behind the guard and hold it up pushing forward It’s a bit of a workout. in the Soft soil it digs down builds a pile in front of it self you then have to shave down, but it throws the rocks pretty good, bits of gold too I imagine if they are there.

I ordered a battery operated sweeper attachment for my EGO power head this is a rotary bristle brush one of a number of different attachments available for this device, the supplier instead sent me the rubber brush instead with paddle like bristles intended to sweep soil, gravel and rocks. Although not the one I wanted, I figured it might be useful out in the gold fields so threw it into the Jeep for a quick run. This line of garden equipment is really powerful but sweeping gravel off the lawn is one thing moving dirt looking for gold much more demanding so while a fun experiment I didn’t expect the results I’d get out at gold basin to be promising or practical. To my surprise this little sweeper managed to perform much better than I expected. In a wash it easily moved 5” or so of dirt from a small area in just 5 or 10 minutes, in the other picture I used it to knock down a small tailings pile from a dozer push, although a little challenging to control because it wants to dig straight down if it had a bicycle wheel attached behind the spinning broom you could easily sweep 1” inch layers off in 21” wide strips and go down in larger areas more evenly. The brush attachment runs $250 and the power head $150 bare bones without battery or charger, it managed to survive the day without breaking and might have use patch cleaning but I’m really unsure about it holding up out there with regular use?

FedEx showed up at my door with my little Royal Explorer drywasher late Tuesday, the Jeep was loaded to head out to gold basin in the morning so I made a quick trip to Home Depot to pick up a 3 inch air hose to connect my 56v leaf blower to the drywasher. sadly Home Depot’s not really a hardware store any more so it’s hit or miss sometimes finding what you need and I had to settle for a 3” clothes dryer connection for my test, they were also lacking in any suitable adaptor so I was also stuck using the leaf blower nozzle for my reducer for my test while the dryer connection worked it’s less than ideal for regular use. setup was easy and the battery powered leaf blower worked perfectly powering the drywasher, the fan speed was very easy to control and I wound up using a low medium speed similar to the setting in my time test, the leaf blowers controls made subtitle adjustment easy. The battery operated blower is much quieter than a gas blower, no fumes, weighs less and starting and stopping is just a flick of the switch. im having trouble uploading videos to YouTube so for how here’s a couple pictures of the setup. I did email EGO directly to let them know their leaf blower might be desirable For this use and consumers have been requesting a shop vac version hopefully sometime in the future they develop a shop vac/blower version similar to the gas powered vac/blower units in use now.

Made it back out to gold basin today and managed to pick up a couple more little meteorites the largest at 10.4 grams and the smaller one is 5.3 grams. This other stone also gave a nice signal the crystals show better in the sun, I think is a basalt with olivine?

Primarily my time out in the desert is spent detecting on the chance I’ll find something larger, but checking different spots for fine gold I think might help with that too so I’ve been looking for a little Drywasher I can fit in my Jeep and will be portable for sampling different spots without to much hassle. Every time out I bring home 5 gallons of dirt from promising spots except my choices haven’t been very good yet and getting rid of the dirts a hassle so I’m moving the show to on location. Coincidentally starting with their mower I’m building an inventory of the EGO 56v garden tools some with batteries some bare bones and now have 2, 2.5 amp-hrs and 1, 5 amp-hr battery all interchangeable. In the collection is the leaf blower they claim out performs equivalent gas models and it seems to be true. I’m sitting here testing it now on a low medium speed with the 5 amp-hr battery I got 90 minutes and with the other two batteries on hand I should have somewhere around 3 hrs continuous run time total. They also sell a backpack contractor battery for over a $1K I think must be around 28 amp-hrs (correction) if you need long lasting power. Couple days ago I ordered a Royal Explorer Drywasher the size was right, wasn’t to expensive and seemed what I was looking for to pair with the electric blower and then will head out for a real test although I suspect this will be perfect for what I have in mind. I’ll post a video and pictures when I get a chance and have the little dry washer in hand.