1515Art

My wife was in the jewelery business for years and the best way to get killed is to keep anything of value in a safe in your home. Bad idea, always use a safety deposit box.

i feel so bad for the guy, it just makes you sick. hope the guy who stole it is real stupid and trips up some how...

great video, thank you

thanks, just understanding a problem better makes it easier to deal with. I'm anxious for this update rumored for the gpz, my gut says its likely more than a minor tweak as that could have been done fairly quickly and with all the hype and energy that went into the initial release of Zed quickly followed by nothing at all... well something should have been in the works to ride the wave from the release of this new technology, Coils, the long life battery? Something to take advantage of the press while they have it. my hope is this release is something that was already in the works prior to the initial release at the beginning of the year, something intended all along. wishful thinking I'm sure, but this detector was engineered to upgrade, the initial release seems fairly basic in its extraordinary way and something surely must follow?

tortuga, i thought it was a wedge for a minors pick to hold the handle to the pick head, the curve is the thin side. I've had some old picks around as a kid and they had similar wedges, but you could also be right a dimple for the set screw in a plane blade could look like that, this would have been a curved gouge if it came from a plane.

yes every one has been boot accessible and for me its only been a few area of one mountain thats given me trouble, there are just to many of these andesites in one place and the high low pitch is constant while my coil is in motion. this has to be some of the worst ground anywhere and I'm not experienced enough to deal with it.

I like your summer wrap-up a lot better than mine and although a little embarrassed with my tiny gold, i did love every minute of the hunt. Lunk you are an inspiration and seeing how you magically pull the yellow stuff gives me hope that someday (next summer) i'll learn enough to find a little more, WTG. some of my hard earned trash...

most of the time Zed runs really good and when there is a little salt groan it really does not bother me that much. there are a couple of places where i haven't figured out how to deal with the hot rocks in the high sierra. its a green rock and i'm finding it mostly on the hillsides where the top soil is washed away, it gives me a clean high/low target response when the coil crosses a rock. large boulders give a very broad high low and are easier to identify as a hot rock, only a few areas have enough of these rocks to be a problem so when I hit a patch i just move on. I've tried ground balancing on top of them and can only quiet the target pitch a little for a very short time, it seems to come right back.

condor, nice work and very nice nuggets. thanks for the report on your settings, i have been running my threshold very low, now i'm going to try lowering it all the way down. I've also been running with audio smoothing off, were you using any smoothing? difficult? high yield?

quite a nice lump in that scoop chris, i'm going to have to give the rake some more time.

went out to the gold fields last week, but i didn't use it much, last couple of weeks I've had some tendinitis in my right elbow and it kind of hurt to try and swing the zed with one hand and use the rake with the other. the little i did use it, the rake seemed to work if the trash was on the surface or near the surface and not to many things were blocking the way. on one spot down in some old ground sluice workings i hit a strong signal that seemed to loud to be anything other than trash, i jammed the little rake into the area and came up with two square nails stuck to the magnets. also this trip i did a lot of walking and i like to use the guide stick with the zed, it was inconvenient to carry the rake, pick and swing the zed, so i wound up not bringing it with me much. if i had stayed and worked a small area at a time i think it would have been more useful, also the area i was in had a lot of big rocks and this little rake would be better out in the desert where things are more open, or in the washes where rusted tin has polluted and concentrated in smaller but good trap locations. hope that helps, clark

i already spent the quarter...

very nice, hard work pays off... wtg

there was... lucky is a vacuum cleaner for gold.

i got an unexpected package from minelab today and I'm not really sure why, no that I'm complaining. it was a fat little package envelope with an Australian coin, US quarter a Minelab token and a bumper sticker (not one of the ones Steve posted). its not my birthday... is this a special minelab holiday and they send out trinkets every year, anyone else get a surprise bundle in the mail? Hope they keep this up, a new SDC and then a CTX to round things out would be nice, i can't wait to check the mail tomorrow.

thanks rick, great story and some real nice hard earned gold, worth every bit of heart burn I'm sure.

very nice

pretty gold!!!

the gpz is a mysterious beast, the other day when I changed my setting around to something that seem, well... just wrong, out popped a little nugget. its strange because all these different combinations all seem to find gold at different times and in the same area. sort of like the different settings do more than just affect background threshold or affect it in a way that opens up new views into the ground?

we have another friend in Xin Mi, who has a lot of farm land and on his land are a couple of jade mines, they hard rock mine a very beautiful green chrysoprase and other chalcedony there. the mines are nestled in a very picturesque hillside and river valley that looked great for gold prospecting so i was asking my wife about where the giant gold nugget was found in the farm field in China, thinking it would be fun to invite a group over to hunt for gold if it was detectable in the area. turns out that giant nugget was found in the Xin Jiang region same as the hetian nephrite jade. I did a little more research on gold regions in China and as it also turns out some of the largest gold producing mines are within the same general part of the country as my friends property in Xin Mi, i don't know if the gold bearing channels in china would extend anywhere near his land, but the quartzite's and other mineralization might suggest some possibility.

could you push a lightweight plug into the shaft to keep the water from seeping into the tube?

thats funny...

Hi Spencer, I can't complain about this run when my time is up, i've had the opportunity to try a lot of different stuff and see a bunch of different things and then I met my wife and life really got interesting. She had some power and connections as she was growing up in Shanghai and helped out a lot of people with their own connections who now call her sister. a lot of these people are running the country now, for me it's always exciting when I'm over there, but it can be a bit overwhelming at times although everyone is really nice. On one of my earlier trips over I stayed for three months, I brought a bunch of cash (the shops and businesses won't take US currency i found out) an my cards to get me through my stay, when I headed back home i had the same amount of money I came with, no one would let me pay for anything so luckily i didn't need the cash after all. the other thing i can tell you is three months in a foreign country is a hell of a long time when hardly anyone else speaks any english and the customs and food are all different. you really miss a good burger when you can't get one (you can get a yak burger in Shang-gra-la, its not the same). if you can find that giant jade boulder, I can connect you with someone to carve it for you...

and... happy moon festival yesterday. Moon cake from President Xi (She). Friends were invited to Washington for a meeting and dinner with President Xi and they brought back moon cake that was given as gifts from China. i've had a lot of moon cake and don't really like it, but this was very tasty stuff made with dates, nuts and other spices, it's good to be president.

" It does not make a very good seat like my other picks. " no problem of sliding off your seat by accident if you did happen to sit on it! ​when I'm ready for my next pick I gonna want something like the big scoop with a magnet holder on the top, you make great picks and all the custom work is really nice.