1515Art

very nice, hard work pays off... wtg

Nice finds and fun times it sounds like.  I hope to visit the area with my SDC 2300 sometime, maybe even as soon as next month.  Good to see there are some good nuggets still to be had out there!

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?

  Statistics, like a bikini, can be very revealing. but the things they hide, like a bikini, are vital.

 

  What am I finding gold with? A fragile, heavy, clumsy, expensive, porely supported GPZ 7000 with questionable reliability that could easily have been 40% better without adding significant manufacturing costs.

 

What is my favorite? And old scratched up, beat up, worn out, seamingly indestructable, well equiped with accesories for all occasions GPX 4000.

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.

Wait Jade is a rock?? I just figured it was a good sripper name. I'm learning things everyday.

China's a confusing place and you are not to far off... the word "Yu" in chinese can be a name of a person (stripper), jade stone, fish, rain... slight change in tone and context. so just knowing that one word could get you just about everything you need, but not necessarily in the order you would like.

I'm happy you found this interesting, my wife introduced me to jade about ten years ago and i was completely blown away by how much money some of this stuff goes for. The green imperial jadeite is even more expensive, I've seen small carvings for sale in China of the size you would wear or carry in a pocket for prices in the millions of dollars. 

you have to be very careful with all of this stuff and a lot of people have lost a lot of money on fake and treated jade and thats mostly whats out there for sale. the fake treated jade looks really good too, but has only decorative value. my friends in Nian, China took me to a major jade market area in the city and in one section of the town all the streets were stained a dark red brown from the uncontrolled run off of stain used to dye the outside of jade and other stone to make it look like the skin on hetian jade.

Sunday, and i should go hunt for something...

there are rocks out there not in the fields in the USA, but they can be found in shops and rummage sales as items carried home by travelers from exotic lands. the stone I'm referring to is a very special white jade found in a specific area in China. the jade is hetian nephrite and comes from an area in Xin Jiang, China very near Turkey. it is easily confused with other white nephrites and tons of other white jades are passed off as hetian, the differences in the materials are slight, but the difference in value is tremendous.

the most valuable of the hetian jades and most highly prized by collectors are fatty pure white specimens found in river beds with the outer matrix worn off by the action of the water and surrounding gravels. the very highest quality hetian nephrite will fetch in the neighborhood of $1000.00 per gram US dollars. This jade has been prized for centuries and spurred a movement of sorts not unlike California's gold rush, the entire area is now off limits and under state protection from the ravages of collectors. 

The gold nugget is 9.5 grams and the little jade fish is 5.2 grams, the nugget is worth in the $400. range depending on the buyer this little fish from the studio of Xio Fan in Suzho, China would bring close to $10,000.00 (or a new GPZ) from a knowledgeable buyer. in the second picture is another hetian pebble of aprox 30 grams a slightly lesser quality, but showing very good skin, alongside the little fish for comparison. the slight differences in color and clarity drop the value by as much as 1/2 of the top quality per gram.

so if you are out hunting in in odd shops and come across a curious little white rock some traveler carried home from vacation???

I have had my zed from the first release and have experienced most of the issues as everyone else and caused a couple more myself probably. given the choice of having my money back or keeping my detector, I would still keep my GPZ... Minelab quickly sent me a brand new 7000 after mine had issues that i can't say were all minelabs fault and i could have sold the new unopened one if id chose to do so, but i did not.

I've only found a little gold with mine, but I know it will find gold better than any other machine in most conditions and knowing that makes digging countless bullets and other trash tolerable, things will improve as i learn more.

My new gpz is now wrapped in a really nice Doc's protective cover from Rob's detectors, it's very nice and my 7000 is well protected, so most of the early concerns are covered, sorry for the cheep pun.

The one thing i hope for is some form of discrimination mode in a new software release, in heavy trash areas the gpz is almost unusable. use my programable button to give me an optional iron discrimination mode for heavy trash areas, nothing fancy... there are a lot of different tones that come out of the gpz and while understanding the language it is speaking is beyond me, it is saying a lot more than dig here if we had the right software to make sense of it all.

went up to the high sierra for a couple days of swinging zed around in the dirt. first day out spent the morning hunting in an area that looked heavily worked with not much to show for my time except a small pile of lead and a mess of tiny rusted iron fragments, the gpz can really see those even though i can barely find them in the scoop. stopped to take a break and eat a few crunchy nut bars and drink some coconut water and then headed back out with my zed settings different than in the morning with sen up to 20 and the thresh down to 15 (later i set the tresh at 3 this seemed to run even better). after about 20 or 30 minutes i hit a nice soft high low and dug this little 1/2 gram piece, wonderful seeing something with a glint of yellow in the scoop for a change. 

hunted the remainder of that day and the next with nothing to show but more junk and a lot of hot rocks. 

Gpz ...found a little one today

nice finds, good job keeping your head in the game its tough going through all the trash to get those beauties. 

steve, this list is such a valuable resource perhaps it should be pinned or saved for easy access as links, thanks for thinking to offer this to us.

clark

Tortuga

now that the heat wave is giving us a little break I'm planning on heading up to the sierras tomorrow for a day or two. I'll let ya know if the mighty mini magnet rake was of any use to me, that would make it the mmmr7000 maiden evaluation of useful purpose or lack there of.

clark

i can see it now... giant crane mounted electro magnet sucking every piece of iron for miles around, cars on nearby roads swerving uncontrollably whenever Paul hits the switch on his massive electro rake. might be just what we need for the 7000, be great if you can make it work. sure would beat cleaning the crud off with my fingers.

i ordered some rare earth magnets and when they arrived they were a little smaller than id planned on, but i figured what the heck and stuck them on a small rake i had in the garage that i bought a while back at the local garden center. the magnets came with 5mm holes and i used some pop rivets to attach them to the rake. it's light weight and the magnets seem to be stuck on pretty good for now, we'll see if I'm careful just how long before i break it... if it is even useful out there at all.

that nugget is close for sure must mean you are boat shopping tomorrow?