1515Art

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?

I bought it 2 years ago in a very soft boat sale market for not much more than i paid for the GPZ from a retired mountain view firefighter who moved up to a larger boat. it's a 1997 almost exactly like the 2015 except mine has a two stroke, i don't mind the 2 cycle engine and this one runs great...

our optics were pretty similar i think, mine was just an older drive system and i had to lug around a car battery to run it your setup is much nicer. an 8 inch tube gets you everything you need. I used to go out with a friend who had an old 11 inch orange tube. his optics were really good, but the difference in what you can see is not that big a difference between the 8 and 11 and the bigger tube and mount is a beast to haul around.

Norvic, you weren't kidding when you said you were into astronomy, that is some nice set up what kind of tube do you have inside? I used to have a compustar 8, but sold it back in 1999 because it wasn't y2k compliant and wouldn't work accurately after 2000. I saw a lot of cool stuff, the telescope made it pretty easy, so easy i've forgotten most of what i learnt.

Thanks everyone but to be clear, only the ceramics are mine the jade carving is not my work, the jade is done by friends of mine in China. Buy luck and chance I know a bunch of different jade carvers over in China and the work they do is amazing. This one carver in a city called Nian, works mostly in clear quartz crystal of all different shapes and sizes. A mine in Brazil saves him these 5 ton flawless clear crystals, I saw at least a dozen being worked on and another dozen waiting for design inspiration sitting in different rooms, his studio was two stories tall and had about 50 rooms. In the rooms with the large clear crystals where the carvers were working, each large crystal had 6 or so carvers working all at the same time with small powered diamond tipped tools and the large carvings taking 5 years each to cut and polish... now thats patience. I also like to fish and have a little 21 foot Grady White with a walk around cabin that I usually launch in Santa Cruz or Moss Landing, sometimes I also fish San Francisco Bay and also go out the gate. We should put together a little fishing trip while the weather is good, two weeks ago we hit some nice big Vermilions about an hour up the coast from santa cruz.

bado1 Thanks for the compliment... Here are some pictures a friend in china just sent of jade carved to look like food each is made from a single piece of untreated stone only the plates are real

I do ceramics...

no doubt, great story and beautiful nuggets!

John, great video, thank you!

also if you check you will find a number of threads on the past topics within the last 6 months on this site with different gpz settings for different reasons...

Hi Tony, As both Norvic and Scott have said the factory default setting are great for most all conditions. the gpz by design and function is very easy to use and other than individual preference or while reaching for the limits of the equipment in a particular type of ground, it's almost difficult to not find detectable metal no mater what you find suits your needs with regard to your settings. I consider myself a new user also and I believe it would take me a long time before I was comfortable with something as complicated as the 5000, where I find the menus on the gpz very intuitive, just feel free to play with the controls a bit and you will be cruising in no time. If during the learning process you get lost or are having some trouble, just do a restart and ground balance and you will be good as new.

the ISIS sponsored hunt should be interesting...

Paul, You are such a good and generous person I only wish I had a t80 to give you... You deserve it!

Great story and fantastic pictures Chris... thank you. Brings back some memories of when I was a kid, back in the late 50s early 60s when we toured the Comstock silver mine in Virginia City. Back then for a couple bucks they would walk you a half mile into the mountain, through the muck and puddles and over the old ore cart tracks showing you all the old equipment and timbers along the way... when we got to the end of the tunnel they turned off all the lights so you could see what total dark was like if your candle was to blow out or something like that. fun times before we litigated our way out of those kind of experiences, for our own good Im sure.