1515Art

This brush

home depot sells a long skinny narrow u-shaped short bristle stiff wire brush that is good for clearing and breaking up material jammed in crevices. its in the bar-b-q supplies and is made to get into tight places on your grill.

I purchased some new headphones and ear buds for my detectors. the headphones I selected were the black widow model and the improvement over the stock minelab koss phones is night and day for me. The sound quality is very crisp and clear and not that I'm able to reliably understand yet what the detector sounds are telling me, I can distinguish a much wider range of tones with the black widow headphones over the stock issue koss, the sound quality is much improved on both my whites and the minelab detectors. The black widow headphones also exclude most outside noise if you like that. The ear buds are Bose sport phones and they also work very well with the gpz and are great when the air temps are very warm and they're still very good sound quality although well below the black widow brand headphones. The whites sst has no independent volume control so the bose ear buds are a poor choice for this detector and the sound quality with the whites sst and bose ear buds is best described as uncomfortable. This is my second set of bose ear buds, last month I dropped a pair of green bose sport ear buds somewhere in the n nevada desert out of the back of my rig, something nice for someone to find, if you find em before the sun ruins them enjoy.

Californiagold, good luck out there and be safe!

update on zed s adventure home... Zed arrived via fed ex ground at minelab america in Lisle, ILL today Monday 7-6-15 at around 230pm their time, so we will see just how long it takes for someone to contact me from minelab to let me know what the plan will be. Hopefully not to long as the separation anxiety is rising exponentially as the days pass and the desire to find a replacement to fill the void is becoming ever increasingly difficult to resist... must hold out, although i've been spending a lot of time in the parks and school yards with my SST and am finding the limitations of this detector in mild soil and may breakdown and get something more flexible to play with.

i left all my rye patch find points on my gpz when I sent it back in for repair, all one of them... hope it helps someone out.

ya, being upside down really increases the degree of difficulty and that was a bunch of stuff to haul up hill.

I hit a beautiful soft signal in the middle of an exposed gravel bar down on the american river. the deeper I got the better it was sounding, the only problem I had was getting below the water line and as I get deeper the hole was filling faster with water and I could not really see what I'm digging in. long dig story short I found a large chunk of old iron tiller/ripper tooth that came from some old equipment, sadly not gold.

Condor, Had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago when I hiked down to a claim near the western states trail on the american river all those river canyons are incredibly steep and deep. its a 4 wheel drive trail down to the river but the winter storms had everything so torn up that no one was sure the road was open and once you commit to going down the road there is not many places you can turn around if you get stuck. All I took with me was my zed, pick and a small pack with some supplies for the day. the hike down took about an hour and it was hot around 90 and humid from rains a few days before and even taking it easy my clothes were soaked when I got to the bottom of the trail and arrived at the river. I only spent about an hour looking around, my legs were feeling the walk down and I was anxious to see just how bad I was going to feel on the way up. well, it was a very tough 3 hour walk up that road that felt like it was never going to end and by the time I got to the top my legs were shot, the worst part happened as my legs began to recover a little bit the leg cramps started to kick in. I drove from auburn to lovelock nevada and all the way there every few minutes id have to grab my legs and fight the pain from the sudden leg cramps. luckily the next day nevada had that giant rain storm and I was forced to take a break for a few days. anyway, being 62 I know exactly how you were feeling, but at least we can still do it!

nice hunting, wtg

sounds like a great adventure and fun story!

welcome joemedic and good hunting!

Hi Cindy, welcome to the forum... You came to the right place, you will get a ton of great information about your detector and detecting here and its a very friendly place to learn. Im fairly new to detecting and bought my gzp as my second metal detector when they first came out. it is very powerful and also very easy to use right out of the box, you can play with the controls and customize them to your specific conditions and preference, but this detector will operate well in many different setting combinations and find targets deep. it finds very tiny pieces of all metals and is a fantastic relic detector, some of the pieces i find are so small they are difficult to see. you are going to love hunting with this detector and we are all hoping you will post some pictures of your finds for us to see. good luck hunting, clark

zed is on a fed ex back across the country to minelab america, no hassle so far except I kinda feel empty like a parent thats just sent their kid off to college and now they have a giant void to fill in their lives. Ive been out puttering with my Whites SST, a great detector, but its just not the same. I love the sheer power of the 7000 and the 6x10 coil feels small next to the gzp14 in an open area. A second phone call on monday got me the return authorization number for minelab, that puts the detector into the system for repair and it should b back at the service center on Friday. No word from minelab on what if anything is covered under warranty, obviously they need to look it over and hopefully word from them will be reasonably quick on what the plan will be. fyi,shipping the gpz fed ex standard ground from california to minelab america with $10,000. insurance is $145.

Chris, really appreciate your reports and comments, the help you freely give is invaluable, I know id be (more) lost without it...can't wait to hear about the next hunt.

nice job out there with that sdc and good looking gold too!

Thanks Steve, oh so true, I saw the difference out there this last couple of days at rye patch. my first trip out i found so much trash all kinds of stuff, this was right at first with the first batch... last couple of days I hunted around the same general areas from high on the hill too down low following the quartz breakouts and wide around areas with the most brush and was wishing for a piece of trash to break the pace. GPZ s have been working overtime and like you've said before, sometimes you turn right and sometimes you turn left, my turns were off this time out. minelab is a great company with great products I'm sure everything will work out fine, this is a flagship detector from the top company and Im generally satisfied with anything fair and reasonable.

wow, beautiful nugget and nice hunting... you are inspiring, keep it up!

This has been interesting and I feel better knowing Im not the only one to have damaged my GPZ. I hope this discussion about little problems with an amazing detector has been constructive and helpful as this is how it was intended. The damage to the case on my zed was caused by me during normal use in a harsh environment, could I have been more careful, of course however as this thread has shown in the real world the equipment needs to be able to stand the rigors of the use it was intended and if the detector needs additional protection to withstand normal use then it should be supplied that way, not a big deal. everyone is buying and making protective covers for their machine because they are needed, hopefully mine lab will make some minor adjustments to provide their customers with the best product possible on a very very expensive detector. Im not upset as on almost any beta release manufactures need to make adjustments on new products as life in the field is different than in the r and d lab and I expected some bugs to come out, what matters is how these issues are addressed. I called mine lab today and they were very helpful, I am sending mine in for service and we will see how this issue plays out, I promise to keep you posted on what direction mine lab takes this. here is a picture of my two issues:

Ok, zed has duct tape covering his cracked case and he has spent the last couple of days roaming the n Nevada desert at rye patch. The ground is still damp down about 4 inches, but the only relly bad ground I found that was undetectable was down very low below etna rd. The place was empty, in two full days no one else was out there but me and zed. Still no gold this trip and I hit a few areas very hard, not even that much trash. I even used the gps in enhanced to keep track of the ground I was hitting so I know my coverage was ok. Oh we'll next time... Zed is having a new problem and will have to go back in for service, this evening I powered up and now have two black streaks about an inch apart running down my display where the pixels are dead. Anyone else have display screen issues?

beautiful pan, good luck next time out.

My hot rocks not gold, but I don't know what it is. I double checked and it is slightly magnetic with a strong magnet it was also unaffected by sulfuric or hydrochloric acid. its light in weight like volcanic stone, i thought it was a compacted earth or some kind of ironstone? the way the zed is hitting space rocks I guess that could be a possibility. i just don't know very much about meteorites, but this was in an area that could have debris from the strike that happened a couple of years ago.

El Dorado, you are probably safe in most places down there, the river is so remote, although i did see a forrest service ranger on the dirt road in the logging area. is it ok to dredge yet, although the ban was thrown out by the court my understanding is it is still being enforced by some of the rangers and everything is on hold until something comes out on the arrest of the last two guys that refused to sign their tickets for dredging even though that was after the court decisions.

I was out prospecting on a hillside in california and my zed hit a pretty solid signal. After recovering the target I was disappointed to see just some little brown hard clumps, I threw a couple in my pocket and moved on. Thanks I hope, saw this thread and now I'm off to get some pool acid and I'll see if anything promising shows up?

so, I was out at the rye patch with my gpz digging holes and having fun, I had just dropped a 40 caliber slug in my pocket and was down on one knee with my buddy zed resting atop the other. I let go of it for just a second while it was resting on my leg and twisted a little while using two hands to slip my pick in its holder and zed slipped about a foot and a half or so to the ground, the bungee was off. I checked it out and everything was working perfect so I'm thinking good no problem. Im swinging zed a little more and happen to take a closer look at the bottom and notice a crack in the case, now Im bummed my good friend zed is hurt and its my fault. the good news is everything is working fine, it did not fall far or hit hard but it did hit a pointed rock in just the right way i guess. the plastic case is egg shell thin so be very careful. I put a piece of tape over the crack and suppose I could just live with it but will likely call mine lab and find out the cost of repair. the good news, i was digging a nice signal near an old sage brush stump and found a Rye Patch meteorite the size of a dime... my first.