brogansown

We were out a couple of days ago and detected these nuggets with the GM 1000.  Temperatures were right at 32 degrees and the ground was wet and slightly frozen in a few places.  One of the guys got a 6 gram nugget.

My Gold Bug 2 is in for repair, so I was using the Gold Monster.  It is more sensitive than the GB 2, but certainly more difficult to handle. The signals are not as friendly and the chirps on every blade of grass is annoying.  But you can get gold with the Monster.

This is my last post on this subject I promise.  Got everything plugged in at home and yes the Koss does work on the Gold Monster.

Must have been another pair of headphones-the Koss' didn't work today.  Found 4 small nuggets though.

My Koss headphones work fine on the Monster.

Winter is rapidly closing in on us here in Oregon, although we have been finding a few small pieces lately.  We expect to get in a few more short day trips after the morning thaw before we are force to quit for the season.  Sent my Gold Bug 2 off for much needed repair yesterday, but have a Gold Monster and the 4500 hanging in the basement.  We'll mostly just talk and dream about how great it will be next spring.

My friend did send the defective 10 inch coil back and Minelab returned a brand new one.  Haven't had time to try it yet though.

Thanks Steve.  I'm aware of the three coil sizes you mentioned, but was hoping that other sizes were out there somewhere.  In a former life, I would have wound my own, but not having the schematic rules that out.  We are having good success with the 6.5 inch and thought an eight inch would bridge the gap by going a little deeper.

Gary

The six inch coil for the Gold Bug 2 is working  great and we find a few with the 10 inch, but we wonder if there is an 8 inch coil available somewhere for the Gold Bug.  In several locations in our hunt area, an additional inch of depth would open up a whole new world of small nuggets.  Just asking and hoping competing vendors' coils might work on the Fisher.  

Way too corny for me.  The drivel to knowledge ratio is just too much.  

Chuck,

We did mail off the 10 inch coil that I had trouble with and mentioned in the earlier post.  It was just sent out, so it is too soon to know anything about Minelab's findings.  The coil did have a bit of rattle or looseness inside the cover though.  And like Reg said above, it started off okay, but shortly got unusable.  So thanks for the advice.

Gary

The Gold Monster I am using works perfectly with the 5 inch coil and I've found some truly tiny pieces of gold.  The 10 inch coil is another matter-it sometimes works okay, but after a bit of time, the coil detects a target, but on the back sweep the target has disappeared.  When this happens it continues for the remainder of use.  Kinda indicates a coil defect or a defect with the automatic ground balance.

While this is a problem, I'm more annoyed by the ergonomics of the unit.  When I set the detector down to pinpoint the target in the Jobe scoop, it promptly tips over and when I lean the unit against my shoulder, it spins around so the back of the coil plate faces out. Totally annoying and very time consuming.  But I really like the new technology that Minelab and others are trying out on us detectorists. 

Some Gold Bug 2 nuggets in the last four weeks.  Even the 4.0 gram nugget was in the patch.

They are out Swifty.  Up our way we have Diamondbacks, Bull Snakes, Blue Racers, Garden Snakes and Rubber Boas.  Have seen all but the Boas in the last couple of weeks.  Only the rattlesnakes are a worry though.  Time to start watching where we step and where we place our hands.  Ticks are still out too.  But the lure of nuggets is strong.

Great story JW and thanks for responding.  Rod's Good Luck charm paid off-sorta.  We did find this thin nugget on bedrock weighing in at about .3 grams.  We were working on caliche bedrock at the edges of some 1960's mining operations.  Just one they missed.  But it was in ground we had never detected previously.  Might be a place to try again someday.

My brother and I didn't find any nuggets on Monday last, but he did find this two sided crevicing tool to add to the collection.  We are going again today and hope to get a few pieces.

A little over a week ago I received my repaired Gold Bug 2 back from Fisher in El Paso.  I thought my threshold knob was bad, but Felix at Fisher said it was the ID and Mineralization toggle switches-probably from years of dirt build-up.  They replaced the toggles, checked out the calibration and cleaned it.  Turn around time, shipping included, was less than three weeks. We took it out four days ago and got this .7 gram nugget in shallow gravels on bedrock.

To preclude the problem from happening again I bought a thin neoprene washer and cut a round disc using a Henry rifle cartridge.  After slicing a tiny x in the center of the discs with an Exacto knife they slipped tightly over the toggles.  Not pretty but I think this will work.

Built my own BFO detector from scrap ham radio parts in 1967.  It was very sensitive, but lacked ground balance and discrimination.  We did find lots of coins, Civil War and Colonial artifacts, but no gold.  In fact we were looking for lost treasures and never even considered hunting for gold.  Wished we had.  Gerry M. has one of our early experimental models.  Next detector was a U. S. Army mine detector.  It was sensitive, extremely stable and had a beautiful sound and weighed about forty pounds.

Then a Compass followed by an early Fisher.  Now a Troy Shadow X5, two Minelabs and a Gold Bug 2.

If you go to the Library of Congress Chronicling America digitized Newspaper site and type in the words "gold gizzard," over 300 articles pop up about gold in goose and chicken gizzards found over past 150 years.  Some of the stories are copies and some are probably copy-cat articles, but many are probably true. 

I think it's "leaverite" so leave it and tell me where you saw it.  I collect um.

Could be a scale weight for gold scales and would then probably be made of bronze.

Thanks for that Chris.  We don't have much silver here in Eastern Oregon that I know of except for a deposit at the ghost town of Mineral, Idaho, just across the Snake River from us.  It's a ghost town now, inhabited only by rattlesnakes (and lots of them).

Virginia City is synonymous with silver.  Chris, was there any native silver found in those mines?  I think I've read that before the silver discoveries there, prospectors were looking for gold and as they worked up the wash towards Virginia City they encountered that "pesky blue stuff" in their sluices.  That material wasn't native silver, but a very pure form of the ore.

Anyway I saw a vial of blue crystals in a Museum in Virginia City and have always wanted a small vial of that "pesky" stuff.

Rick, Steve,

I own a 3000, a 4500, a Gold Bug 2 and a Troy x5 and like most of us can repair the cables, make new batteries for the GP series and even fix simple circuit stuff.  But without a circuit diagram it's impossible to go much further on the old, but still usable machines.  It would be nice if Minelab or someone would release those old diagrams so enterprising talented techy types could resurrect machines that can still find gold and coins, etc.  But I understand commerce and know that isn't going to happen.  Good to hear Steve, that at least seven years of repairs are still available.  My friend(who by the way is looking for a good old GP Extreme) just sent his 4500 in for repair and was surprised to learn that it would be repaired.

A couple of days ago I took the 3000 out detecting and was totally surprised at how quiet and stable it ran.  Didn't get gold, but did find quite a few deep targets in a couple of hammered patches, which gives me hope for next spring's start.

Paul,

I looked deeper and find it is Emperor Wen Hsuan. You can see a similar coin at   Http://www.sportstune.com/chinese/coins You'll have to worm your way around that site to locate your coin, but it is there.

Paul,

No, just that one side.  They are called Wu Chu coins and that is deciphered by the center of the inscriptions- the hour glass on the right and the other two figures on the left of the hole.

The Chinese coins we find around our area often are hundreds of years old and I don't know why.  But for sure they were brought over by the thousands and when discovered to be worthless here, were discarded pretty much indiscriminately.