phrunt

This works very well on most coil covers; a hair dryer does the trick nicely and less likely to damage than a hot air gun. Just leaving big coil covers on a desk in sunlight can cause them to warp, so a bit of hot air blowing on them while holding them down flat fixes them up.

Difficult question in a way as some covers are more suitable to taping than others, taping an Equinox 11" coil would be hard work, whereas taping a Coiltek 10x5" on the GPX 6000 is simple and effective. So, it comes down to the coil for me, any that can be taped are taped as the benefits are certainly there keeping the cover nicely sealed up from dirt and black sand intrusion along with that little bit of extra protection the tape provides from the side of the coil being bumped on rocks.

Yes, I learnt from Norvic’s recent experience to keep the Minelab’s separated from the Garrett’s.

I guess I'm the opposite in a way, I've been building a cabin to store all my detecting gear in as my wife wanted them out of the house as I've taken over a spare bedroom with my stuff, and a big chunk of the garage. 😛 I'm certainly no builder, but with the help of Building expert Google and some vital questions to JW when I didn't understand what google was telling me who is a crazy good builder that's been building a house that's build progress start to finish is going on the Grand Designs TV Show I've managed to pull it off I think, at least it's handled some wind and snow and not fallen over so far 🙂 \ I put these on all the walls running off solar to charge my gear with 12v lights and a 12v 32" TV of course. Tucked away up the back corner of my property. I've done a lot more than in these photos now, even the flooring is down just ready for paint when the weather warms up. Just haven't taken photos the past week or two. So let this be a warning to you, if you don't cull down your detectors expect your partner to eventually crack and kick them out of the house, and when this happens you too will be building a little cabin for storage, all built for the price of a GPX 6000. I know a few people have wanted to see what I've been up to; this seemed the logical place to put it.

So have you..... Interests: Retirement 🙂

Sorry Norvic for my involvement, my post was more positive than negative, explaining why I think these things happened.

That is outstanding, if I lived in the topics still, I'd be making one of them tomorrow.

It wasn't just Minelab Reg, it was pretty much everything, Australia stopped being a manufacturer of goods which it once was and now produce the lowest proportion of stuff-to-GDP in the OECD. This particular economists take on it is the Aussie dollar went from a very poor performer to a wonder currency on the back of China's boom and Australia's miners selling to China to fuel their boom making the dollar's value very high post GFC, I remember it passing the USD at some point when I was living there, I made some coin on that. So, with the high Aussie dollar manufacturing overseas becomes very attractive for businesses and the rapidly growing Australian economy with very high wage inflation on the back of the mining boom made it all even worse for local manufacturing. Australian dollar ‘sinking’ as Chinese economy tanks, how low AUD will go | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site Now he sees the Australian dollar on a downfall with China's fall, maybe more local production will make sense again. Its s shame they're no longer made in Australia, they've had some recent quality issues that perhaps, maybe, possibly wouldn't have happened if they manufactured locally having more control over what's going on in the production facility. Garrett on the other hand have resisted the lure of overseas production and remained made in the USA. I am sure the US has faced similar pressures on production with incomes increasing and the high USD making overseas production very appealing yet Garrett have held on and remained American made, something they should be very proud of as it's increasingly becoming a rarity.

He was one of the good ones, brought this back to the top so we can all have another read, I really liked oneguy. 😞

I really liked Oneguy.

I guess when it comes to prospecting it doesn't need to be an apples-to-apples comparison, the one with the best coil wins. and in this case, it's likely to be the Deus 1 over the 2 for prospecting. It's good you've found a way to make the Deus 2 work for you Jeff, hopefully you find a situation where it's worth using over the Nox and Legend for gold.

You're really armed with some decent weaponry there Norvic, I see a GPZ, GPX 6000 and Axiom, along with a couple of X-coils and you even have two Torus neck speakers one with Axiom written on it so you don't mix them up 😉 It really makes no sense how the Axiom was damaged in that situation, even if you were using roo's as speed bumps. Maybe it was beaten up by the Minelab's, not a good idea to put them all in a confined space together, they hate competition. They went and chopped it's head off.

Wow they dodged a bullet this wasn't an old 80's model Minelab.

I can see the big wigs sitting around in a board room gloating their customers are desperate to buy their Manticore coils and thinking how great it is for their customers to be desperate to buy their products. Little do they realize it's never a good decision to annoy the hell out of your customers when the competitors are biting at their heels, they're not overly used to having competition so they don't know just how damaging having upset customers can be, in the past we all had to put up with their shenanigans. When they were the clear winner with no real competition they didn't need to care, now they do, they need to care a lot as once a customer has moved onto another brand it's hard to get them back.

I can't bring myself to thin my herd, I got rid of the QED but that was out of principal more so than I wanted to get rid of a detector, I also got rid of my GPX 4500 but mainly because a guy I know wanted to detect black sand beaches here and he bought a Tarsacci with their infamous NZ black sand coil they say was made for NZ's black sand beaches and it sucked basically and wasn't suitable and I knew my GPX handled it with the 11" DD so I moved it onto him seeing I have a 5000 anyway and was unlikely to use it again. So instead, I just have gear I use, and gear I collect 😉 And my herd is as follows in order of amount of use Equinox 800 (tops the list as I use for gold and coins) GPZ 7000 CTX 3030 GPX 6000 Garrett 24k Manticore Ace 300i My other detectors are just decorations. And my pinpointers that get used in order of use hours are Garrett AT Sphinx 03 (too new to clock up enough hours) XP-Mi4 Others are just decorations.

Probably the right decision, Hard to beat a trusty old model Equinox, at least for me, know it like the back of my hand, entirely comfortable speaking it's language and it does what I need it to do very well. They're in a stage of pumping out as much new product as they can to overwhelm the competitors it seems, new detector models galore and even a pin pointer yet won't provide coils to the suckers that already bought one of these new products, namely their nearest thing to a flagship VLF since the CTX. New models always create a buzz and generate sales, well possibly except a certain pinpointer. I'd rather they just let someone else make coils for it seeing they can't be bothered, just let Coiltek start right away, I'll just buy theirs instead and they'll work hard as they do to get the coils to market quickly. And to top it off from Day 1 the website has never mentioned these coils are not available, in fact it acts as if they are available and just has a where to buy button to click on that takes you to the dealers list, so dealers will be fielding calls and emails all the time about wanting to buy these coils, and Minelab are happy for this to happen for many months as its the dealers dealing with it, not them. I hope dealers' response to customers is more honest than Minelab's marketing department and they're not taking people's money with no known release date. With this new method they're trying to do more often of selling direct to customers we'll see how long this attitude lasts when they're paying the staff to endlessly explain to customers with the same old, "Sorry this product is not available and we don't know when it will be" line.

I have "fear of missing gold" 🙂 I would rather come away with a tiny spec than nothing at all. The 15"CC is great, it's like running a big coil for deeper gold and a tiny coil for small gold with one coil. It lacks edge sensitivity through and its size can be a bit awkward in areas like this that the ground is so uneven, hilly, and rocky. In more open areas it's a no brainer, the 15" would be the way to go especially as I can run my detector in normal with maximum sensitivity to get the most out of it. He lives very near this spot so he can go back time and time again with different coils, which he does so he gets the best of both worlds. I just use what I think will give me the most chance on the day as I don't go to this place often, or in this case trying out a new coil. You're right through, if you're not geared up to find the bigger deeper bits, you're not likely to find it, although my two biggest nuggets (small to most people but big for me) were just over 4 grams have both been found with the small coils, the 8" and 10" and the one with the 8" was fairly deep.

What a great post, thanks for all of the photos, I see Ed from Australia in there, looks like he's having a ball, no doubt it's looking like the best dealer conference ever. Istanbul looks a nice place. The factory looks fantastic and even Nokta branded busses 🙂it's great to see the company grow so rapidly, all that's missing from the Line-up is a prospecting PI machine, I see on one of the photos "New Products for 2023" Hopefully!!! 🙂 I received the Pulse Dive coil today Dilek, thank you. Unsurpassed customer service, you took time out of all that conference to deal with my little problem.

Yes, it's really cool you can set your own sensitivity beyond that of standard pre-sets, a feature that would be a killer setting on a gold prospecting VLF for someone like me in mild soils. It's probably too complicated of an option as you'd get people complain they've made their detector or in this case pinpointer unstable. I pushed mine a little too hard and it was falsing a bit in the air like the Pro-Find at one point, still worked well in the ground though and at that setting was the most sensitive to small target pinpointer I've got. So, I have to decide if I want to put up with a little instability to get the super sensitivity. I'm thinking I'll mess around some more tweaking and try resolve that instability and get as close to that sensitivity as I can, I'm sure I can do it, just takes a bit of tuning. Certainly, my favourite feature of the pin pointer.

Too true Dave, when you've got a good 11" mono it's a hard coil to beat for performance, for me personally I like the aftermarket coils for their size and shape more than performance, I've said over and over again the 11" for me is equal to if not better than the aftermarket coils for small gold sensitivity so unless size matters there is no real point getting an aftermarket coil for it when the 11" is likely to be deeper than any available aftermarket coils now on the bigger stuff anyway. The only other added benefit is they can be quieter running, how much of that is down to size with a smaller coil receiving less EMI is unknown but it would play a part. JW himself prefers the 11" over the aftermarkets and he's certainly put the miles on these things. In your case Dave some coils appear to handle hot rocks better than others, I've seen it a few times now where the Coiltek's appeared better too although noticed that particularly with the 12x7" picking up only one hot rock all day, probably defies logic and it could be that between myself, JW and anyone else had that been detecting in that area they'd all been thrown off into the bushes 🙂 We did see a guy as we were leaving that day with what appeared to be an older GPX model, very rare we see another gold prospector but there he was. Probably only the 5th time I've seen someone else with a gold detector my entire time detecting. Minelab has done a great job on the 11", its downfall was the massive number of faults with the product and just general quality issues more so than its performance when it's a good working one. It's not like the older GPX where many didn't even plug in their Commander and went straight for aftermarket, this time you're not missing much if you run stock. I think they've got all the 6000's issues ironed out now so anyone with a recent purchase that wasn't old stock like yourself Dave has a really good detector.

I haven't put enough time on my 14x9" to give a proper opinion, I don't even know if it suffers from the same lack of edge sensitivity as the 12x7". I do know I found it not as sensitive as the 11" and then I decided it's not suitable for my needs, I need sensitivity seeing most of the gold I have a chance of finding is very small so I haven't used it since. It does run nice and smooth though and works well around powerlines for its size.

Good Macgyver job there 🙂 You could have just bought a toggle switch boot cover and screwed it on, I did so with my GPX. You'd just need the size for the thread on the switch. 10PCS/LOT 12MM Toggle Switch Waterproof Rubber Resistance Cover Dust Cap Boot Black Tarpaulin - AliExpress

Great news, thanks for posting it all, I'm sure someone in the future will find this very helpful. Sounds like the seller got a dud batch of screens.

That's good to know they're all about the same, now to just go and find some 🙂

That's where a feature like the Sphinx 03 has would be ideal, you can set your tone, or do pulse audio. Although the pinpointer isn't available in most of the world hopefully the other manufacturers of pinpointers take note of some of its features and incorporate them into their new pinpointers. You do these settings using its paired phone application.