dig4gold

@Phrunt. I thought after the EMI fix on your 6000 that you loved it. What's changed? D4G

Lets just hope it doesn't have the issues the 6000 had. D4G

That's the truth right there. I am with you on that score. I was at a spot the other day that I had not been to for ages as my first time there I got nothing. I have learnt a lot more since then. The other day there were signs of old dig holes & scrapes not backfilled but had grassses growing in them. I saw no recent activity so the thought crossed my mind that maybe there just isn't any gold left. Obviously at one point there was & I had to believe that there still was. The area was high above a gold rich river that was littered with old worked ground. Water races & tailing races cutting through the schist bedrock, layers of stacked rock of both river/glacial & also broken up bed rock. Lots of exposed schist bedrock but mother nature was doing its best to repair the scars that mankind had inflicted & was quite quickly now covering the bedrock. I saw some scaley rotted flakey schist bedrock on the edge of a steep drop off down into the river. Waved my coil very slowly over it & got a faint signal. Scraped away at it & it was a small bit of gold. Then another. Then nothing. That run of bedrock then started to have a layer of deeper material over it & for no other reason than the bedrock had coughed up some bits of gold for me I just scraped away some of that material to get the coil closer to the bedrock. Bingo.... more gold. This bedrock ran along to a quite big crevice that had a small dead tree in it but with the branches sticking out everywhere I couldn't get my coil in there. I went back to my iron horse & grabbed a pair of loppers I had in there & trimmed off all the branches & managed to break out the trunk. Long story short, I got three nice little bits of gold for just shy of 2 grams. Moral of this yarn is that no gold is easy gold & you need to do a bit of rock & material removal to get your coil into those spots that the gold likes to hide in & that nobody else has bothered to do or just didn't think about doing it. You will be surprised at the gold left behind. D4G

Don't Minelab "talk" to you dealers? D4G

Excellent Lanny. Always tib bits of priceless info & advice in your writings. Thanks for sharing. I can't wait for your book. D4G

Yes it certainly does Lanny. Good on you. D4G

But.... what if it was faulty? You will never know now. I also wonder that the people that go on about the Z Search, have they tried any X coils? If not, then they will never know either. So, does it become an us & them thing? D4G

Time... aren't you on holiday? Connections.... most places you stay at will have free wifi. Even MacDonald's has free wifi. D4G

How about a nugget or two? I am sure he would like that more than a flake or two. If detecting fails you could take him panning down the Arrow or by the Oxenbridge Tunnel on the Shotover & almost be guaranteed a flake or two from my experience. D4G

From my understanding he got one 2nd hand, considered it a lemon & chopped the chip end off it to make an adapter for his X coils. There was a long standing debate from JP that it may have been a faulty coil from production but Phrunt just roasted it & gave it no 2nd chances. D4G

Well... it did find you gold so you shouldn't be too hard on it. D4G

I agree, the stock 11" is a great coil on the 6000 outside of its issues. I have been lucky with it so far in regards to those issues. The 10x5 is great for in the water creek detecting on the 6000. It has kind of taken over from the Gold Monster for me in that department because of its extra depth & edge sensitivity while still deadly on the tiny stuff. The 10x5 has proved itself to me finding gold in creeks the GM missed. Being just that bit deeper. On absolute bed rock scrubbing I would still give the GM the nod but throw in a bit of gravel & more depth then the 10x5 holds its own. Throw in some crevices & the ability of dragging the 10x5 on its edge down those crevices & its edge sensitivity comes into play as well. Like any detector & coil combo it comes down to the terrain, & the size & depth of gold expected. No one set up is going to do it all. D4G

I am sure you & JW can make that happen. D4G

Yes, he has been very slack in photos. None in fact. What he tells, & that is very minimal, kind of means nothing without photos. A photo tells a thousand words & would make his sharing of his journey a lot more meaningful. D4G

Thats already a LOT more than most people have. D4G

Bloody hell, so out of all of those, which do you use that gives you the most success? There must be a favourite stand out. I think your last gold finds post was with the 6000 & the NF 12x7. No mention of the NF 12x7. above yet it found you gold. D4G

The weather in NZ can be very fickle with 4 seasons in one day. It kind of gets more settled down in Central Otago where you are heading. The West Coast of the south island has the wettest weather in the country. Coming in from the Tasman sea & held up by the Southern Alps. It just drowns the West Coast. D4G

GEOGRAPHY THE POWER OF TAUPO Lake Taupo lies in the caldera of an active supervolcano, the site of the world’s most violent eruption of the last 70,000 years. Just 10 km beneath it sits another lake of molten rock 50 km wide and 160 km long. With a growing need for alternative energy sources, plans for tapping this latent reservoir are hotting up. Why would you consider it a minor eruption? It wasn't too minor from what I have read about it. You only have to see the size of the lake. Which you have. According to geological records, the volcano has erupted 29 times in the last 30,000 years with 25 of those in the last 12 thousand years . They reckon it last erupted about 250 CE, that is around 2 thousand years ago. Did you consider Mt St Helens a minor eruption? Would NZ survive if Lake Taupō erupted? This is what they say. For NZ, especially the North Island, if it's a real big supervolcano eruption, everybody dies (TM), to a first approximation. It could also seriously affect the climate of the whole earth. Well depending on the wind direction, the very least the east coast would be covered in ash, and lots of it. I could go on but I think I have made my point, that is it wasn't a minor eruption. D4G

A few more photos of the Aurora Lights viewed over the weekend from various places around the Queenstown area. Very spectacular. I believe Mitchel is heading for Queenstown. D4g

Hi Mitchel. Were you aware that Lake Taupo fills the caldera of of the Taupo volcano. That being a volcano that has collapsed into itself, often filling with water to form a lake. As in this case. Believed to have erupted 2000 odd years ago. A super volcano. Now that you have been there & seen the size of the lake, you can but imagine how that eruption must have been. I hope the weather is clear for you as you travel on from Taupo heading south up on the volcanic plateau & along the desert road past the three volcanoes. Mt Ruapehu, Mt Tongariro & Mt Ngauruhoe. Still classified as active. Don't forget to stay on the right side of the road. In our case that is on the left. 😉 D4G

Why do you call it a wire? It is a cord. As Nenad has said, you need to lock the bungee cord into the grove. You pull down on the cord to achieve the right height of your detector off the ground & then while holding the weight on the cord horizontally pull the cord away from your body & up & it will lock into that wedge shaped groove & you are good to go. D4G

How come no photos? D4G

Or reduce their price. D4G

Maybe because there was/is lots of gold there. Goes without saying I reckon. D4g

That's interesting. I don't recall any posts you have made of gold you have found from where they are prospecting. https://www.santanaminerals.com/bendigo-ophir-new-zealand D4G