TAZMAN1972

Rick, I guess the nuggets i found in one of my spots would be called Chevron then. I have only found them in that ONE particular spot in CA. Have you ever found any other Chevron gold in CA? I wonder if all gold was deposited as or grew as crystals or does some of it just have the "impression" or "negative" of the rock that it was touching?

Lucky, Those are some special nuggets. I like the spaghetti one the best though! I have actually found a 4 or 5 that look a little like the one on your tailgate, not so big, but i found them in one spot in the West slope of the Sierra range about 4500 ft elevation. Is the one on the tailgate considered crystalline gold or Chevron gold?

Well, I used the whink on my large nugget. The 1st pic is after about 48 hours. (the pics may be backwards) I did this in steps. I started with an hour, then 8 hours, then 24 hours etc. I took it out and gently toothbrushed it each time. I did find that once I started I really had to keep going because the in-between natural and clean (1st pic) just wasn't doin it for me. I am really happy with the final result which took about 72 hours. I really had no idea how rough it was going to be and how many small pieces of quartz their was under the covering of DARK red. This nugget is really neat to look at under the magnifying glass! Not sure if you can zoom in on it on the forum though. Thanks for the help with the Whink, I really like the stuff!

Not so little for the large one. Nice golden gold!

i can see them too! I also see a gorilla head with teeth bared looking left. The dark shadow is the eye sockets.

Thanks for the nice comments. Scott, the two large pieces were found about 100 feet apart so I don't think they went together but the top 2 and bottom left were all found close to each other. I just tried to put them together anyway just now. No go but good thought! Until next time!

Rye Patch gold is always real pretty. It has been too long since I have been there. Glad to see you had such a fun and productive time!

I had my Sunday free so I went up to the Sierra to try to get one more trip before the snow starts. 5 hours total driving and 6 hours of detecting... Priceless! I have been detecting alone since the summer. I like not having any interference from another detector in the area but there is just something missing when you have to hike, eat lunch, detect and, in the case of this trip, fist pump over a nice find...by yourself. That might just be me though. It took about 3 hours to find the first one which was the largest at 2 dwt. the total for the 4 pcs was 0.2 ozt. The last 3 were all within about 20 feet from each other and the 2nd largest was literally only about 1" down. I think the one on the bottom left looks like a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull! I always look for shapes in my nuggets like some people look for shapes in the clouds! I didn't find the nickel on this trip but I did find it not too far from this spot. I was swinging for hours with not a single target and this nickel was all by its' lonesome! I suppose a miner or logger dropped it on accident. It was a beautiful day and I was really glad to have made it up there.

Thanks Strick! I went and bought the Whink. I took a before and after pic of some smaller "ugly" nuggets that I always wanted to clean up better. I know, I know, no such think as ugly gold but it is all relative right? Anyway see the before and after pics. You may notice one of them is missing between the two pics, I always thought it was gold but it was lead. I am really happy with how it turned out. I am thinking of putting the big one in the Whink for a little bit and see how it goes. I will do before and after pics again.

Wow, beautiful piece of gold with a lot of character!

Tortuga, I didn't see that you asked about my settings. I run it wide open. High Yield x Normal x Sensitivity @ 20 x Volume at 7 with stock headphones or 14 with speaker x Audio Smoothing OFF x Threshold 23 x Ground balance Auto. I used to run in manual but I can't seem to find fault with auto so there you go! When it gets too noisy, on occasion, i put it on Difficult but I don't touch anything else. It is really like swinging my GMT with all the blips beeps and whining but the real targets seem to scream out. I have not actually found any new spots since getting the 7000. I have just been going back to the places I have been getting gold for the last 4-5 years, that had gotten hard to find gold at, and they seem to produce almost like new. It may sound backwards but I figure once things slow down again I will try the opposite approach and try running quiet. I have actually been switching to difficult when I swing over a target that is deep (doesn't sound at the edge of the coil). There has been more than one target that was so faint I am not sure I would have recognized it the first time if I had been running in difficult.

I will try it on some smaller nuggets that have rust and caliche before i even think about trying it on the big one. I will post some before and after pics of the smaller nuggets (Really just large flakes). This may take me a few weeks.

Don't fret kiwi, She wasn't using it and I still have the Whites GMT. It is a bit more her size anyway. Thanks for the nice comments!

Went up to the Plumas National Forest yesterday. My buddy has a very cool Ford military jeep. The thing goes anywhere and we needed it to get where we went. We found 2 small hardrock mines. Both were collapsed. One must have been large enough for rail and mine carts because I found a narrow gauge rail spike. Also found some rock drills/chisels and the sledge hammer head that was used with them hidden under a ledge of a very large boulder. There was so much ferrous trash that I didn't even turn on the 7000 all day. I used my Whites GMT and just looked for large ferrous targets and small non-ferrous. Not sure what the loop is for but it looks hand forges along with what looks like a hand forged door handle? The curved parts are SQ like a sq nail and they are bent over in opposite directions. I thought is was a door handle because it has shoulders that look like they were meant to only allow it to be hammered in part way. Then the two "nails" were bent over like a door nail. "As dead as a doornail"? That's my guess. It was an awesome day, 72 degrees F and sunny, no breakdowns with the jeep and some cool finds! Any one else have a guess about the doorhandle or the "loop"?

What I would really like is if I could just accentuate the high ridges of gold that stand out in front of the dark like tiger stripes. Is Wink like CLR but a bit stronger? I never heard, does everyone think that it is ironstone covering it? There is just a little bit of iron stained quarts on it too. I also realized I put the weight wrong on it. It is actually 0.69 ounce. The next smaller one with the quartz is the half ouncer.

Thanks guys. My wife also likes it, natural, the way it is too. I had to sell 3 ounces, my 5000 and my wife's 3000 to help pay for the 7000. As a rule I don't sell my gold but after reading so many posts about the 7000 I could see the benefit. I just need to get out more to start paying it back! Prime weather for detecting in CA coming up!

Hey all, I have not had time to post for a long time so thought I would brag a bit about my GPZ finds. I have had the detector about a year now and these are my finds to date. I still run it flat out on Normal every chance I get and have been happy with it. I love this detector except for a while there I had tennis elbow from it. Had to start using the swing stick and that slowly got better and is now gone. I would like some opinions on what to do with the large one covered in what looks like ironstone. It is really solid right under the ironstone, not porous. I tried soaking it in CLR for a few days and toothbrushed it with absolutely no improvement. Should I leave it natural? Acid? other ideas? Thanks!

Very pretty! Looks like a golden arrowhead...To me anyway. Now go get another! :-)

Wow! that is just crazy! congrats. Something told you to dig it. I have been in areas like this before and "usually" do not have the fortitude to dig a target that loud. I need to rethink. Tobin

I think I remember this from an older ICMJ. I can't even dream of something like this. My mind just can't comprehend what it would be like to find or where I would find something like these "potato's". Tobin

Thanks guys! I just keep wondering why was this cap gun out in this field? I have found hundreds of sq nails, horseshoes, and the stirrup there too. I wonder if the miners had a camp there right next to the gold and this was a stable or corral and one of the kids was playing in the corral and dropped his gun and then a horse stepped on it and crushed it? I could just make up scenarios all day and it is fun to think about. I am going to go back and see if I can find the trigger and the other half of the cylinder. Tobin

I went out to a field near me that has yielded lots of gold over the years but not much recently. There is still gold there, but it is few and far between. I had my 7000 and Whites GMT. I was in an area that was just packed with trash so I pulled out the whites to try to pick through it and find some non-ferrous targets. I guess there was just too much iron in the soil because lead bullets and even my gold sample glued to a poker chip showed 50-75% on the iron scale. I had found a stirrup in this area two years ago, and since I really couldn't distinguish ferrous from non-ferrous targets I figured I would look for some relics. I soon found a screaming target louder than the rest. I pulled it out and it was a small piece of cast iron that I could barely make out the numbers 1776. I knew their was no way it could actually be from 1776 though. I kept digging in the area and then found the other half to the first piece and it looked like the handle to a derringer. This was pretty exciting so I kept digging the area and found 4 more pieces, the hammer, two halves of a barrel and another piece that I could not tell what it was. I could tell that it was not a real gun, just a toy, since the barrel was in two halves. When I got home I did a web search and found examples of the toy in just a few minutes! It ended up being a cap pistol made in 1876 for the centennial. The other side of the handle has 1876 on it but it is too rusted to make out. Here is a short description of the cap gun and pics of some in good shape, with my find at the bottom. The picturs are of the S1.1.1 but I measured mine and since it is about 5.25" long it looks like it is the S1.1.2. Since I don't look for relics, I usually don't find them. Even though it was not gold and it is rusted and broken this is one of my coolest finds and it was pretty neat to find out exactly what it was. Stevens "1776 - 1876" Centennial Cast Iron Cap Gun made in 1876 S1.1.1 with a three star rating for rarity as described in the book Cast Iron Toy Guns and Capshooters by Samuel H. Logan and Charles W. Best. The Stevens "1776 - 1876" is a single shot single action capshooter. There are two that are almost exactly the same and they are identified as S1.1.1 and S1.1.2 in the book Cast Iron Toy Guns and Capshooters by Samuel H. Logan and Charles W. Best. The only difference between the two is the size. This one is the smaller of the two by 1/2 of an inch. It is 4.75 inches in length.

Steve, Exactly. Love-Hate. Love finding gold I know I would not have found with my 5000 but hate finding pieces of trash that my 5000 would not have found. I forget about the trash when a small flake shows up in the scoop though! Tortuga, My largest nugget is only 0.4 ounces. Some of the areas I detect have had large nuggets found, and deep. I am just worried I am giving up too soon on a large deep nugget. I think I need to take a large piece of lead and bury where I hunt so I can know what a large deep target really sounds like with the 7000. Thanks for starting the thread Condor. Tobin

Hi guys, I am new to this forum. I have had my 7000 for about 6 months now and it is for sure a love/hate relationship. I started out with a GMT then GP Extreme, 4000 and 5000. Since I started out with the GMT I was used to a loud chattery detector so I have been running all of my minelabs pretty hot. I have been running flat out with the 7000 for the last 2 months and I really see a difference. for example I went back over a 20x20 foot patch I hammered over the years with my other detectors. Took my 7000 running "quiet". I was stoked to find 3 more small nuggets under 5 grains that everything else missed. I went back and ran flat out and found 2 more under 3 grains. I have been back 2 times and not found any in that spot but have found lots of small stuff in other spots that had not yielded gold in a while. I love the detector when it finds gold which is just about anywhere where there are nuggets and not a lot of trash. I love that. I essentially can't even use the detector in other areas with trash. Especially with the gain up, it finds small pieces of iron that would give my GMT a run for it but with no discrimination. Hate that. With the older Minelabs, I could be a little discerning with a mono coil and could tell a square nail from a nugget or bullet about 50% of the time. I personally can't do that with the 7000, not a bit. One thing I will say about running hot, be prepared to dig hot pockets of dirt. Maybe I will get better at it but right now a small hot pocket of red dirt sounds just like deep target. I will dig 16 inches down before realizing that it is not a target. I could go on and on but I will leave it at this. I like running hot! (so far) Thanks, Tobin