Lanny

Used it lots, works great, happy with it. Doc's a great guy to deal with as well, in addition, always thinking outside the box to create new items to better serve prospecting needs. All the best, Lanny

Great timing on your move, and congratulations on finding the gold. Nicely done, and all the best, Lanny

Nice find, congratulations! All the best, Lanny

Enjoyed the story, and liked the gold you gathered as well. Thanks for taking the time to write about your adventure, and congratulations on getting some gold with your machine. All the best, Lanny

Sad indeed for the loss. All the best, Lanny

Nice haul indeed. All the best, Lanny

Never met him, but he sounds like a class act, especially after reading Largo's post on Smokey returning Largo's lost nuggets! Sad to hear about his passing, all the best, Lanny

Lunk--Hello, I'm late to this party, but was doing some research on the GM 1000 as my wife will be using it this upcoming weekend on some bedrock. I found this article very informative, especially the bit about balancing out the magnetite as the bedrock will have lots of chunks of magnetite. Thanks for the other tips as well, really appreciate them. All the best, Lanny

Wow! Those are amazing finds. Nicely done, and all the best, Lanny

Thoroughly enjoyed the story and the pictures, nicely done! All the best, and thanks for posting, Lanny

Wow!! Nice finds! All the best, Lanny

Sweet ring find indeed! Nicely done. All the best, Lanny

Nice nugget find, congratulations! All the best, Lanny

A New Learning Curve My son and I loaded up our blue mule (Dodge 3/4 ton diesel) and headed for the mountains Friday evening.That meant we'd be doing part of the drive in the dark, and setting up camp in the dark, but when we're out chasing the gold, that's no hardship at all.Early the next morning, we did an equipment check: gold pans, a bucket full of sniping equipment, a couple of picks, as well as several detectors. On our way to check freshly uncovered bedrock, we wanted to make sure we had what we needed.My son had his Minelab X-Terra 705, a machine he's got about 600 hours on detecting for coins and jewelry (and he's done very well!), a machine I gave him a few years ago, but he's never used it to look for nuggets, so this trip would be a new learning curve for him.The 705 is a machine that Minelab put a lot of extra technology inside for the price-point at the time, and it had sniffed out nuggets in the past, so I knew it would do the job on shallow to gold bedrock that wasn't super hot.To leave camp that Saturday morning, we ignited the throaty roar of the diesel and left camp slowly, as in August the super-dry roads in camp are blanketed with fine clay dust that mushrooms a cloud of dust that goes everywhere.When we hit the main forest service track, we opened it up a bit more, but the washboard condition of the gravel roads wouldn't let us go too fast without shaking the truck to its core.Next, we hit the paved highway and made excellent time.It was a glorious, windless day. The sky was completely cloudless, the ceiling of air a perfect cobalt blue, the pines and firs a deep green that contrasted beautifully with the flawless blue sky.After seventy minutes, we finally arrived at the mine, this after leaving the highway then slowly navigating a logging road, one heavily rutted from recent haulage. The road included what the locals call "punchouts", places where the roadbed has been pounded through by logging trucks that leave dangerous soft sections. If you hit those sections at speed, the front end of your truck dives down deep and fast and you experience the "punch"! Then you come flying out. If you enter too slowly, and not in 4-wheel drive, you get stuck, so it's an ongoing challenge.At the mine site, the owner was chatting with the vacuum truck crew, the group cleaning the bedrock for the next couple of days. After his meeting, he told us where we could work away from the vacuum crew, but he also wanted us to check their progress to see if any gold was being left behind. We did from time to time, and we directed them to spots where they'd left some gold.To work the bedrock effectively, I made sure my son had a magnetic wand to deal with the never-ending bits of steel from the excavation. Moreover, with the bedrock super-hard once again (like last week), the magnet would clear the surface signals so the softer sounds of gold could be heard.We fired up our detectors. I chose the Gold Bug Pro as I love the digital meter on shallow bedrock as an aid to ID'ing the gold. Moreover, for any iffy signal, a quick swipe with the magnet usually solves the puzzle, or some quick pick and magnet work either tells the tale or requires more investigation. Furthermore, in several cases where the meter read lower than gold, the nuggets were sitting among pieces of magnetite (ironstone) that skewed the digital reading, but once the magnet had removed the ironstone, the gold signal was nice and clear.While I was collecting a nice catch of nuggets, my son was having some frustration with his detector due to all of the bits of steel, but he kept at it and at last he found two nuggets with the 705! Well, the dam burst after that, and he showed some innovation as well. When he'd get a signal that was strange, he'd quickly switch to discrimination, and if he got any positive response, he knew it might be a nugget. He kept toggling back and forth over the next couple of days to verify signals, and it worked out very well for him.The bedrock we worked was often broken in sharp slabs, so we had to be very careful while walking over and through those troughs of iron-hard bedrock as the footing was bad. To slip would be to get a nasty cut, and luckily, we avoided any injury until the second day my son did a nice circular slice around his finger when he reached too quickly into a crevice to check out a signal.In the bedrock, there were slabs of clay stuck to the sides of the troughs either where the excavator had broken chunks of bedrock out or where we used bars to pry apart sections. That sticky clay held the gold! Sometimes, after locating a target, we could see the gold stuck to the clay and only had to pry it out.I scanned a section of bedrock where there was a deeper hole. The excavator had hit a soft spot within that super-hard bedrock, and at the end a bedrock rise, there was a small pile of channel stones. I got a cracking response that turned out to be a six gram nugget! We kept at it until it started to get dark, and by the time we headed up to the mine boss's trailer, we'd caught just over an ounce of nuggety gold.The next day, I let my son go solo, and I only hung around to give him tips if needed. However, he did well fine tuning his own system of ID'ing targets by toggling back and forth from prospecting mode to discrimination. He kept gathering a nice collection of targets in the little orange bucket he threw his signals into. (Rather than take the time to visually ID each target, he'd throw them in the bucket so he could pan them all out at the end of the day.) As well, when he'd get a broad signal under the coil (which often indicates a concentration of flake gold), he'd scoop that dirt into the bucket as well.As darkness closed on that last day, he panned out the dirt in his bucket. He'd caught half an ounce of sassy gold! That included a three gram nugget he'd found through determination. He was detecting a flat chunk of bedrock that held lots of steel signals, but he kept swiping them off with the magnet. Then he got a good sound right on the edge of the flat bedrock where it dropped off into a pocket of water. He worked the signal with his pick until he popped it out, and that was how he found his nice nugget! Without removing the steel shavings that produce such a nasty racket in the headphones, he'd likely have missed the nugget.So, we got a 1.5 ounce bounce for those two days, but golden memories of a hunt together that will last a lifetime.All the best,Lanny

Having read through the rest of this thread, I've truly enjoyed all of the feedback on the original question. Well done all of you that have contributed! All the best, Lanny

Great explanation and solid response Steve, thanks! All the best, Lanny

When I get the chance, I'll remember that, thanks. All the best, Lanny

Not sure how excited I am about this release unless they make the machine considerably lighter--I'm with Steve on that issue--but of course I'll have a look at it when it comes out to see exactly what any serious advantages might be. I'm fast falling in love with using the new generation of lightweight VLF's to first check the ground, then unlimber the heavy Minelab to get the deeper stuff afterward, but I'm not in love with swinging a heavy beast all day just because. In fact, if the competition comes out with a great new machine that's going to be close to or equal to what the 6000 supposedly will do, I'm seriously considering that as a go-to option. All the best, Lanny

Yes, I'd say it's harder to find nugget patches here in North America for most people. Some of the California/Nevada/Arizona nugget hunters seem to have more luck, but here in Canada, where I'm currently chasing the gold (I have chased it in the United States, from Arizona to Alaska), it's not a likely thing to find large patches of nuggets like you do in Australia. That's why someday, I'd love to chase the gold in Australia to get a crack at some of those sun-bakers you find just laying around. It's been a rare thing for me to find sun-bakers, but I have found a few. I popped over to one of your threads and looked at your aerial views of some of your nugget patches, made me drool all over the keyboard! All the best, and thanks for the information about Western Australia, Lanny

Lake Placers #4I knew there were signals in the bedrock, and they sounded sweet, so I headed off to gather tools. We had a small sledge back in the truck, an assortment of rock chisels, and the Estwing pry-bar, the one that has the pointed chisel end on the bottom, and the flat L-shaped head on the top. Moreover, the “L” can be used to scrape or be used as a chisel as well to hammer into a crevice—absolutely beautiful little tool.Having rounded up the tools, I hustled back to the site. The most amazing part was that once I started to chisel out bedrock chunks, the original bedrock was indeed solid, but there was a natural cement of fine-grained, crushed black slate that had been running with the gold in the stream channel that created a perfectly camouflaged matrix, the matrix rock hard as well. In this way, Nature had hidden the original crevices perfectly.Using hammer and chisel, I worked my way down well outside the edge of the signal’s midpoint. I usually had to go down two to four inches to get below the signal, but then I’d insert a longer chisel and reef on it until the piece of bedrock and matrix popped out. Sometimes the piece would flush up in the air just like a game bird! (It makes sense now why my partner was on point like a bird dog.) After the first nugget flew, we made sure to block the flight path with a large gold pan. We couldn’t risk losing any nuggets in adjacent cobble piles.After recovering the nugget-rich matrix, I took the chunks and carefully tapped on them until they started to fracture and crumble. (As the matrix and the bedrock were of the same hardness, I never knew where the piece was going to fracture.) Having reduced everything to small pieces, I passed them under the coil to pinpoint the gold-bearing ones.After tapping away to remove the remaining residue, the gleam of gold was unmistakeable. Moreover, all of the nuggets had wonderful character, nothing flat, featureless or hammered. It was incredible fun liberating a dozen of those long hidden multi-gram nuggets.Did I smash any fingers while reducing the chunks? Absolutely. Did it hurt? If a fingernail goes black and falls off later, would that qualify? Regardless, the gold adventure was well worth the effort.In another instalment, I’ll talk about detecting the test-piles farther up that same placer claim and what I found in them.All the best,Lanny

A Few Hours To HuntOn Saturday, my son and I headed to the mine in the mountains with only a few hours to hunt the gold.We arrived at the placer cut, and we could hear an excavator working somewhere on the placer lease.We looked over the bank and saw the mine owner working at stripping off the bottom fifteen or so feet of the sixty feet of overburden to get to the virgin bedrock underneath.As soon as I looked at his machine, I noticed something was wrong, so I got the operator's attention, and he shut his machine down. He opened the door to see what was up, and I told him he'd thrown a track! He was just about to turn his machine which would have caused a lot more trouble. He thanked us for flagging him down, then he made the long walk up the haulage road to have a chat with us.He was happy we'd come along when we did, and he yakked with us for a while. We learned that the motor on their largest excavator had seized the day before, and that they were busily searching for a replacement, but they were having a hard time as the diesel motor was a specific design with a special high horsepower build.We asked how the vacuum truck had worked at suctioning the bedrock my wife and I had tested for them last week, and he said their test had worked out much better than they'd even expected. In fact, from now on whenever they hit super-hard bedrock, they'll use the suction retrieval system to clean the bedrock.He told us we could go play in a spot they were no longer working where there was a small hump of bedrock protruding from an old haulage road.My son and I only had several hours to play as my granddaughters were at our mining camp that weekend and we needed to get back for a family cookout, so we unlimbered the detectors as well as the panning and sniping equipment and headed for the bedrock hump.My son took one end, and I took the other.It was a typical August day, hot, hot with perfectly clear skies, the blazing sunshine pounding the bottom of the cut. A brown and orange butterfly gently pumped its body up and down in front of us as we started to snipe likely looking spots. The gentle chuckle of an ice-cold spring flowing from the side of the cut was the only natural sound on that calm day.I tested a small area first with my gold pan; there was some friable rock exposed, but it held not gold. So, I dug around until I found a v-shaped crevice that held more material. The top part was gooey clay and rock hauled in to cover the bedrock to make the road; however, digging deeper, I soon uncovered intact ancient channel material that was instantly recognizable by its composition.I blanked on the first pan, but prying apart some bedrock and exposing seams of orange-stained clay, the second pan produced a nice piece of gold half the size of an oatmeal flake. That got my son's attention!He wasn't having any luck on his end of the hump, so I told him to hit my spot hard while I took out the detector to scan what I'd already cleaned. Sure enough, I found two nice pickers that were stuck to the clay on the sides of the crevice. I worked along behind him as he pulled out channel material, and when I'd get a broad signal, he'd pan the material out, and it usually held nice flakes of gold.I had my hooked bedrock scraper (spoon-shaped on the other end), and I scraped all of the material from the crack at the bottom of the crevice.My son headed off to pan it, and when he came back, he had two large flakes in the pan. Then I heard a whack and looked back at the pan, and he'd dropped a nugget in!The two gram nugget made the flakes look small, but the smile on his face was huge.We had to finish chasing the gold as it was time to start the seventy minute trip back to camp, but we'd rescued 3.62 grams of gold from an ancient channel, a stream bed that was last disturbed millions of years ago when the dinosaurs tip-toed through them.All the best,LannyP.S. My son also panned out 2.5 grams of gold from some virgin dirt we brought back from the outing my wife and I had last weekend.

Thanks Jim, and it was great to get out again, and it did start to make up a bit for not being out for so long. All the best, Lanny

Thanks for the compliment, and I really would love to ready your stories some day! All the best, Lanny