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Lanny

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Posts posted by Lanny

    A Monster Month

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    On 5/9/2017 at 12:02 AM, Lunk said:

    I recently had the very fortunate opportunity to use the Minelab Gold Monster 1000 for 30 days. During that time, I was able to discover the nuances of the machine that, like any metal detector, can only be fully realized by logging lots of hours behind the control box and investigating lots of targets. 

    In Steve's excellent review, he has covered most of what the GM 1000 is capable of doing, as well as the features and functions of the machine, so I will not rehash those here. Instead, I will relate my experiences with the detector and its unadvertised abilities that have come to light during my sojourn with it in hand. 

    etc............

    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

    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    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

    Single Frequency Vs Multi

    in Metal Detector Advice & Comparisons

    Posted

    On 8/3/2020 at 10:59 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

    A highly tuned single frequency detector can do the better job on some tasks, and multifrequency on others. In many situations it will make no difference which you use. They are just tools in the tool belt, each to be used when one provides an advantage over the other.

    Multifrequency provides a clear and undisputed advantage on mineralized saltwater beaches. Multifrequency also gives the engineer more information to work with as regards discrimination, providing generally better discrimination results. A single frequency detector tuned to a specific high frequency may derive some benefits for gold prospecting, for example. Or better EMI resistance. It is like manual versus automatic transmission. One is not better than the other per se, it is just two ways of doing things. I prefer a machine that offers both options.

    Selectable Frequency & Multiple Frequency

     

    Great explanation and solid response Steve, thanks!

    All the best,

    Lanny

    Its So Hotttt The Nuggets Rise To The Surface

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    On 8/17/2020 at 7:27 PM, wltdwiz said:

    well yesterday i went out for a bit :th_panic:

    it was a bit hot 107 but i just scored a gp 3000

    & i needed to give it a test run

    so i took it to a place thats all worked out .... ever heard that before?

    well before i melted totally i scored this 1.8 gram nugget :4chsmu1:

    great start

    its dam hot out there be very careful :desertsmile:

    Congratulations on your hot, sizzling find. As well, nicely done with your new-to-you machine!

    All the best,

    Lanny

     

    Minelab GPX 6000 Full Reveal In February 2021?

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    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

    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    16 hours ago, geof_junk said:

    Lanny you make it sound hard over there in USA 😉 Over in WA Australia I found about 40 nuggets one afternoon,  about half were sitting in the sun having a tan.😎 Most were about 2 or 3 grams in weight.....LINK...... I guess us Ozzie's are a bit blessed or maybe lazy. 😁 Thanks again for your detailed description of your adventure.     👍

    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

    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    Lake Placers #4

    I 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

    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    Lake Placers #3

    As part of this ongoing series of gold tales, I’ll explain the channel depositions of this area. From what the geologists and the miners out-lined, the glaciers were masters of that northern kingdom for eons. There were glacial stream concentrations of six or seven channels laid down from different directions of deposition. This reflects the continual glaciation and resultant upheavals of watersheds in the area. Moreover, as the glacial streams were constantly re-oriented at varying angles, they dropped their material in those new runs, some being heavy with gold, others barren

    The ongoing detective work, from the Sourdoughs of the 1800’s on down to today, went into determining which runs carried coarse gold. Furthermore, a super glacier had clearly bulldozed through this narrow choke point, scooping out most of the overlying channels as it worked its way down-slope and burrowed toward the bedrock. Evidently Mother Nature had been quite a help at stripping overburden. Nevertheless, with mysterious motives I'll never understand, she then burrowed deeper, hauling the rest of the coarse gold deposit off to banishment in an unknown location, leaving only the telltale bedrock gouges of that robber glacier, clearly evident at the end of the gold run.

    However, the beauty of the gold run left in place was that the face was only about six feet from the standing forest with its green and yellow carpet of moss, the depth of the channel shallow to bedrock. Clearly, this lowest run of the remaining overlapping channels had been packing a considerable amount of coarse, nuggetty gold, likely the result of much higher than average stream velocity which had propelled large boulders along with the big gold.

    I detected and recovered one smaller piece, match-head sized, from the crumbling rock, and then the ground went silent. So, we wandered back to the fierce zone of insane bedrock but only encountered a hot mess of false signals, no gold (I’d love to hit that spot today with the newest generation of Minelabs to tease more black nuggets from the bedrock!). Regardless, after finding only bits of blade on the surface, we wandered down-slope to where there was a four to six-foot wall of virgin rock and dirt. It was the spot where the bedrock dove under the forest floor and moss I mentioned earlier, and it marked the farthest advance of the mining cut.

    There was a slump of dirt, maybe a foot or two in front of the aforementioned wall, and then there was an exposed sheet of that red hot bedrock. The detector could only function at about half of its capacity, losing a lot of sensitivity as to depth. So, I hunted with far less power, but at least I was still in the game. (The new generation of Minelabs and coils deal with ridiculous bedrock much better.)

    I kept detecting, but the screeches from the detector sounded like a cat fight crossed with the squeals of train brakes gone wild! Regardless, I kept at it. As my buddy didn’t know how to run the detector, let alone deal with the hot bedrock racket in the headphones, he waited there like a bird-dog on point, ready for any game to flush. However, he didn’t have to be on point for long, as emerging from that tortured electronic noise there came the unmistakable low-high-low sound of gold!

    So, I tried to isolate the target signal from the background racket, and all at once I heard this series of terrible high-pitched wails, followed by screeching sounds I’d never heard while detecting. I thought the bedrock minerals had finally conquered the detector until I realized the noise was coming from my partner! A complete squadron of black-flies had crawled down the front of his shirt leaving a bright red patch of raw skin in the middle of his chest!! (If you know nothing of blackflies, you know nothing about the weeks of pain, the scratching, the possible madness from misery.) After hosing my buddy down with a bug dope shower, I got back to detecting.

    I was rewarded with the unmistakable sound of a good response. My partner scraped the bedrock as well as he could with one hand, and I used the flat side of my pick to clear the rest of the small stones and clay to expose the shallow pockets in the bedrock.

    My dim brain remembered that the DD coil might be much quieter than the little 8-inch mono-loop, so I made the switch, but before I got down on my knees to investigate, I swung the DD in a wider arc just to test its operation and heard several quiet signals—things were rapidly getting interesting. However, the continuous racket of feedback was still there, even with the DD! Putting the detector aside, I knelt down to have a look. However, what I saw was a visual mystery. I was looking at solid bedrock. I mean there were no crevices at all. I couldn’t fit a knife blade into any visible spaces.

    I’ll post Lake Placers #4 later.

    All the best,

    Lanny
     
    Nothin' quite as fun as chasin' sassy nugge

    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    A Few Hours To Hunt

    On 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,

    Lanny

    P.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.

    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    On 8/12/2020 at 4:07 AM, geof_junk said:

    Lanny I wish I could express myself like you. Language is the only thing that has disappointed me in life, or should I say spelling and grammar. I have a lot of story that people miss out on because of it, but at least they can enjoy yours.👍  

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

    All the best,

    Lanny

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