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Now that I have aftermarket coils, an EMI fix to allow me to use my speaker and a nice working GPX 6000 there was just one more thing bugging me, the shaft twist. Mine started off good, I was there gloating how mine doesn't twist but that didn't last long, a few times out looking for gold and it was twisting like Chubby Checker with a slight breeze. A while ago GotAU came up with an idea of putting little o-rings in there and he said it worked for him, such a simple cheap solution. I kept meaning to try it and never got around to it, mainly because I had to remember to buy some o-rings and always forgot. Well, I finally got around to it, I bought some and it appears to have worked well, my shaft no longer needs over tightened to make it secure. It got to the point the only way I could prevent it from twisting was to use something like vice grips to tighten it up which I figured would end up breaking it in no time. So, now I've done GotAU's recommended fix and I can say so far it's working fine. For such a cheap price and simple solution it's worth giving it a shot for anyone having a twisting shaft. I didn't bother to measure my shaft, I just bought a multi pack for a couple of bucks You just dismantle the shaft, slide the little O-ring up over the shaft to the position you want to tighten up your shaft then tighten it up, couldn't be more simple. Slide it up over the shaft and into position, a lot further back than this photo obviously. I used ones that were quite small, they were smaller than the shaft but stretched over it. So far so good, thanks GotAU for the great idea, you should be a shaft engineer at Minelab, although you might be over-qualified for the job. The only downside is it's slightly slower to shrink it down as you have to move the o-ring by hand, maybe if I used a looser fitting one I wouldn't need to do that, I'll give it a try sometime, at the moment I'm just happy it's not twisting.

I decided to work a patch near some power lines today and was reluctant to use the larger DD coil even though it works great here at eliminating most EMI interference. Usually I always run the 6000 with the threshold on for hearing the fainter signals better, but today I decided to keep the 9" mono coil on it and lowering the sensitivity to manual 5 and also turning off the threshold. This resulted in no EMI interference using the mono coil. The sensitivity was still fairly good and I was picking up the little bits pretty good. This also allowed me to turn the threshold back on when moving farther away from the power lines without doing several coil swaps throughout the day.

I sure do!!! I'm probably spelling his name wrong but, Great Britain's Jim Fiveash built custom detector's that was among the first to successfully hunt in the coke, coal, & iron debris of the Thames River shoreline. His last three improved versions of The Red Heat XD 17s. Were sent to America. For myself & two friends. Jim was a brilliant mind, that was dying of cancer while completing our machines. It took Jim a long time to complete our three custom built detectors, they were improved version of his legendary XD-17. Jim died shortly after we received our machines. He never even got a full report of there amazing performance! These machines were way ahead of there time, with great depth, separation, lightening fast retune speed & telescoping rod deployment. I foolishly sold my Red Heat 17+ not truly considering the brilliant cutting edge technology, workmanship & shear artwork that Jim had poured his final days into. Making these machines for 3 American fans of his work. Somewhere in America, there is 3 very extra special Red Heat Detector's!!! I hope they're in good hands & still detecting relics!!! I don't even have a picture of them. RIP Jim!!!

I’ve booked a trip for a week in July at AK/AU Gold Camp in Nome. They do rent Metal detectors and they’re part of the package. Other than the Gold Monster 1000 and Nox 800, I’m not too familiar with the other Minelab products they might have available. I was thinking about taking my Garrett Axiom. I have two concerns. First, what’s the best way to get it there? I’ve heard that Lithium batteries should not ride in an unpressurized area like a cargo hold. I suppose I could carry it on in the convenient backpack everything fits in. Second, how will it handle the Alaskan ground? I’ve heard that VLF machines work better there. Thanks in advance!

Hello I need a battery cover for a Garett Hunter 7. Any ideas?

Ethan is looking for a second hand detector, as someone who's never bought a new vehicle in my life I get it. But there are certain things I may not buy second hand, detectors may be one of them. If I was buying a detector that I was completely familiar with then yes I would, but what happens when you have never used the machine before. There are many factors to consider here, The amount of money involved is one I guess, second hand GPZ 7000's and GPX 6000's are holding their value pretty well in Australia, is the saving worth the risk especially when you consider that if you haven't used the detector how do you know if it's working properly. If you are looking for older or cheaper machines then this becomes less important. As some one who may consider buying an expensive P.I. machine secondhand, I would like to hear how others have approached this and how many would never buy a used machine and why ?

I would like Everyone's thought on this. My Father is planning to buy a gold detector from a brand called AKS specifically AKS Multi GFIS 3d. I found the brand not very trusting cause it has few reviews and they are not very active in their official YouTube channel. Did anyone knew about this brand?

Hey guys, I was recently contacted by a local person with a personal treasure story. Apparently this woman's ex-boyfriend buried a box with several gold bars in their back yard. It was meant to be a surprise for her but he tragically died in a car crash and didn't get the opportunity to present her with it. She learned of this recently after his death. She knows which property it's located on but the area is 1/4 acre in size and she figures it's buried 4-6 feet deep. There are apparently several gold bars the sized of Hershey bars. There is supposed to be other treasures but she doesn't know what those are. She doesn't know what kind of container this stuff is buried in. If it was metal we could find it pretty easily with a magnetometer but she's not sure. What technologies are available to detect at that depth? I'm not aware of any detectors that can reliably go that deep.

I didn't know where else to put this but I thought I would try here but if it needs to be moved Steve go for it. A little background, I am in no way affiliated with this company other than I bought one of these to help relieve my elbow pain. In addition to detecting I coach golf, do a lot of push-ups/pull-ups in my fitness routine and drag my scoop behind me when on the beach. My elbows always used to hurt and there were times I chose not to detect as my tendinitis was just to painful. I found armaid through a fitness friend and tried it out and bingo, it has helped to alleviate the pain I'd get from swinging my detector or anything else physical using my arms. As we age things don't quite work as they used to and pain shows up more often in our daily lives. When I started to see relief I thought this was too good not to share with the forum at DP as I'm sure many others suffer from elbow tendinitis as well as painful wrists and fingers so here is the website. www.armaid.com They have a bunch of videos that show you how to use it so it's pretty easy to get started. Again I have zero interest in the company and my only reason for sharing it here is that it might be able to help someone eliminate or lessen their arm pain so they can detect more. I tried to attach a picture but I ran into problems so I apologize for that.

as the title reads what do you do when you are detecting an area that is so heavy in Magnetite that none of your detector work the area I am in detecting for gold is this way, the solution I have come up with is to fill five gallon buckets with dirt haul them back home and run them through a small sluice, like the gold fox mini monster, the area has a layer of magnetite down anywhere from 1-5 inches, when you drag a 2 inch rare earth magnet through it the magnet comes back looking like a tennis ball,it is like trying to detect over a iron plate, have found no detector as of yet that will see much deeper the 3-6 inches and the 6 inches is exaggerating it LOL, and that includes a pulse detector that I just recently sold, just thought I would pose this question and get some opinions from the more experienced gold detectorist, every area I have detected here where I live is like this, I have tried the Legend which when you activate the mineralization meter on the Legend it literally pegs the iron particle side of the meter at 10 bars the salt side is reading 3-5 bars, GM 1000, Xterra 705, Whites TDI, Simplex Plus as well as a few others, nothing seems to work, so what do you all do when you encounter an area like I described Thanks for reading

I'm not new to prospecting or metal detectors but I am new to owning a PI machine I've used the gpz a lot but never owned a PI so now I have a Whites TDI and I'm wondering rather to turn my thershold all the way down so I only hear targets or to hunt with a threshold like I see my cousin do with his gpz 7000? Any positives or negatives. I'm not a fan of bees in my head but I will keep it if I get say better depth.

About 2 months ago, I purchased a Nox 800, brand new / open box, for a little over $700. (about a $200 savings) The online seller had 3 or 4 units at that time, and they all sold fast. Before I purchased it, I emailed the seller, and was told it would have the FULL 3 year warranty. So i pulled the trigger, and it arrived a few days latter. Still had the shipping plastic on the keypad, and the screen protectors and cables were unopened. It looked brand spanking new, minus the open box description. I immediantly contacted Minelab reguarding a warranty. Gave them the serial number and registered the warranty I even called the service center, and was assured, that I had a 3 year warranty. Its been a great detector, and Ive certainly put it through its paces over the last few months. It has rewarded me very well, with a large amount of clad, small amount of silver, and 1 gold ring! Ive followed the same seller since then, and watched them acquire and sell yet another batch of similar nox 800 units (new/open box). I wonder where or how, they are able to get ahold of these open boxed machines, that have never had the warranty initiated. Any thoughts?

The Chinese manufacturers are not only doing clones they're doing mash ups combining features of one model in the look of another. This one is pretty interesting, it looks like a GPZ, combined with a CTX 3030, combined with a normal VLF for functionality and coil design, and includes a full colour touch screen. I like the GPX 4500/5000 arm cuff on a GPZ body. 🙂 It truly is a shame they don't use their talents to make their own detectors, you would think with the clones they can pop out and the skills that they must have to do them they could sit down and build a detector of their own and start a genuine manufacturing company for detectors rather than using other companies ideas. One thing they did do right that Minelab could learn from is getting rid of the weak CTX coil ears and using the GPZ 7000 coil mounting ears on a CTX shaft.

Hello there, long time forum observer here and thank you to Mr Hershback for this great website. I'm wondering if detectorist really need to have maybe a small advantage in performance and features on high end detector vs the mid range detectors? or even maybe some of the beginner detectors. As in my conclusion by observing information's from this forum (since i didn't have the resources to test out by myself) there are very small difference in performance between the legend, equinox and deus 2. I guess what I'm asking is where/in which scenario the high end detector shines from all other detector to justify the price. Thank you for reading and sorry for my bad English. Happy hunting wherever you at.

Looking for a gold prospecting club in Gold Beach Oregon or someone who knows about Gold Beach prospecting on the beach

Anyone have any good fortune around the southern Michigan area? There was a gent on YouTube talking about finding baby nuggets near the Grand Rapids creeks. I'm hoping to make a trek soon before it gets too cold, and do some testing, God willing.

Hello, looking for some trouble shooting help. I bought this xdovet metal detector (see below) a while back and it has been working just fine, until yesterday. We took it out to a reservoir and we were searching in sand. We always put the settings to find any metal. It beeps when we get close to a large steel object like a picnic table but I threw my keys on the ground and it didn't beep at all but in the past we have found small nails. We put a fresh battery in it, no change. We turned up the sensitivity, no change. It seems like it's not sensing properly but I have no indication as to why. No error messages on the screen. Any thoughts on trouble shooting to fix? Thanks

Last night I got in a 4 hour moon lit beach hunt watching the moon disappear into the clouds, fog and Pacific. That is reward by itself without finding much valuable jewelry. This was the 3rd night in a row for me and I'm pretty dialed in right now finding small and deep targets. One was a tiny computer chip and another was an aluminum can bottom at over 20 inches deep. I know metal detecting is like riding a bicycle but if you are a mountain biker or a mountain runner you know that more is generally better. Much of this summer I didn't have a reason to go out more than 3-4 hours a week or less sometimes but now I have been averaging over 20. How many hours a week do you detect?

I always found the best way (for me)to understand what the machine is saying is putting it on a lot of targets. Might say I only hunted for the easy stuff. Parks, schools and beaches. So digging a lot of targets to learn the machine. Always been a question to me is how people hunting for the hard stuff like silver in iron infested sites can really get to know their machines. I'm guessing hunting silver in over grown trashy areas sometimes means finding a very few good targets per hunt. Now I understand many hunters take far less time to understand a machine than others. A lot of hunters are still learning a machine even after digging a thousand good targets in the wild. I'm talking clad, jewelry. Going out and digging a thousand silvers or nice relics to me would take for ever to master a machine. On top of that the newer machines are far more complicated. It just seems to me that some can fully evaluate a machine in far, far less time than others. I got to admit I often learn something new every time I go out. So having comparisons with a few machines ( some borrowed ) on a handful of targets (some staged ) and then making a decision is beyond my pay grade. So hats off to the ones out there that are recognized as reliable testers.

Anyone know where I can get one of these? I'm finally too old to solder 😆 cjc

Hi All I’m just wondering if there’s anyway to tell the difference between gold rings/ jewellery and trash eg pull tabs as it all seams to come in around the same numbers!. I’ve dug many many targets between 10 and 15 and all have been trash I spent a few weeks at the beach and dug hundreds or targets between them numbers in the hope that one of them might have been a gold target but without luck!, I don’t usually dig much between them numbers as a rule but being the beach I didn’t want to miss the chance of it being something good. Anyway I just thought I’d ask the question if there was anyway of being able to see / telling the difference between a good target and trash between them numbers??, I know there’s Guys / Girls that would do a Lot more Detecting then myself and might’ve found a way or know some tell tale signs between trash and good targets between them numbers. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers

Here’s a simple fix for the 6000 twisting shaft issue- just put a 1/8th inch thick dry O-Ring inside each of the locking rings. When you twist the locking rings, the o-rings compresses and tightens up between the shaft locking ring and collet keeping the shaft sections from spinning as easily. I used these two sized o-rings (in inches): 13/16 x 1-1/16 x 1/8 3/4 x 1 x 1/8 Fully unscrew each plastic locking ring and separate each rod, leaving the plastic locking rings in place on them and put the o-rings on. Be sure the o-rings fit snuggly but not too tight around each rod as shown below. Then insert the rods back in place and reconnect the threaded locking rings with the o-rings between the two parts. The o-rings will slip between the plastic collets and the ring wall as you screw on the locking ring. When the locking ring gets hand-tight, the o-rings will provide more locking force between the rod sections so they can’t spin as easily.

I'm sharing my last experience during the end of a noisy dive... For those that hunts in saltwater like me, can be a gamechanger talking about noise to signals ratio.. I started with too demanding settings in P11, Sens.95 salt sens.8 audio resp.6 react. 0.5 no filters and notch at all, just trying to do the G.B. here and there where rocks sounded with a solid 25... There's no way to obtain a so low balance, so I just left it around 69 and so... After a couple hours of really annoying background noise (already reduced with pitch tones, but still too much for my taste), I just tried before leaving the area to turn the GB tracking... I also had the black sand accepted cause nothing blackish was around me... Miracle😎...All the noise canceled like it was mute and only good pitched signals above the thin audible treshold that even at 20 is still too low to sound over the bubbles and the hood... No gold to show, but some coins and less headache guys😉... Have someone experienced the same?

Went to the El Paso mtns near Randsburg today to go detecting and found a couple defunct hollow PVC claim markers still standing. Pulled them out of the ground and dead birds fell out. I’m sure the people putting them in never even imagined something like that could happen. If you ever do see them, BLM has approved pulling them out if they are uncapped and hollow, because some have been found with dozens of dead migratory song birds and burrowing owls in them. If you would rather not pull them out, you could fill them up with gravel or rocks, or at least jam a rock into the top to seal it perhaps but if it’s your claim you can’t use hollow pipe anymore for markers, they have to be solid. It was pretty sad finding all those dead birds and even a shrew in them.

I have been detecting with the GPX 6000 and other model detectors in creeks and rivers during the hotter summer months. The air pocket under the GPX 6000 skid plate is quite large and makes the coil act like a floating cork. The best solution I found was removing the skid plate and using UPC 2 inch 10mil. pipe wrap on the actual coil thus removing the air pocket when under water. Please see pictures! This tape is extremely scratch resistant and has great stretch ability without leaving much sticky tape residue. I have over a thousand hours detecting with the GPX 6000 using this tape without any damage to the coil. I infrequently only need to add tape to the bottom edges after a lot of coil bumping. The skid plate also fits back over the taped coil edge for when you go back to dry land detecting. I have also used a small amount of this tape to the inside of the battery compartment to tighten the loose seating of the battery. This also has prevented the exclamation warning screen from occurring when the detector is bumped hard enough or dropped. If the exclamation warning is frequent then please send it in to the repair center to be fixed correctly. Also note the accessory armrest covers in the picture. These are item # 3011-0144 Armrest Wear Kit, GPX/Sov/Eureka.-- very comfortable on the GPX 6000. Take a kid detecting. Ron