A Big Lump And The Funeral Of The GPX 6000

[phrunt]

Yesterday JW and I went for another gold hunt to the same place we'd been going on all the previous missions I've posted about in the past couple of weeks, I've always liked this spot, it's been my favourite.  You do deal with a lot of junk here though, mostly shutgun pellets but I guess it's good practice for me sorting the junk from the gold.

I felt like I was up to a bigger walk this time, JW invited me up to the spot he did last time we were at this place, If you recall I stayed right at the start and spent the day in a very small area last time while JW went for a stroll far further into the area and he managed to find 8 nuggets.

This a photo of the 8 nuggets JW found in the area on the previous day when I stayed at the entrance to the area.  It seemed a worthwhile spot for me to take on a big walk to get to, my broken foot seems to never feel better, it's been a long time now and it feels no better than it did at the start, although it has its good days and bad days and it felt like it was going to be a good day.

We walked up to this area and JW showed me around and told me where he'd found some nuggets in the past, I hadn't been here for a couple of years back when I was using my GPX 4500 and I found nothing with it in this spot from memory.

So we fired up our weapons and off we went.

I headed up higher and JW went off to the right and down from where we stored our packs, the higher ground looked alright to me although my detector was nutting off constantly on pellets straight away, big pellets like someone had been hunting elephants in the area, only NZ doesn't have elephants, but the really large size rusty magnetic pellets, I don't normally encounter these sort often, usually it's the tiny little lead ones.   They were absolutely everywhere and driving me mad.  I kept going in the area anyway and then I encountered a target noise that was not like the others, a softer quieter sweeter sound, a few scrapes to remove the chances of it being a small lead near surface pellet and the signal improved, I kept digging and digging and the signal was better and better, this was getting exciting although I'd dug so much junk since getting here I had it in my head it's 90% chance some sort of junk, maybe a boot tack or something so I wasn't overly concerned about doing any video.

Once I was fairly deep I decided it might be time to flick on the phones camera just in case and I'm glad I did, now I have some memories of my second biggest ever nugget find! Over a gram nuggets or even gram size nuggets are an extreme rarity here, so it's a happy day when you score a gram size nugget, this one however was a lot bigger than a gram.

This is it's hole, and if you'll see the video you'll see it wasn't a fisherman's story about the size of his fish catch, exaggerating the depth on the hole, this is precisely the depth of the nugget.

A beauty, and very odd for a NZ nugget based off what I've found before, mine are generally always pretty smooth, this one was a chunky rough looking nugget, more like the nuggets found in Australia.

And here is the video, I'm so annoyed I didn't film the entire thing from the start as I like having videos for my future watching of my nugget finds, especially when it's a nugget out of the ordinary for me.  Oh well, at least I got some of it on video.  Pretty happy with this one, my second biggest nugget so far and only just behind my biggest by .1 of a gram.

I ran down to show JW, we were both pretty shocked a nugget this size was found here.

I now had a dilemma, the likelihood of me finding a nugget now was low, usually if I find a nugget right at the start of the day I find no more 😛

Hours passed and exactly that, plenty of junk and no more nuggets, I had some lunch and figured I'd move out of the bigger nugget area and see if I can find something down lower on the hillside.  I didn't really want to walk too much on steep ground with my foot but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.  At this point JW had found one nugget also from memory so I didn't think my hopes would be too high down lower on the slope where he was but that's gold for you, you never know.

It wasn't even 20 minute and there it was, my second nugget.

A nice easy signal, the 8" loves small gold, even a bit of gold weighing 0.03 of a gram is a booming signal compared to a very small lead pellet.  This piece wasn't exactly small though, well for me 🙂

within a few steps of that nugget I found another one almost straight away, another easy target signal.

Here is what the ground looks like we were hunting, from a cut out the old timers had done.

Things dried up again for a while now and JW appeared crossing over a ridge into sight, he was heading back to his bag for lunch so I decided I'd go sit with him and have a break, we had a look at the nugget again after the initial shock had passed and at this point he had 3 little nuggets with his GPX 6000, so we were sitting on 3 each at this point. his were similar size to my smaller two.

Back at it, this time we both just hung around near our bags for a bit where I'd just found the two nuggets, and after an hour or so of nothing we gradually moved on, I decided I'd go back a fair bit in the direction of the car so I took our bags to save us having to go back for them as JW was slowly heading in that direction too.   I went for a walk to some thyme bushes on the downward slope hoping the little 8" would give me an advantage over anyone else who had detected there as the spaces between the bushes are so small it takes a small coil to get between them and the 8" had done extremely well doing this in the past, it slides between the bushes no problems.  I don't know why I didn't take a photo of them.

I was only in the bushes for 20 minutes and digging plenty of pellets and junk and then I had a signal that seemed different to the others, I scraped away the grass and could clearly see I was on some bedrock.

The signal was pretty good, unmistakable, although tiny it was a nice little bit of gold.

It was my smallest bit of the day so I wanted to see how it responded on JW's GPX 6000 to compare it in my head to how it responded with my GPZ and 8" X-coil.  I was very satisfied with how good the target response was on my GPZ so it would have been good to compare, I walked over to where JW was to find him fiddling with his GPX unplugging the coil and removing the battery and so on, he said it was doing its usual EMI thing where he just turns it off and does a factory reset and it seems to clear up the EMI, however this time when he switched it off and on again it came up with an error so he was unplugging everything and making sure it was all secure in an attempt to revive it.  After many attempts it was clear the thing had died.  Either the coil or the detector.  We took a video of it which you can see here.

This put a bit of a downer on what was otherwise an excellent day.  Minelab have really outdone themselves with the build quality of the GPX 6000, for the price things are not too great I think, it's pretty disappointing.

I told JW we should just leave now, I didn't want to continue with him having to sit around and wait for me to finish, it was sad enough his detector died without having to sit around watching me have all the fun so we left to go get some Chinese food on the way home, we got there right as the place opened for dinner so the buffet had all the good stuff! We got ourselves an excellent meal.

Once we got back to JW's house we tried another coil on the detector and it worked, so it was the 11" coil that failed.  My theory is the security chip in the coil has failed, my reason for this is the detector was working fine until it was turned off, so a fault with the windings or cable connection or anything like that is HIGHLY unlikely to be the problem, the EMI he was getting that prompted him to turn it off and on was nothing out of the ordinary, he does this many times during a detecting session to fix the EMI when a noise cancel doesn't seem to do it.  When the detector was turned off and on it uses that chip to verify the coil, if the chips dead the detector will error exactly like what's happened.

A bit of a downer on what was a good day.  JW ended up with his 3 little nuggets, I can't remember his weights but his total was about .3 of a gram from memory, I'll put up his total photo if he sends it through on email, he normally sends me his photo of gold weights.

We also weighed my gold at JW's house, I wanted to know if my big one was my biggest ever, it was close.  The little one I wanted to check and compare with the 6000 came up as 0.03 on JW's scales, when I arrived home checked the weights on my scales as they're more accurate and it came up slightly heavier than on his.

It's not my smallest GPZ nugget which is 0.023 of a gram on my scales but it's getting down there.  It's heavier than it looked.

Here is my junk for the day

lots of tiny little metal shards, they were so annoying as they're a great signal.  I think I lost a fair few pellets out of my pocket, it happens pulling my scoop in and out all day.

And my days total

My best day in about a year I'd guess, pretty sad about JW's GPX though, now he's got the hassles of dealing with the warranty.

[Hard Prospector]

Nice haul phrunt,  fun day for sure.

[jasong]

Nice work, that'd be a great nugget in the US too these days, for NZ I'm guessing even rarer. That one looks like it has a story, maybe a lode source closer than normal.

Requiring these chips on basic, old school monos seems to defy rationality since it doesn't do the customer any good at all and is just one more route for failure and lost time for us the customers. I understood the rationality for (though disagreed with) the chip on the DoD/GPZ. But monos are old news, already public, and well understood, no IP to protect. 

[GotAU?]

Nice writeup Simon, and thanks for sharing! Pretty  nice lump you found there!  So I cringed reading the last part of your title… maybe change it to something less scary like “the funeral of a GPX 6000 coil”? 😉

[beatup]

Well done , some fine detecting on your part .

[schoolofhardNox]

Awesome hunt. The junk pile would drive me nuts trying to find those iron bits. I'm assuming you have a magnet on a stick for those situations?? Great gold!

[phrunt]

32 minutes ago, schoolofhardNox said:

Awesome hunt. The junk pile would drive me nuts trying to find those iron bits. I'm assuming you have a magnet on a stick for those situations?? Great gold!

Thanks, yea I have a crazy strong magnet in my pick handle, the magnet is about 1 and a half inches long, a drilled a hole to fit it and used a tough glue to hold it in there, does the job nicely and makes the entire end of the pick magnetic so stuff sticks to the sides of the wood as well as the magnet, makes it easier to use with it being so powerful.

It sure makes getting the little iron junk easier.

I got the idea off JW who did something similar with his pick.

[Cal_Cobra]

Nice job Simon, that large nugget's a beauty 👍

[geof_junk]

Well done Grasshopper, another 7 of those to make up the 1 Ounce plus so get back out there mate, if you don't you will have to get more than THREE HUNDRED of those 0.1 gm bits and that is a lot more holes and junk. I see you clipped JW wings this time.

😜

[abenson]

Nice nugget Simon! Thanks for the detailed write up. Too bad on the 11" coil at least it's still under warranty.