Scrape & Detect With Goldmaster 24K

[Steve Herschbach]

This is an addendum to the post I made about Metal Detecting For Gold In Finland. I thought it would be good to put my money where my mouth is and show what the Garrett 24K can do on a scrape and detect operation. For details on the procedure see that thread. The long story short is I used the 24K with 6" concentric coil to carefully work through material an inch or two at a time, with the goal of missing as little as is humanly possible.

Condor and I found some real nice specimen gold a couple years ago. I have been sure our PI detectors left some tiny bits behind and have been wanting to go back with a hot VLF ever since. Wanting to write this up finally provided the impetus for me to do so.

This is the work site. The 24K was running default settings with volume at Boost 2 and Sensitivity 7 out of 9. I ground balanced an average of the ground and a couple small hot rocks and found sensitivity 7 to work best with the hot rocks, any more making it harder to discern them for what they are. I kept the ground balance locked once I got it where I wanted it. As I had it set the rocks gave a negative "boing-boing" response while gold gave the standard "zip-zip" response.

I removed the surface rubble and detected, finding a couple small bits. Then a few hours of scrape the surface down an inch or two, followed by careful detecting of the surface and the removed soil. The 24K 6" coil combo is basically immune to knock sensitivity, so I actually used the coil as a rake to smooth and push the dirt down the hill. The gold seems confined to a certain horizon in the bank and gave out once I got down a little deeper than where Condor and I had left off.

The two smallest bits both weighed in at 0.050 grams and once cleaned up the total weight was 1.662 grams for the fourteen little specimens found. The largest was 0.25 gram.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was I was surprised at how well the 6" coil on 24K identified the gold as non-ferrous. Ferrous items just bang repeatedly at the far left of the meter. Tiny bits of gold do jump around a lot, even reading ferrous now and then, but the bottom line is if you get any non-ferrous readings dig it. Only ignore targets that never come off a ferrous indication in multiple sweeps. Even the smallest bits here gave reliable non-ferrous readings, boosting my faith in this detector quite a bit for work in ferrous trash.

Anyway, fun little outing, and demonstrates how gold can be found without ever moving off a small location... of course providing the gold is there to find!

[GotAU?]

Very nice little specimens! Speaks well as to what other tools to have around along with a PI detector. Thanks for sharing!

[phrunt]

Mirrors my experience with the 24k, absolutely no bump sensitivity which can be a huge advantage in situations where it's rocky and you're going to be constantly bumping the coil, I've done this scrape and detect method in spot where my GPZ just kept getting more and more nuggets and then I went through my big dug out pile of soil and found plenty more tiny bits the GPZ missed.   I was flattening out the pile and taking layers off at a time much like you describe here, it turns out really fun as I just kept getting little tiny bits on almost every layer I took off. 

I find the 24k handles hot rocks exceptionally well for a VLF, and in heavy hot rock areas around here the 24k is my detector of choice when I'm using a VLF. 

[Steve Herschbach]

A good PI and a hot VLF make a great combo not just for versatility, but for having a backup just in case. I think a 6000 could have got a few more of those once scraped up but they were probably too deep originally. Still, no PI yet beats a hot VLF for the smallest gold, though they are getting so close it's amazing to me.

Some people think chasing tiny bits is silly, but the fact is there are many locations where there simply is no large gold. Small gold is the norm in most locations, not large gold. There are many low mineral small gold locations in Alaska, for example, where having a PI would be a waste of time.

[GotAU?]

I found my first gold detecting with a Gold Monster (about .3g) after scraping an area about an inch deep that a buddy pointed me to on his claim. It was previously cleaned up by a lot of PI detectors. Scraping away in layers is a great idea.  I tried it in other areas with a 24k also, but as a beginner I haven’t really gotten the feel for using the disc screen values yet. One of my other detecting friends is really good at doing this, I have a lot to learn!

[beatup]

good information Steve thanks for sharing