All Roads Lead To First Texas

[Steve Herschbach]

When I started this forum most people did not know that Bounty Hunter, Fisher, and Teknetics were in reality all the same company - First Texas. That holding company purchased those brands to trade off the cachet of their established names and brand following. It is therefore ironic to me that they are now abandoning the separate brands to a large degree. The once separate websites now all point back to just one - the new First Texas umbrella website.

The old Bounty Hunter website http://detecting.com/

The old Fisher website http://www.fisherlab.com/

both redirect to subsections on the main First Texas website. The old Teknetics website is still up at https://www.tekneticsdirect.com/ but no doubt the new First Texas Teknetics subsection will replace it someday.

First Texas is obviously abandoning small dealers fully now in favor of big box and direct sales. They have been repeatedly selling various models direct on Amazon and the FT website at under dealer cost. Hard to be a dealer when your number one competitor is your supplier. The Teknetics site long since morphed into factory direct sales and now the new site has everything factory direct, often with huge discounts. The main FT website does have a dealer application page still. It mentions a dealer listing page but I have not been able to find one. Maybe that is because of this requirement:

To earn a spot on our dealer website page, dealers must have placed orders for a minimum of 20 units and sustain an annual sales goal of 100 units. Your dealer listing on our website will exclude your website address if your landing page promotes detectors from other brands.

100 units a year plus no mention of other brands on landing page specifically excludes small dealers. Only sell 80 a year? Too bad.

I'm a businessman and business is business so I am not posting this as a swipe at First Texas. More a recognition of things changing with the times. The fact is many so-called dealers are just order takers competing on under the table price discounting out of garages and basements, not real brick and mortar operators. I understand why the companies, and not just First Texas, will be weeding these people out. Everything will go big box and factory direct eventually with only a few of the biggest online independent dealers hanging on over the next ten years. As price competition heats up so will the need to cut extra pockets out of the distribution chain. First Texas might be ahead of the curve on this a little but they are not the only company making these moves. Minelab is heavily promoting direct sales via Amazon and Garrett has a new factory direct website. My advice to anyone thinking of becoming a small metal detector dealer? Don't.

Great deal on the Fisher F70, regular $375 and below dealer cost at $199 - almost makes me want to buy one, it's such a smoking deal!

https://firsttexasproducts.com/products/fisher-f70-metal-detector-with-dual-coil-and-coil-cover-combo?variant=47452772335896

[Muddydogz]

It seems you are right on the money with how sales are going to be moving in the future. I fell victim to the $199 no tax, free shipping f70. Not much more than a good pinpointer or coil and, i've owned one before and a tek patriot so i know whats what on them. My bride on the other hand said, if you liked it so well why'd you get rid of it. Phht, she 's not a detector head so she'll never understand.

I just hope customer service doesn't fade away with all the amazon sales.

[Redneck]

the f70 has been around so long its almost an antique!

[Kickindirt]

This is now the way of the world. Everything going to online sales. Biggest companies are now web based. Even forums. You don't see detecting clubs hardly at all anymore. We now have forums. Or Facebook. Sad part is detecting is dieing a slow death for the most part. 😢 

[Lead Detector]

If we didn't already have the f75 Ltd,  I'd jump on this deal.

[Bill (S. CA)]

You wonder how long First Texas can milk selling heavy discounted dated machines.

With that being said, the price on the F70 is amazing. But here's the question: would you hunt with one in 2024?

[Lead Detector]

6 minutes ago, Bill (S. CA) said:

You wonder how long First Texas can milk selling heavy discounted dated machines.

With that being said, the price on the F70 is amazing. But here's the question: would you hunt with one in 2024?

For that price it would be a great spare, extra, gift, entry level...etc 

[Steve Herschbach]

48 minutes ago, Bill (S. CA) said:

You wonder how long First Texas can milk selling heavy discounted dated machines.

With that being said, the price on the F70 is amazing. But here's the question: would you hunt with one in 2024?

The F70 has nearly all the bang of the F75/T2 and was considered an overlooked value by Dave Johnson. He frequented some forums under the name of woof! and here is what he has to say in a post on TreasureNet:

 

"The F70 was the product of a mission-- to come up with a less expensive adaptation of the F75, while incorporating things we had learned meanwhile. Without "dumbing it down". Because the F70 was advertised for a lot less money than the F75, marketing dept. didn't quite dare to say how good the damn thing really was. Some of the secret sauce we put into the F70 eventually made its way into later revisions of the F75 group of machines, as well as into the Teknetics "Fratbros" series and most other new beeps introduced after the F70. 

As the top of the Fisher lineup, the F75 including its revisions got all the attention. That's how the F70 became a "sleeper". Guys like Mudpuppy will never have to wonder if they should have gotten an F75 instead.

This is the same sort of explanation I just posted in "another forum" about the approx. $200 category. If you get a Eurotek Pro, you never have to wonder if you should have gotten something else. Get anything else, and you'll wonder if you should have gotten a Eurotek Pro instead. F70 owners never have to wonder if they should "upgrade" to an F75. (emphasis added)"

 

The model has one of the best true all metal modes ever made, something that has been lost in the new digital models, that are always doing some sort of filtering. Yet has a full time visual target id layered on top of that all metal audio, a killer combination. I look really hard though at that $199 and ask myself the same question - would I really use it? And the answer is no. I do 95% of my detecting  with a PI, and if not, it will be a multifrequency of some sort. That's just the reality and so at even at that price it's no deal at all if it just sits in a corner.

And that is the long way of saying they have to practically give these things away now to sell them.

[RickUK]

Some weeks back i found a dealer here in the UK selling the very latest T2 with boost mode for £299 including delivery,so snagged one as they had been well over double that price,must admit the boost does make alot of difference over my original green T2 from 2006/7 and will never sell that detector as its found me more gold hammered and mill coinage than all my other detectors put together.

Not sure what the difference is between boost mode and cache mode,would have liked the cache but they never had them on offer but i am happy with what i have got....can anyone enlighten me what the cache mode advantage is if any ???

[Steve Herschbach]

17 hours ago, RickUK said:

Not sure what the difference is between boost mode and cache mode,would have liked the cache but they never had them on offer but i am happy with what i have got....can anyone enlighten me what the cache mode advantage is if any ???

Per designer Dave Johnson:

Posted by: Dave J.
Date: September 24, 2015 08:59AM

"Cache mode" on most F75 and T2 versions is very similar to "Slow mode" on the F70. The response is slow, with improved sensitivity to large deep targets. However this means that the signals from shallow targets will smear, with a cost in both sensitivity and in ability to discriminate and ID targets. Shallow targets will do better in cache/slow mode if you slow down to a crawl, but the default and boost modes work better for the shallower stuff. And, if you really do want best response on deep stuff, all metals mode goes deeper than disc mode. For finding the deep stuff, an alternative to Cache/Slow mode is to search in Boost mode all metals, then switch to disc when you suspect you're fighting trash. ........Another way to deal with shallower stuff is to search in Cache/Slow mode with the searchcoil lofted several inches above the ground. This will result in a big cut in response to shallow trash, but perhaps more importantly it will achieve a large reduction in ground mineral interference (since ground itself is the shallowest target) and in mineralized ground will usually enable deeper detection than if you were scrubbing the surface in a misguided attempt to "get as close as possible to the deep targets".

SUMMARIZING: Cache/Slow mode is basically for locating large deep stuff in areas where there's not so much trash as to defeat the enterprise.”