New Zealand Gold Prospecting & Metal Detecting Forums Archive

Perseverence certainly pays off. Well done

Hi Rex, Sure is pretty no matter how small. Nice photos & nice gold. Does look great zoomed up on. Each piece unique & made by nature. Dont you love it.
That is bloody fantastic!!! Well done. Pretty good for one hole. How many grams all up?? Its not often you find a bunch of gold together but a good sign when you do. Shows that there was a bit/lot of gold getting moved about back when it was getting deposited. Have a very slow look around that general area. Often the gold is just the odd loaner when detecting in old workings, the odd piece that the old timers didnt get out possibly due to it being trapped tight in a crack or crevice that there water didnt move out or dislodge & wash through their box's.
When you save your pics you need to resize them to no bigger than 800 wide. Some forums are 600 wide. Other wise your pic ends up stretching the the width of the page as your one here has done, but you have the posting of pics now sussed.
Look forward to more pics of your finds. I miss so much the south island gold & the detecting of it. I havnt been out up here dredging, sluice boxing or crevicing since the weekend after labour weekend. Surf was very good yesterday & I didnt even get out in that......WORK.
Im back down QT for 10 days in feb so will be detecting for sure. I dont think I caught up with you when I was down over winter. I do recall seeing you at one of the markets but not sure if that during winter festival or an earlier time.
Detecting for gold is very hard in the easy to get to places, for obvious reasons.....many have been there before you. NOTHING will beat your gold bug for the VERY SMALL SHALLOW gold, but thats where it ends. The depth of the bug is limited unless the gold becomes bigger & then too the depth is limited due to the coil size. So if a big piece is just out of reach of the bugs coil you are not going to get it. That is where the minelabs shine as you can wack on a bigger coil to get deeper bigger gold......or a smaller coil to get the small shallow gold.....if it is there. The bug doesnt have the range of coils the minelab has. When I find some gold I will go back over the same ground time & time again with different size coils & can usualy get gold with every different coil.
But you have the best of both worlds as the bug is a top of the line VLF gold detector & the minelab the best gold detector by far. The bug, depending which one you have, the first one ran at 19 khz & the bug 2 at 72 khz. The difference being that the higher the khz's the more sensitive to very small gold at SHALLOW depth. The trade off with the higher frequency is that the depth of the signal into the ground is less. Hence at 72 khz very sensitive to tiny gold near the surface but lacks the depth even on the bigger gold. The bug 1 at 19 khz will find bigger deeper gold than the bug 2 but lack the sensitivity to the very tiny gold near the surface that the bug 2 will get. Most VLF gold detectors operate around the 19 khz mark as it is a good in between frequency for sensitivity veres depth. There is always a trade off with frequency verces depth with a VLF detector. Hence your serious detectorist will have more than the one detector. Usualy a top of the line VLF & a pulse induction (PI) detector like a minelab. Minelab do make VLF detectors as well. X Terra Steve has shown some nice gold he has found with his minelab VLF
I have a Whites Goldmaster VLF that runs at 48-52 khz. It will go slightly deeper than the bug 2 due to its slightly less operating frequency but not quite as sensitive as the bug 2 on the tinest gold near the surface. My trade off is.....Do I really want to be spending & wasting all my detecting time getting that tiny tiny gold......if it is there........& every tiny tiny shotgun pellet AS WELL (been there done that, drove me nuts) Thanks to the rabbit shooters. Personaly I would rather spend the time looking for bigger gold with my minelab. It comes down to the old numbers game. Sure any gold is better than no gold, but how many sub sub grammers do you need to find & dig to make up a couple of grams? When you could be finding a patch of 1 gram & bigger nuggets in one hit.
The smallest I have found with my minelab is .05 of a gram & many at less than .1 of a gram. Thats not 1 gram but .1 & that is 1/10 of a gram. I would need to find & dig 20 of those .05 gram pieces to make up 1 gram. Not to mention the number of targets I will be digging as well that are crap items. I wouldnt really want to be finding that smaller gold all the time when I can possibly be getting much bigger by trying new areas.
Its all fun though & sorry if I got a bit carried away but just trying to get the point across about operating frequencies verses sensitivity verses depth which dictates size & depth of gold found.

Good luck & happy hunting

JW :)

Hi again JW. Thanks for all the positive comments and the invaluable help with the pictures. Thanks also to Juggie for your help. I use the Goldbug down my hole as the minelab would have been a nightmare due to its larger coil size and getting in small areas. Also it is extremely dusty and grubby in the hole and with the fancy harness on the minelab you cant just put it down to dig up and undercut and then pick it up again plus it would get filthy. So its horses for courses. Conversely I used the Goldbug on some old working the other day and had to dig over 30 tiny shot gun pellets as the area is infested with rabbits. On the upside I now have an 8" mono and a 10" X 5" joey for my minelab so I will be able to try them out shortly although I am up in Auckland from Wednesday next week for a week. So no more detecting until I get back. You may have seen me down the market Winter Festival in Queenstown I do it every Saturday with my Queenstown Hot Glass stand. (Thats my living) All the gold in the picture is only 18grams all up so it looks more than it is. some of the nuggets are sub 0.1 gram and the goldbug will detect down to 0.02 on the surface. 0.01 down to about 1 to 2" depending on soil type. I will be trying the Minelab out with the joey on to see how low it will go when I get a chance to get away from this built up area and all the interference. My Goldbug is the 72Khz model by the way and being so small and light its ideal for working in the hole. It is limited on depth though as you say. Thats why I bought the Minelab GPX 4500
You will have to give me a call in Feb and we can meet up if you would like.
Well better go I have to get ready for the market

Regarding your last note See the bug overhanging rock in the pic I thought it looked doggy so I jumped up and down on it to cave it in but it was solid. About 10 minutes later I was just checking some soil from under the rock and it fell down missing my foot by a couple of inches. I broke out in a cold sweat as it must have weighte as least 1 ton.
Good Luck
Rex

Hi Rex, awesome finds! That pic of the nuggets reminds me of the small bags of candy you used to be able to buy as a kid... it was called "gold nuggets" or something like that. Yummmmmy! lol

I am back in NZ late January, and hope to be down South on my first fossicking expedition late summer/ early autumn... am hoping to meet some of you guys who are posting here.

Edited by user Saturday, 27 November 2010 9:24:15 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Someone just said to me "Whats that guy with the big nose doing in your gold bottle?"



Faceing Left

Hi Gingerbreadman Interesting name. My grandparents specialised in making gingerbread in the 1920 through to the 1960s and exported it all over the world from Congleton in Cheshire UK (Maskeries Gingerbread) Anyway a bit off subject there. Yest I have thought of all those things. As I dont own the propertey major excavations are out of the question. The main hole was already there when I found it. I have panned out some of the soil and there is a fair bit of flake but not worth the effort it would take to recover it. The big rocks on the right are truely massive and sitting on bedrock so again this would be a major excavation and you would probably need an excavator which is out of my league.

Thanks for the suggestions though

Hi Gavin I have already shifted the big rock that sits on top of my hole. It the one that fell down and almost crushed my foot. I had to use a trolley jack to tip it over so I could get at the paydirt behind it. The huge rock at the side that it is sitting on at one end goes right back into a reef at the back and is sitting on bedrock. There are also some very large rocks at the left which I hadnt uncovered in that picture. I am battling with one of them at the moment but its winning. You couldnt get your truck anywhere near the hole though. Its off the beaten track although there must have been a digger in there at one time as I dont think it was dug by hand. My main problem is now I am running out of false bottom to dig in and finding just this pea shingle and there is no gold in it. JW will be pleased to know that the Minelab GPX 4500 outperforms the Goldbug in my hole with its new Joey 10 x 5"coil. It definately has a lot better depth on a 0.6 gram nugget. One of the nuggets in the picture above I picked it up in the side of the hole up with the GPX long before the goldbug got it. Its also a lot less suceptable to hot rocks although there is a blue grey type of rock which fools both detectors. They both think its gold and there is quite a bit of it round my hole but not too much down deep. Not sure what the rock is but I have never seen it in the rivers round here. Well no more fossicking now for a few days as I am off to Auckland and bay of Islands for a week.

hi rex

nice gold and excellent pics, i do agree with you about the goldbug v gpx, the bug is stremely light and maneuverable and less prone to reacting off the spade from a short distance away. ideal for what you are doing. was there any chance of bucketing it to a sluice nearby, might get through the wash a bit quicker.

well done
starflash

your doing very well rex good on you, there are many ways to use a detector and you have opened my eyes to some possibilities that i have seen over the years