15 Inch Concentric X coil Finds

Hi guys, A couple of days after getting these bits, bar one.



Out of this hole



I went back to try the Gold Monster in it to see if there were any smaller bits. I was in luck & got two more smaller bits



I then just dug the crap out of the hole making it wider & deeper but ended up getting nothing more with the GM or the Zed. I tried both the 15" & the 12 x 8. Nothing more.

So I wandered off to another spot where I had done ok on back in my GP 3000 days but nothing more with the 4500 or the Zed with the ML 14 coil. I had tried a few times with the Zed & ML coil as I do when I am in the locality but got nothing. This time was no different but this time I had the 15" X coil on & since I was there I thought I had nothing to lose.

Well bugger me. I got 4 little bits. Crazy. All in the up on edge folds down in the schist. Not overly deep but they were all pretty small.

This first bit was down the edge of a drop off into a tailing race. So I had to be carful not to lose it down into there.





This one was probably the deepest. Took a bit of schist smashing & raking the pick down through the schist foliation to pop it out.



















We had a couple of days rain & this arvo it cleared nicely with the sun popping out so I went off for a detect for a couple of hours to get out of the house.
Went to an area that Simon & I were struggling to get anything any more & I hadn't been here for a while. Thought I may as well try the 15" coil. It wasn't the easiest of places to use that size coil & I was struggling & losing my mental ground balance but I got a faint signal through a slab of schist rock.



I flipped the rock over & out of the way & the signal improved slightly & was still down in the gravels.



It still took a bit of digging & scraping before the signal was out.

A .25 gram piece of the good stuff.



Crazy small for the depth & a coil of that size. That was it for the afternoon & I called it quits on that one.

Cheers

Good luck out there

JW  

I've often thought of panning some of those deeper gravels.. never got around to it !!!

Ya never know.

Thats pretty impressive

Impressive indeed for a coil of that size/stature. Well done JW

Kon.

Thanks guys for the comments & feedback.

@ Butch. Hi Butch, When I get a few bits of gold from one dig I usually go back with the Gold Monster or GB2 to scavenge for any tiny rats & mice as I have shown in some of my posts. I have also on occasion done just what you mentioned. In fact not too far from this spot I got a little glory hole back in my GP 3000 days. There is a little creek not too far away from that spot so I went back in there & with my classifier bucket set up & sluice box set up in the creek. I did bloody well in quite a lot of finer gold.

Here are some pics of my classifier bucket set up & sluice box operation. This is at a different location but same as what I just described above.













Well.....if I was impressed with the depth of the 15" Concentric X coil yesterday. I was blown away today. I ended up going for another quick afternoon detect today to an area that again had dried up on the gold take. Last gold was with the 15 x 10 X coil but I thought I would give the 15 Concentric a go.

I got a very faint, almost imagined signal. You know the ones. It wasn't always there but something just pulled me up when I first 'thought' I heard it. I ume'd & are'd over it but thought I would take a bit off the top to see if it improved or was even a signal.



I was still in a top soil loam but there was a faint signal there now. So I laid into the dig until I hit schist gravels.



The signal was real good now & I was into tight packed gravels & now really liking my chances of it being gold & not rubbish. Finally the signal was out. That scoop is 12 inches long



The coil is 15" diameter



Another thing about this dig is it was directly under powerlines. No EMI or interference with this coil. High Yield Normal & full max sensitivity of 20.

This is looking directly up from the dig.



.85 of a gram piece of gold







Crazy depth on that size gold with a coil of that size. Be very interesting to see what the GPX 6000 delivers.

Cheers

Good luck out there

JW  

I've likely been over that spot and missed that bit in the past with a different coil In the 3rd photo with the scoop in the hole you see the power lines shadow going over your hole

I was looking at those lines and was wondering what made them. Now that you pointed it out I should of guessed, but missed the shadow on the coil.  

I never enjoyed detecting that particular spot where the power lines are with my GPX, it sounded like a cross between a UFO and a Police siren in the area from all of the EMI from the power lines.  I had to dumb it right down and then my chances were slim and I never found any gold there with it, When my QED arrived I spent a couple of days detecting under and around those power lines hoping it's increased immunity to EMI would help me get bits others had missed in the past with detectors that were chased away by the EMI from the lines, it managed to get me one small nugget right near them on some bedrock in this same general area JW found his bit yesterday.  I then took the Equinox and used it in single frequency 40kHZ as Multi IQ was too bad around the lines, it found me 3 pieces from memory directly on the bedrock near the lines that others had missed including myself with the QED, mostly likely because they were very small pieces.  

When I upgraded to the GPZ I once again started to detect around these power lines as it handled it quite well, I mostly used the 15x10" in this particular area as it was doing well in general in other spots, I found a few bits with the 2.2 gram one I mentioned previously being the biggest, it was pretty close to the power lines, 20 or so meters I'd guess.





So I am pretty confident I'd been over this bit of ground at least once where JW got this piece of gold and I missed it.  JW has a more trained ear for the faint targets than I do but I can't help but think the Concentric coil had something to do with it, that coil is just doing so well in our soils and it handles EMI from power lines very well.  Taking the Concentric coil to old spots that appeared cleaned out looks like it's working well.

Hi guys, I found a crazy small bit of gold on Saturday with the 15" Concentric coil down about 4 inches.








I don't know how that is going to compare with the GPX 6000 but with a few finds coming in now with the 6000 it will be very interesting to see. Not forgetting that this is a 15" coil on my Zed & not an 11" like I am seeing on the 6000 finds.

I wandered on down this sunburnt gully but found no more with the Zed but did get an even smaller piece with the Gold Monster.

At the bottom end of this well worked & turned over gully from back in the early gold rush days of the early to mid 1860's is an old "Chinese" rock overhang hut shelter. I say Chinese as they were well known for building these kind of dwellings but it could have well & truly been European too. They had piled stacks of flat schist rock to close it in from the elements. I have come across many of these type dwellings over the years when wandering the hills & far off gullies.

This particular one I have know about for many years & always thought to myself that I should go inside it & detect for what ever may have been lost or hidden or just dropped by the original dwellers. Trouble is that it has always had a lot of briar rose bushes growing tightly up against its entrances. This time with the Gold Monster in hand & wandered down to it & to my surprise quite a bit of the briar had died off & I was able to crawl into one of the openings.

This is the hole I climbed in through.



It is at the top end of the dwelling & the ground here was raised up quite a bit more than the lower end.

I then spun around & this pic is looking down to the bottom end. Quite a few of the schist stone slabs have fallen down. Note the briar rose growing in the openings.



I started to detect the inside of the stacked schist slab walls for anything that the inhabitants may have hidden or stashed in between the layers of schist. I got a strong non ferrous signal in one spot where the stacked schist had a dried mud mortar packed in-between the schist layers. I scraped away at this with my scoop & gathered the scrapings into the scoop & scanned it over the coil. BANG. Loud signal. Hoping it was a stash of gold nuggets or coins, but it was an old bullet. I scanned the spot again & another signal. Ended up getting 4 of these old bullets out of the hole that the mud mortar was in & hiding them.



The handle end of the scoop is pointing to the hole. You can still see dried mud in there.



This pic is looking back up to the higher built area from the start of the lower bottom end of the dwelling. That is the hole I climbed in.



These next two a bit further down again. Notice the briar rose growing in the openings.





I also found quite a few old square nails on the floor. They had laid flat schist on the floor but over time there was a layer of dirt covering it. There were also nails hammered into the outside face of the schist rock above the overhang. This would have been to nail canvas up that was probably rolled up during the day to let light it. There was also still some mud packing on the outside where the top of the canvas would have been. This would have been to seal the canvas top edge to stop water running running down & into the dwelling. There was also a bigger spike hammered into the outside of the schist that may have been to hang a lantern on.

It is at the bottom end of a gully that has been heavily worked & turned over. I have found some good gold here over the years but getting very hard to find any these days. It is a dry gully & has no water at all. They would have had to of carted the paydirt off to the nearest creek to wash it. So they only took the bottom richest layer. They threw quite a bit of gold out on to their piles in reaching for the richer bottom layer. Bless their little golden hearts

These are the bullets & the gold I found. The 5 bits are with the Gold monster & the one by itself was the piece with the Zed & 15" coil.



The bullets are 12 mm rim pinfire bullets for a hand revolver & was a very common weapon on the goldfields in the early gold rush days of the 1860's.



One of the Bullets was exactly like this one. https://freemycollection.com/?page=list_pinfire_by_id&id=100
The other three were the same as this one.  https://freemycollection.com/?page=list_pinfire_by_id&id=268

Pretty cool find I reckon. 

This was the gold found with the Gold monster



Cheers & Good luck out there

JW  

wow,what a tough life living in that little cave, it would of got a little Smokey with a fire going.
Bound to a few more hidden treasures kicking around? great story JW good luck.
I wonder if the gunpowder in the bullets is still dry and viable[bang]


cheers    moredeep

JW you are 4 times better than me. I only have one pin fire bullet in my collection and I am still proud of the find. If I remember right they were only around for a short time due to the introduction of the revolver.

Yea, that was a cool story. The bullets are awesome, what a find!

It looks like I get to slot in a find or two in this thread.

A couple of days ago JW and I decided we'd go on a gold hunt, the weather wasn't looking too flash, my drive to JW's largely consisted of admiring the fresh snow on the mountains knowing ski season isn't far off and the fact we are about to be flooded by Aussie tourists because of that and the fact our borders finally opened to Australia.

I didn't really take any good snow photos stopping on the side of the road like a tourist but here is one from out the front of JW's house as we were loading our gear in the car.



Once I arrived at JW's the rain had really kicked in so we were a bit lost for where to go, jumped on the phones and discovered the area of my recent patch was looking like the best weather so we jumped in the car and off we went, after a coffee of course.

We had talked a bit about going back to the patch and trying the ground above it, the way the patch turned out the very fine gold was down the bottom, a bit further up the hillside was the bulk of the patch, all in quite a small area but it was acting like a bit of a line up the hill so we started detecting, JW fortunately turned he detector on to walk to the place he was heading as he hit a glory hole I'll leave that up to him to tell.  I just wandered around aimlessly hoping to find another area where the trail of nuggets were hiding.  It was only 10 or so minutes and I had my first nugget.  The crazy thing about this concentric coil running in HY/Normal/19 is just how loud it sings on small nuggets and this was no exception.





I diligently checked around that nuggets location hoping it had some friends nearby but it was a loner.

A bit of time went by, maybe an hour I'm not sure but by now JW was well and truly digging up his golden goodness.  I wandered further over trying to line up my position on the hillside with my patch down below and had something that sounded like a 22 shell, a few scrapes and it was still there.  This isn't that unusual as sometimes I've dug these things deep so I wasn't overly optimistic yet, the signal was just too loud and strong and with a majority of our nuggets being quite small I wasn't even thinking it was going to be a bit a of gold.  Kept on digging and JW walks up to see what the commotion is.  Now that I think about it I should have asked him to take some video as I was digging away like mad going down deeper, breaking up the bedrock and digging more.  It took me quite a while but out popped the target after dragging out the contents of the hole.  





As you can see, quite the hole, and a mission to dig it but I'm glad I did:)

I did my usual check very well around the location of the nugget thing, going low and slow and taking my time, it looked like it too was a loner then when I was about 10 meters away from it another hit! Bang! Big boomer, Please tell me this is another nugget and not the 22 shell this time

Again, a hard work dig, but nowhere near as hard as the last one, I didn't have to break up the bedrock on this one, it was sitting on top of it.





And here's a little video of it when I was confident it was going to be gold.



Right before leaving I found another little guy, this one was one I could have easily rejected it as a shotgun pellet as it was virtually on the surface, it just didn't sound like a pellet so I went ahead and recovered it, lucky! I did dig about 20 pellets during the day, and rejected another 50 or so by ignoring first scrape and it moves targets.



And the hillside I am hoping continues on with more gold, it goes forever, it's going to take a long time to cover this ground with a 15" coil, looks quite intimidating.  I don't know how you guys in WA look at the vast redness of nothing and think I'm going to detect all of that!



And the weigh in







We were going to go back today but that didn't work out so we'll have to go another day soon and see what else we can scratch out of the hillside.  I feel right at home with the GPZ and Concentric coil, the combination suits me well and I love I can lift the coil in the air over a target to pinpoint it with the very center of the coil being the deepest it really helps even when I've dug a heap of dirt out onto the ground I use that method to narrow down where the shotgun pellet is in the dirt, sometimes by doing that I can get it in my first recovery scoop.

JW/Phrunt, always a pleasure reading about your gold adventures. Superb looking scenery, nice gold finds, well done to you fellas.

Cheers Kon.

Nice gold lads well done

I too enjoy the stories the Kiwis show and tell. There is nothing quite like it on the net. Keep it up guys.

Mitchel

Chuckle....from reading posts here it seems like NZ and Australia are made of gold with a little dirt and rock thrown in to cover it up. You guys make it appear that gold is easier to find than a cold pint. ....

I sure don't. I spent yesterday on the prowl for some gold in the area we just got quite a bit a few days ago, I came away with a pocket full of pellets and some deep boot tacks that got me digging down into the bedrock People don't report on the days they find nothing

True that mate I have 2 big coffee tins full of trash with easily over 5000 junk targets from small bits of wire to 22 bullets shot pellets tin all the good stuff

Re Rubbish
What annoyed me some years ago.... I use 2 ML rubbish bags on my belt at the back, LH one with CB, GPS, gold cannister and small water bottle. RH one 2 plastic shoves and rubbish.

Came across an diggings area in Vic GT, with lots of leads shot all different sizes... Ah must still be gold here. That day digging up lead shot 3 or 4 to a heap and putting in loose in RH rubbish bag. Next day out traveled over some of the previous days heaps to get where I left off to find shot that I had missed??? that lunch time checked the lead shot in the rubbish bag no where the quantity I though should be there.......

The Reason, the New ML Rubbish Bags ( or at least the bags that I had) on the RHS had stitching only down to 10mm from the bottom of the bag. Maybe ML decided if you detect in the rain the bottom openings will allow the rain water to seep out.

Now the New rubbish bag is used to hold the CB/GPS etc.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/293291003126?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=705-139619-5960-0&mkcid=2&itemid=293291003126&targetid=1137570801346&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=9070922&poi=&campaignid=12499394789&mkgroupid=118688270293&rlsatarget=pla-1137570801346&abcId=9300512&merchantid=7613492&gclid=CjwKCAjwj6SEBhAOEiwAvFRuKB6yBUceiKKEA7g0As_Crtr1-E85ojtjthI5YT0TDGkR13DRgsmkMRoCjeQQAvD_BwE

Saturday of ANZAC weekend I headed to a local Queenstown spot with the GPZ 7000 & the 15" concentric X coil. It was pretty hard going on the gold front but I eventually got a signal that lived on down into the bedrock schist past the shot gun pellets.



Smashing & peeling the schist out.




I knew it was going to be a bit of gold. All .05 of a gram  




Then on ANZAC day itself Simon & I went further afield & ended up at the spot he mentioned above where he got his 4 pieces of gold.

He got his first piece in no time while I was getting my share of bloody shot gun pellets & two deep signals that had me going. But they turned out to be two deeply buried .22 lead bullet heads.   It would have been well over an hour & the day had started off pretty chilly but after digging those two deep bits of lead I soon warmed up. So took off a couple of layers & headed up to put them in my back pack. I saw Simon digging away & went over to see him. He was down quite deep & into the schist bedrock smashing & peeling it out. The signal was still in there & just had to be gold. I got a pic of him slaving away at his dig.



Turned out to be his biggest bit of the day. Just over 1 gram.


I still don't think I had found anything at that stage. But my luck soon changed. I walked back down to my detector & decided I would work my way down a fence line towards the old turned over gully. I then noticed what looked like un-natural ground to me & may have been old timer activity.
Ended up getting heaps of shot gun pellets & .22 shells & there lead bullet heads as well courtesy of bloody rabbit shooters. They are part & parcel of this game, unfortunately & can make it real 5hit.

Then I got my first signal that got to below the shot gun pellet layer.



Was a bit of gold, finally  



Before back filling the hole I re checked it & got another signal in the side wall.

Another piece of gold. So two from the one dig.





I then looked up & took a photo of Simon off in the distance. Top left of center. You may be able to make out his white shirt. To the right the fence line I was working down.




I ended up getting 9 pieces from this small area one after the other as I worked my way down along side a fence line.

This was my biggest bit of the day & right beside the fence line.






Not too shabby







2.33 grams



Then this little 'patch' area dried up on me so I headed down into the turned over gully to where the old timers had exposed a bit of bedrock. Got a tiddler at .05 of a gram. Admittedly it wasn’t deep at about 1 inch through a white clay to the bedrock





But that is Gold Monster size gold & for a coil of that size it just blows me away.



Just before I called it quits I was detecting the edges of exposed schist bedrock where the bedrock dropped into deeper ground. Hoping to find something that edge of bedrock had halted its progress. I got a faint but definite signal. Dug down on it & it lived past the shot gun pellet horizon & into tight packed gravels.





My 2nd biggest bit for the day





12 pieces total for the day






We went back yesterday hoping for great things but I only managed two small ones after the good run on Sunday.

.10 of a gram





And .15 of a gram





Unfortunately Simon got a skunk.

Cheers & Good luck out there

JW

bfloyd4445 wrote:
Chuckle....from reading posts here it seems like NZ and Australia are made of gold with a little dirt and rock thrown in to cover it up. You guys make it appear that gold is easier to find than a cold pint. ....

Thanks for dropping in & for your comment, but no....we work hard for what we get. We pass several pubs on our way to this area. We are heading back to that general location again tomorrow. Will most likely take the E-bikes (mountain bikes) so we can go further quicker & most certainly much quicker coming back, down hill.



Simon.









3.5 hours up, my wife was with me, 20 minutes back down





Cheers

JW

[quote="kiwijw"]

bfloyd4445 wrote:
Chuckle....from reading posts here it seems like NZ and Australia are made of gold with a little dirt and rock thrown in to cover it up. You guys make it appear that gold is easier to find than a cold pint. ....

Thanks for dropping in & for your comment, but no....we work hard for what we get. We pass several pubs on our way to this area. We are heading back to that general location again tomorrow. Will most likely take the E-bikes (mountain bikes) so we can go further quicker & most certainly much quicker coming back, down hill.

I would feel at home in country like in your photos. Thanks for posting. I know how hard it is to find a tiny speck I have been doing it for around 55 years mostly in the mother load country of central California. chuckle.....
Love your bike would be nice to have climbing up hill untill the bat dies. .....

fantasic views,I'm glad you have ebikes otherwise it would be hellish ride up.
It might be nearly worthwhile camping there for the night??
Thanks for sharing,great post & good luck



cheers moredeep

Hi there bfloyd, The bike has different battery settings. The higher you set it the easier it is to peddle but you consume more battery power so will flatten the battery quicker. If you set it mid range or lower for the easier gradients & use the gears appropriately the battery will last a lot longer. It does have an accelerator 'throttle' where you don't need to pedal but that is very hungry on the battery if you abuse it. In general use you still need to pedal but you are greatly assisted by the motor. More so if you use the higher assist setting. It shows what your battery charge is so you know when it is getting low. The good thing is you don't need the battery for coming down hill.
I actually did the E Bike conversion myself on my Giant Trance 3 mountain bike. You can get the kits.



The bike before the conversion. I up spec'd the disc brakes to larger size calipers & size of the discs.







The only bummer was the battery wouldn't fit inside the frame due to the back wheel shock. So need to be careful when going downhill & using the front brakes. The front shocks tend to close up absorbing the momentum of the frame dropping down under braking & the front wheel can hit the battery. That could be disastrous if turning at the same time this happens. I usually lock the front shocks in this situation so they don't absorb impact or I avoid braking heavily.





I did the same to my wife's bike as well. Which is the one Simon was using in the above pic.

Thanks Moredeep. The bikes do make it a lot easier & quicker to go greater distances than you could if you walked. Certainly much quicker on the way back down with virtually no peddling. When I have walked into these type areas I have camped over night in some of the rock overhang/cave dwellings that there are quite a few in these hills.

Here is one of them



Inside



You will notice how much the stone wall has dropped away from the rock overhang ceiling.



Another one. This was back in my GP 3000 days. 11 years ago. Gosh, where did those years go?



Simon & I are heading into this area tomorrow with our 15" concentric coils.

Cheers

Good luck out there

JW  

It's the Ritz m8 and it"s free


cheers moredeep

Hi guys, Simon & I head out again on both days this weekend. Sunday we E-Biked to a few spots. I didn't take my phone with me so sorry, but no pics to share. Simon may have some, I left my phone at home on the charger as I did my WM12. So had to plug my B&Z booster directly into the back of the detector. It worked fine though & I didn't find being tethered to it was much drama, once I worked out that I couldn't walk very far away from my detector. I tried a few times    

We both hit old worked gullies that were very hard to get gold off on previous attempts but we thought it worth giving the 15" concentrics a go. I targeted areas I had found gold before & the deeper ground on the edges. I ended up with 7 small bits on sunday & just two on the Saturday. Total of 9 for just over 1 gram. Smallest was .06 of a gram & the biggest .34



It is the depth I got them at that is blowing me away with this 15" coil. All my previous PI's & coil combination, including the Zed with 14" ML coil didn't see any of these small pieces.

So loving this coil.

Cheers

Best of luck out there

JW  

I got to give you guys credit for your perseverance, stamina & endurance, chasing gold through such terrain.  
Top going, well done to you gents.

Kon

It's quite the mission to get up to this area, all uphill and a long walk, fortunately we took JW's E-bikes which made it a lot easier.



Yup, it was a bit of fun and I found one of my two bits of gold I know for a fact I'd covered before and very thoroughly using my GPX 4500 and Nugget Finder EVO coil.  JW had obviously been over the same pile before with whatever combination of detectors he'd used in the past here too and on that day he was using his GPZ and 14x13" stock coil.    The thing that surprised me was the fresh dig holes all through the area, someone else had been here and very recently.  This is rather odd, we don't often bump into other gold detector users however this exact same gully we bumped into a guy with a GPZ and his mate with a Gold Bug 2 some time ago, and then later in the same day we bumped into a guy with a GPX 4500 and Coiltek Elite.  This is just odd, other than those guys all in one day I've only ever bumped into one other guy and it was a new guy to detecting with a Nokta Gold Kruzer in the same area.

I know exactly what their fresh dig holes were, shotgun pellets, they were everywhere!  Only one dig hole I found was substantial, the rest were more VLF type digs, or pellet scrapes.  

Anyway, my photos from the mission.

This was my first nugget, and it was on a old timer throw out pile in the gully that I know I've detected before, I detected the nugget through a flat piece of schist on top of the pile, after moving the schist the signal improved a bit more so I dug down and out it came.  .2 of a gram.






Things dried up then for a long time, I was just scraping pellets around all over the place so I moved out of the worked gully.




The terrain wasn't ideal for the 15" coil with the long grass and sage brush everywhere, but I'd forgotten to bring my 8" X-coil.  I intended to bring it but didn't.

I found a bit of bedrock coming out of the ground nearby the bottom of the gully, it had a signal coming out of it, I carefully scraped all the lichen and moss off the top of the corner of it that was giving the signal thinking it's likely a pellet, after cleaning it all off the signal was still there, I broke a few layers of schist off and the signal was still there, very likely to be gold now so I took more layers off and the target fell onto the nearby soil with the broken schist.  Recovered it and it was indeed a bit of gold.  My last piece for the day.





So that was it for me, I was extremely happy to get anything here, a bit of fun.