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- Feb 6, 2018
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Check out my "custom" Go Find 40, including such features as:
- 'Quick release' arm strap with gaffer tape reinforcement
- Weight reduction by unplanned removal of unnecessary trimmings such as the coil nut wings and many internal plastic pieces
- Handle plastic joinsrepaired reinforced with super glue
- Bespoke metal hose clamp arm brace locking mechanism
For the $240 I dropped on it 5 months ago (eBay), it's been a ripper but I don't think it's going to last too much longer at this rate. I reckon I've put somewhere in the region of 100 hours into it, making it a very cheap hobby to be honest. It gets clattered around the bush and smacked into trees and rocks rather than the parks and fields that it was designed for. I think an upgrade for Christmas is in order.
I wouldn't mind getting a little more depth, most coins I'm getting are at 6 inches or so but I suspect I'm not getting to the bottom of the prospective layers of the areas I detect. The two main sites I'm detecting at the moment is a vineyard where the rows have been deeply ploughed every year, and a very interesting turn of the century cricket pitch (now forest) where storm runoff over the decades has scoured the entire field and dumped the soil at the bottom of the gentle slope, with more than enough power to take the coins etc with it. The 1890's coins I recover there are in a layer of silt full of leaves that I don't seem to get to the bottom of, I reckon there's more potential deeper.
My other detector is a White's GMT, I know it's a bit niche and struggles with the Central Vic ground but I intended to start my detecting career going over local mine dumps for smaller gold, and it seemed like the machine for it by my reckoning if most of the ground has been previously walked over with GPXs etc. For this it isn't too naggy since there's less iron on the dumps than in the soil. The realities of my life changed about the time I got it (new kiddo), and it really meant that coin and relic sites were more accessible with the time I had rather than the gold mines I'd been spending a lot of time walking over. Haven't exactly got the same price per hour of fun ratio out of this one yet! Naturally the GMT isn't the best coin machine so I picked up the Go Find to cover the gap. The coin bug has fully bitten now, although some time in the future I'll get back to gold. The GMT still gets a run regularly when I think the Go Find has done as much as it can on a site, and they seem on par with each other, but for this purpose the Go Find is far more sanity-friendly.
I'm thinking I'd keep it under $1000 (~800 would be ideal), and it would be nice to have some kind of mineralised ground gold capability to complement the GMT. The 705 dual coil pack hits a good price point (especially with an Anaconda sale), but would I be disappointed coming from the capabilities of the Go Find to this older model? I can't find too much 'real world' comparisons of the Go Finds to more serious detectors, clearly because those worlds aren't meant to overlap too much. Could stretch to an Equinox 600 if they came on special, but I have a feeling that I'd regret not getting the 800 if I went that way which I can't justify. I'm not in love with Minelab and happy to give some of the other brands a whirl. Are the Makro Racers any good (in a Victorian ground context that is)? It would be good to be able to notch out pull tabs / bottle tops to be able to hit up some camping sites, I figure more drunk should equal more dropping of stuff, seems to be the case with me...
On that topic, can anything be done about decomposing tin cans / kero tins? the flat, jagged iron fragments ring up as the highest category on the Go Find, despite the fact that they are clearly ferrous. The fragments all seem to have a similar sound to them so I assume they might be notchable? Bits of this stuff are everywhere and make some areas almost impossible to detect.
I also wonder if the Go Find is a little weak on the silvers. I've found many pennies and half pennies by now, but my silver finds are represented by a single sunbaker shilling. Even a 3p would be nice...
TL;DR - Go Find is going the way of all things and the GMT is too niche to sanely chase coins with, what's the best value coin machine with decent depth in the ~$800 range?
For something visual after that slab of text, here's a pic of the Go Find doing it's thing a couple of days ago on the cricket field - 1894 half penny in insanely saturated ground. This is when my arm strap plastic broke and I resolved to retire the thing!
- 'Quick release' arm strap with gaffer tape reinforcement
- Weight reduction by unplanned removal of unnecessary trimmings such as the coil nut wings and many internal plastic pieces
- Handle plastic joins
- Bespoke metal hose clamp arm brace locking mechanism
For the $240 I dropped on it 5 months ago (eBay), it's been a ripper but I don't think it's going to last too much longer at this rate. I reckon I've put somewhere in the region of 100 hours into it, making it a very cheap hobby to be honest. It gets clattered around the bush and smacked into trees and rocks rather than the parks and fields that it was designed for. I think an upgrade for Christmas is in order.
I wouldn't mind getting a little more depth, most coins I'm getting are at 6 inches or so but I suspect I'm not getting to the bottom of the prospective layers of the areas I detect. The two main sites I'm detecting at the moment is a vineyard where the rows have been deeply ploughed every year, and a very interesting turn of the century cricket pitch (now forest) where storm runoff over the decades has scoured the entire field and dumped the soil at the bottom of the gentle slope, with more than enough power to take the coins etc with it. The 1890's coins I recover there are in a layer of silt full of leaves that I don't seem to get to the bottom of, I reckon there's more potential deeper.
My other detector is a White's GMT, I know it's a bit niche and struggles with the Central Vic ground but I intended to start my detecting career going over local mine dumps for smaller gold, and it seemed like the machine for it by my reckoning if most of the ground has been previously walked over with GPXs etc. For this it isn't too naggy since there's less iron on the dumps than in the soil. The realities of my life changed about the time I got it (new kiddo), and it really meant that coin and relic sites were more accessible with the time I had rather than the gold mines I'd been spending a lot of time walking over. Haven't exactly got the same price per hour of fun ratio out of this one yet! Naturally the GMT isn't the best coin machine so I picked up the Go Find to cover the gap. The coin bug has fully bitten now, although some time in the future I'll get back to gold. The GMT still gets a run regularly when I think the Go Find has done as much as it can on a site, and they seem on par with each other, but for this purpose the Go Find is far more sanity-friendly.
I'm thinking I'd keep it under $1000 (~800 would be ideal), and it would be nice to have some kind of mineralised ground gold capability to complement the GMT. The 705 dual coil pack hits a good price point (especially with an Anaconda sale), but would I be disappointed coming from the capabilities of the Go Find to this older model? I can't find too much 'real world' comparisons of the Go Finds to more serious detectors, clearly because those worlds aren't meant to overlap too much. Could stretch to an Equinox 600 if they came on special, but I have a feeling that I'd regret not getting the 800 if I went that way which I can't justify. I'm not in love with Minelab and happy to give some of the other brands a whirl. Are the Makro Racers any good (in a Victorian ground context that is)? It would be good to be able to notch out pull tabs / bottle tops to be able to hit up some camping sites, I figure more drunk should equal more dropping of stuff, seems to be the case with me...
On that topic, can anything be done about decomposing tin cans / kero tins? the flat, jagged iron fragments ring up as the highest category on the Go Find, despite the fact that they are clearly ferrous. The fragments all seem to have a similar sound to them so I assume they might be notchable? Bits of this stuff are everywhere and make some areas almost impossible to detect.
I also wonder if the Go Find is a little weak on the silvers. I've found many pennies and half pennies by now, but my silver finds are represented by a single sunbaker shilling. Even a 3p would be nice...
TL;DR - Go Find is going the way of all things and the GMT is too niche to sanely chase coins with, what's the best value coin machine with decent depth in the ~$800 range?
For something visual after that slab of text, here's a pic of the Go Find doing it's thing a couple of days ago on the cricket field - 1894 half penny in insanely saturated ground. This is when my arm strap plastic broke and I resolved to retire the thing!