A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be offered the use of a Macro Gold Racer with an 8x4 inch coil by a prominent local metal detecting personality. His name is Julian and has the blog at www.marlboroughmetaldetecting.com where he keeps track of all his finds and such.
My first outing was with the racer was a lazy Sunday trip to a spot on a local river that you can literally drive right into the river. I was with 4 other guys, one intended to snipe and the others had three different detectors between them. We spent a few hours here which saw me locate quite a number of very small lead shot targets in bedrock crevices but gold eluded me right to the end of the day when I found a tiny 0.12g flake. Initial thoughts about the detector after this outing was that it was quite hot at finding tiny targets and it was the only detector that found gold on this day.
My next trip was to a somewhat more remote area that turned out a little trick to get to. I had suspicions that there might be gold in this particular waterway based on local geology and nearby discoveries. As soon as we go to the river it became apparent that the VLF detectors we had with us were not going to handle the local levels of ground mineralisation. Bedrock was a mixture of igneous rock that in some cases overloaded the detector completely. Despite the racers variety of settings to enable detecting in tougher ground I found it impossible to get it to function here. I could get it to run reasonably quiet but then I was only able to detect a half grammer at a couple of cm and the signal was far from crisp.
And lucky last trip. I took the detector to a mates’ claim for a run. This spot is also in quite a public spot and myself and others have hammered it in the past. At an estimate I have taken a couple of oz’s from it in the past in the form of predominantly <0.5g nuggets. The racer ran very nicely here with sensitivity at 80 and isat at about mid-way. It didn’t take long before I started pulling tiny lead shot soon followed by a crevice that gave a weak signal. With a bit of chipping I recovered about 20 small flakes and colours to for a total of maybe 0.1g from the crevice (not in picture). The gold was all located in an area the size of a 10c coin. I was impressed at having found such small gold despite it being shallow as normally an aggregation of targets seems to be quieter than one large target of similar weigh. Or so I have found.
I carried on for a couple of hours and got 6 further pieces of gold for a total of 0.2g as well as a bunch of lead. In fact, 5 of the pieces together weigh just 0.1g!
So, it seems the racer is ridiculously sensitive to small gold and has plenty of scope to be manually adapted to different ground. Personally, I found the detector a bit on the “manual” side with the option of setting a lot of search parameters yourself. I know this is preferred by some and less so by others, just like manual and automatic cars I guess.
I’d like to say thanks to Julian for the opportunity to let me use his Racer, especially as he didn’t know me at all. It’s always fun trying a new bit of kit.
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great review Mathias!
Wow! Lucky you. That’s awesome.