Why not? I can.
JW 
I can see your previous ones but not last ones. Such is life.
Got three nice nuggets testerday.
A mutual friend is there until Friday. For four or five days has six bottles to keep himself happy.
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I can’t either.Same as Lammerlaw.
Whats your read as to repeated findings on different days from same spot.(ground/atmospheric conditions) or just a new approach?.
You cant see the pics either. I will edit the post & re attach the pics & see if that helps. Strange, as I can see them.
As to repeated findings on different days on my friends wee patch find. I just went really slowly & very thoroughly over the ground he had been over. I grid work to a pattern with technique where as he just seems to wander around here & there with no game plan or structure & so misses spots & gold. I guess we all miss gold but I was very surprised that my very first piece was the biggest that came off the patch at 1.2 grams. That first find became a little glory hole & produced 23 pieces. 18 of those were with using a different detector that I went back with that is a lot more sensitive to tiny gold. The Gold Monster 1000. My friend & I went back again yesterday & I took with me two smaller coils for my GPZ 7000. A 10" & a 12 x 8 elliptical & I took the gold monster again. The first coil I was using on the GPZ was a 15" concentric wound coil. So the smaller coils are more sensitive on smaller gold but they also have the advantage of being able to be poked & prodded into spots the 15" coil couldn’t. Like in-between thyme bushes, in, under & around briar rose bushes, rocks & tussocks.
So the last 2 photos in the previous post to the above, that gold was found with the 15" coil. Yesterday I hit the same ground with the gold monster & got this.
First piece
Ended up with 16 pieces to the gold monster
I then put the 12 x 8 inch coil on the GPZ & went back over some of the ground I had previous worked with the 15" coil but focused more on spots I hadn’t been able to get the 15" coil into but in areas where I had got gold with the 15" coil.
You will see in this next pic that I was able to run the 12 x 8 coil down between these two thyme bushes that I wasn’t able to do with the 15". BANG…got a signal.
Piece of gold
I ended up getting two more pieces out of that one dig & a total of 6 pieces with that 12 x 8 coil from spots I couldnt get the 15" into.
My total for the day
My friend went back by himself the day before as well & it was the first time he had used a smaller coil on his GPZ. He used an 8" & got 13 more bits. Again in spots he was unable to swing his 15" coil. I didn’t bother going where he had been with that coil & yesterday he got 4. I would say that is the end of that spot. We were starting to really scrape the barrel.
So for me it wasn’t so much getting gold off the same ground by using the same detector & coil combo but by using a different detector, Gold Monster, & changing coil size on my GPZ.
But yes atmospheric conditions can & do come in to play. As does cold ground, hot ground, wet & damp ground. This was a lot more noticeable with the pulse induction Minelabs.
JW
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Hi Graeme, Can you see the other pics now?
JW
Can now John…l am jealous again.
Wish l was still there but had to get home.
The two people poaching our old claim are back there and vave been there a week. Must be doing ok as they are travelling from Christchurch.
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Very interesting and good explaination.Might have to get a GM.
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The Gold Monster is very affordable, super easy detector to use & deadly on small/tiny gold close to the coil. Ideal for me to check my dig out spoils. A great bedrock detector for those tiny bits.
I went back to this dig hole yesterday with the GM
Where I got this with the 15" X coil on the Zed.
& got two more tiny bits that the 15" missed.
This happens a lot using the GM on a dig from the bigger coil. Here is another example. Initial gold signal was found with the same 15" coil that got me down in depth. You can just see the green tip of my scoop sticking out of the hole. That is 12 inches long.
The piece of gold was in a crevice in the schist bed rock.
There was another signal in the hole but I used the GM to better pinpoint it with
Doing this with the GM lead to more smaller gold finds.
Ended up finding 10 other bits with the GM once the bigger bit with the 15" coil got me down to that depth so the GM could hit on those smaller bits. There was no way the GM would have heard those from the surface but once down in the hole the GM was a lot easier to negotiate around the hole mopping those smaller ones up.
JW
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Water’s getting a bit chilly now, might have to break the detector out a bit more myself now over winter! The little honey spot last time ran out unfortunately…
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Looks good Gav. Bloody nice. Good on you mate. There will be more there. Go deeper. 
Yep certainly cooling down now.
I went back to a spot I hadn’t been to for quite a while as the last few times in there with the GPZ 7000 & the ML 14 x 13 coil got me nothing. Bring on this 15" Concentric Russian made X coil & game on again.
4 small bits for a coil of this size is just crazy. But I am loving it. Not so much the small gold, could always be bigger 
but the fact I got more gold here at all.
Out of cracks & crevices in the schist bedrock
Good luck out there.
JW
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Lol, I was down to bedrock. Bit slow going though as about chest deep and big bolders to keep rolling out of the way. Keep trying to chase the pay streak 
That’s be effective machine / coil combo to keep picking up those tiny bits!
Bloody hard yacker that gold dredging. Especially in the conditions you were down to. Such is gold though. You never know what’s hiding under that next bolder.
Yes the Zed & X coil combinations are king at the moment. I cant wait to see how the new GPX 6000 compares. Personally I don’t think it will match & wont be better than the Zed/X coil combo’s. Time will tell.
JW
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Double post. Sorry
JW
Went out for a quick afternoon detect yesterday & managed just one small sucker. A place I have hammered over the years but I hadn’t had the 15" concentric X coil on the Zed in there. I wasn’t holding my breath on getting anything as that size coil is not ideal to use in there due to the rocky uneven nature of the old timer workings & the jagged rough exposed schist bedrock.
But I got a very faint signal through a flat slab of schist rock. I had to flip the slab over & out of the way.
The signal was still down in the gravels.
It took a bit more digging & scraping to finally get the signal out.
Only .25 of a gram 
But no catch & release. 
I was very impressed with the depth for the small size bit of gold & that 15" coil.
Went out again today for another quick afternoon detect & again only managed one bit. If I was surprised at the depth of that small piece yesterday this one just blew me away. Ok it was a bit bigger at .85 of a gram.
This was after I had scraped off a couple of inches as I wasn’t too sure if it was a signal or not.
It improved slightly but was still very faint & so I guessed it was going to be down quite a bit. I was still in a top soil loam so I got stuck into the dig until I was starting to peel out schist gravels.
The signal had improved heaps but was still in the tight packed gravels. I was liking my chances now.
The dig was directly underneath powerlines & no EMI or interference at all.
This is looking directly up.
Finally the signal was out. That scoop is 12" long
Coil is 15" diameter
.85 of a gram. Still pretty small but insane depth & also from beneath powerlines.
Cheers
Good luck out there
JW
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Nice one always love to see all the nuggets you pull out! If only I could say only 0.25 of a gram, we have got a fair share of alluvial gold in the past sometimes we get great hauls (at least for digging by hand) but never anything more then 0.3 of a gram, even in these gully’s undetected that had plenty of nuggets in their day came out with nothing even though we found a bunch of pickers in the hole we dug. When detecting do you always want the bedrock to be within the detectors reach (at least in creek beds), as I thought maybe thats the issue as the clay is often a bit too deep or maybe our detector is not sensitive enhough (although plenty of other people have had good success with it). You often seem to be mining outside of creeks is it just the creeks flood plain or an old river bed or old tailings is that where all the nuggets are and with all your time of expertise you have just got a great spot and im yet to strike a spot good enhough to detect well? Just wondering as I have never had any luck with our gold monster 1000 in all the hours I have spent on it and I just really feel like im doing something wrong, maybe if I had found even a 0.01 gram piece with it (it can detect even smaller then that) I would be happy, but no matter how much time on the detector never any luck for gold. I always just feel im doing something totatlly wrong.
Sorry I rambled on a bit there Ill be totally honest whenever I see other people with handful’s of nuggets on a detector I really just go lucky bugger XD (probably a bit rude to say that about anyone considering im still more or less an amateur especially when it comes to detecting) and always wish I could just find at least something golden with it.
Love the gold though make sure to keep it up!
Cheers
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Hi Sluicer, I live in Queenstown so right in the heart of gold country. Having said that though, I don’t do a lot of detecting in the immediate area. Mostly further afield but all in Central Otago. Yes I detect outside of creeks & rivers. They are all claimed around here any way. I go up in the hills away from present day claims & where the old time miners brought water onto their claims by water race. That is why some gold is still there as they weren’t that efficient with the limited water they had. If they had plenty of water then they did a pretty good good of getting most of the gold.
The Gold monster is a great little detector. Very sensitive on small tiny gold but it does need to be close to the coil. Sure if a bigger bit is there it will get that at a bit more depth but it is limited by the small size coils it has & besides, the bigger gold is usually the first to be found. So if detectors have been over the ground the bigger bits have most likely already gone. The GM is best suited for bed rock detecting where the gold is shallow but the gold does need to be there in the first place.
I do live & breath detecting for gold though & most of my spare time is out there doing it. Going away for the weekend in the caravan to chase the little yellow buggers. I just love getting out there. Gold or no gold. All good fun.
Where abouts are you?
Cheers
Good luck out there
JW
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Thanks a lot. Normally whilst detecting its one these 3 places,
#1, Charleston we go on family holidays there all the time and have spent ages detecting most of the rivers in the area, but the gold there is some of the finest in NZ so I never expected anything there.
#2, Goldsborough (and most other public sites but spent the most time detecting at goldsborough) spent ages on the public site detecting over the shallow clay but as expected nothing, we have pulled out larger 0.1 of a gram pieces there from our holes and I have heard of people picking up huge nugget’s there even as recently as a few month’s ago but we never anything with detector (it is a public site though so can’t say much).
But then site #3 this is the one that annoy’s me, Its our friend’s private claim they have mined it as a family for close to 50 year’s now and they assure me no one has ever detected there but they have never mined up in the gully’s yet and you can see the clean ups from their digger works lower downstream and there are handful’s of nuggets, the nuggets and picker’s make up a good 1/2 of the weight not just more alluvial flakes, in these gully’s the bottom is clay and it ranges from about 10CM-1M deep (no crevices in the shallowing stuff on the banks the bedrock under the flow is normally a lot deeper) but I can never pick up anything even though we dug a solid hole down to the clay and we found about 10 0.3-0.2 gram pickers deeper down I can just never pick up anything on the coil.
Maybe its the clay needs to be at its deepest point or maybe I just havent spent long enhough (probably only a day’s worth detecting there overall but I always detect our holes and the surronding area as well).
Cheers-
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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 new 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 & had been hiding them.
The handle end of the scoop is pointing to the hole. You can still see some of the 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 pics taken a bit further down again. 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.
Thank you to Lammerlaw for the photo of the revolver from his personal antique gun collection that takes these bullets.
One of the Bullets was exactly like this one. 12mm Pinfire Cartridge by Kynoch & Co.
The other three were the same as this one. 12mm Pinfire Cartridge by Kynoch & Co.
Pretty cool find I reckon.
This was the gold found with the Gold monster
Cheers & Good luck out there
JW 
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Cool bit of history JW as always nice pics keep em comeing
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Shit John - where did you find that heater - just the sort of thing I collect - you should donate it to a charitable cause. Its a cracker! Belgium, about 1860.
Eggzactly the same as one found a while ago in lake Waihola.
In the photo you can see the slots in the cylinder where the pins on the cartridges poke through. The only draw back with these cartridges was the fact that each cartridge had its own protruding firing pin so that if you were mad enough to have a pocket full and fell of your horse it could well be a bang and a case of, “Fuck mum where did my leg go?”
These are original packets made pre 1908 and were found amongst all the junk at a Dunedin gun shop within the last five or six years. Four still full and the other opened with about 20 cartridges.
Love the gold!
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