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 
They are part & parcel of this game, unfortunately & can make it real shit.
