Yer the Aussies are loving the 17". There is a 22" & now a 26" concentric. Be interesting to see how they go on larger deeper gold across the ditch. I believe there may even be a 12" concentric in the making.
JW 
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Well done Kiwijw; man that Otago country is stunning
Pete Coromandel
Hi there Pete. Thank you. The Coro is stunning too. Both places just a very different beauty & both show the awesomeness of mother nature.
Here is my view from a house I am working on down here in Queenstown. The last moments of the days sun.
Just about to head off back to the spot of my previous post.
JW
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Some of my best finds from a few weeks back and some recent. Most from Louis creek area and a few from doc land (just sneaking a pan and crevice tool in while out hiking lol), great to have moved up from finding thin flakes to now some chunkier stuff! Even found my biggest bit yet weighing 0.31. Love this hobby, though she’s getting cold and slippery out there!
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Some nice gold good on ya mate
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Thanks mate got to love that color
Do you have a detector?
Just a pan and a sluice, will look at getting a GM1000 detector at some point though
Next purchase is a crevice sucker, got some roughly clean cracks that had some nice bits in them, cant quite clean them out fully without one i don’t think
Good on ya mate and good luck out there
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Beautiful gold. Make your own crevice sucker. Bit of fun and so rewarding. Good hunting!
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Yep dan at dredgeNZ has em, Caledonia sucker pumps are very light and have a good seal,you can also buy online Yambby pumps,short and long and s/steel google em!
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Make your own out of PVC pipe. Piece of piss if you have the right gear to do it. I used an old jandle to make the washer seal jammed between two big washers. Just need a hole saw of the right diameter to cut it & fit snuggly inside the pipe. By tightening the nut more you can squash the jandle seal to fit tighter. This is the trick once the seal wears a bit with use. I used 35mm pvc pipe. Then drill out with the hole saw wood plugs for the top & bottom ends. you may have to sand these down a tad to fit tightly, then just screw them in place through the side of the pipe body. Bit of half inch copper pipe for the business end. Secret is to have the copper pipe stick up inside about 4 inches so the heavies can drop into the collection chamber & not fall back out.
You need to drill a hole in the side of the main body up at the handle end, as in the photo, so the air can escape when pulling up on the handle.
By using just the main body without the nosey nozzle fitted you can suck & dump material straight into your pan.
Result of sucking out this crevice up the Lyell
JW
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Good stuff JW
Cheers The Hatter
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Cheers thanks for the idea! Will have to make one for sure now 
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Hi guys, Well I went back to the above spot that I last found gold at on Saturday just gone. Was a late start & I was rushing my detecting, which I don’t like to do, & consequently got a skunk. Was a beautiful day up there though. Note the rock formation, Schist tor, towards the top right. Looks like a little Pokémon figure wearing a helmet looking towards the left with the helmet shading his eyes & his buddy hiding behind him. If you left click on the pic it will go full screen for a better look. It is amazing the figures you can see in the Schist tors. Especially in the silhouette light/shade of late afternoon/early evening. That can be a post all to itself.
The neatness & extent of some of the stacked rocks to get to the very bottom of the gully by the old timers, blows me away. I would say this was done by Chinese. They were renowned for their neatness. These pics were taken back in January 2016 when I had my eldest & youngest sons with me & took them up to this spot. The bottom right of the pic is a pathway that they created that is also formed with stacked rocks & it goes down to the gully bottom & was likely their wheelbarrow access pathway to bring the rocks up & out of their way.
Brent was using the 2300 & got on to a shot gun pellets graveyard here.
Aydin was the only one to score a small piece of gold using the GB2.
I got a skunk that day as well with the 4500. I was using the Coiltek 14" Elite coil.
After my skunk on Saturday I went to a local spot close to home for a late afternoon detect on Sunday. I am pretty sure I had not had the Zed in this particular spot at all & that was mainly due to grass & growth conditions not being favourable for the ML 14" coil. This area is now under development so it was now or never. Luckily for me the growth was next to nothing & was actually the best detecting conditions since I was last here years ago with the GP 3000 when drought conditions had dealt to any growth.
I was also very surprised at the lack of rubbish only getting one .22 bullet head & a .22 shell casing & one or two shot gun pellets.
15" concentric X coil on the Minelab GPZ 7000, High Yield/Normal & full max sensitivity.
First gold signal down in the bedrock schist.
Bloody tiny
This coil just blows me away.
2nd signal, same result. Only my phone died on me. But I got a few pics of the area.
I ended up getting 5 little bits. Just crazy small gold for this size coil.
Good luck out there
JW
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My sort of country - I am jellyarse. ’ - Wallace and Gromit! ‘A Grand Day Out’
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Easy to make, all material from local hardware store about $70 in total.
Went one size up from the keen unit.
Works great.
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Well things have come a long way. I just love how people call them sniffers or sniffles.
There proper name is Snifters. My uncle was amongst the first two or three people to ever make and use them in New Zealand. We used to go around the second hand shops buying every vintage car tyre pump and we converted them into ‘snifters’.
This one is probably a historic gold mining artifact of the modern era as it is one of the very first ever made so well over 60 years old.
It was put aside as a pattern for all the rest that were made later so 60years later we still have not used it. In the meantime 6 of our gold mining partners over the years have died and gone west.
This then is an original snifter.
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How about Crevice Sucker. Or am I just a sucker for crevices??
Hi there Henry…hope all is good.
JW 
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