DJ's Detectors
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DJ's Detectors
700 w.
Alta Vista
Ottumwa, Iowa 52501
Hi All,
June has arrived. The water is
warming up and gold prospecting season is now started. Lots of folks have been
finding good amounts of gold and sending in pictures of it. We love to see
your finds. To all of you who have purchased gold pans for the first time, we
wish you lots of luck and may the bottom of your pans turn always turn yellow.
We hope the spring has been good to everybody.
Metal detecting is in full swing,
pun intended, and with warmer weather coming and drier conditions be sure to
respect the parks and yards you will be hunting in. When you dig plugs and it
is dry ground you can count on the grass dieing till it rains again. I would
like to remind everyone of a few MUST RULES for detecting. Always have
permission. Always fill your holes back in, even if you are in a field, and
always take the trash you dig with you when you leave. There are regulations
being made all over the country keeping us from detecting and prospecting.
Always leave the places as good or better looking then when you get there.
This will help promote our hobbies.
It has been great meeting and
talking with all of you who have stopped in our chat room. We are generally
there most evenings to talk about metal detecting and prospecting. If you have
never stopped in here is a personal invitation to do so. We have been running
specials from time to time which are posted on the welcome message of the chat
room. Be sure to stop in and check from time to time.
We
also post specials on the treasureboards classifieds forum. You can view those
at the Treasureboards site. Lots of great info and finds posted here also. Be
sure to stop by and post your finds there.
June Metal Detecting Tip
Finding gold with a metal
detector can be tricky. First off, if it is jewelry it can have very different
makeup's of minerals, and also shapes and sizes. This can make it very
difficult to tell whether it is just another pull tab, or gold. As some of you
know gold will read anywhere from foil to zinc cent on most visual ID
machines. The method I use most when hunting non trashy areas is the All Metal
Mode. I dig all solid signals. Yes this includes foil and all types of trash,
but it also pays off from time to time. If I am in a trashier site I run Disc.
Mode, and set it at a very low setting. On my DeLeon this is just above iron.
Again you will dig allot of pull tabs and other junk, but many nice finds come
with it.
One of the best areas to find
gold with any metal detector is in the water at beaches. It really doesn't
matter whether these beaches are fresh water at your local lake, or ocean
beaches. Many really nice gold finds have come from both.
For gold nugget hunting it is
very simple. You hunt in the All Metal Mode and dig every beep. Some machines
are much better suited to deal with the highly mineralized grounds then
others. Also some are much better at avoiding the troublesome hot rocks one
will encounter. Gold nugget hunting takes an extreme amount of patience and
persistence. If you do not have these qualities, you are best suited to stick
to coins and relics. If you do have the patience and persistence to nugget
shoot with a metal detector it can be very rewarding.
Sierra's Prospecting
Tips
Tips on following paystreaks in placer gravels William Anderson
The old saying that gold is where you find it is a
copout. That saying is used by people who either don't know where to look or
care to learn where gold is deposited. The fact of the matter is gold
concentrates in very predictable places. To find those places you have to
determine where there is a water velocity decrease in the stream system in
times of extreme flooding. The water flow at the time you are on the stream,
with the sun shining, and your picnic lunch out, is very different than when
there is a 1000-year flood. As you stand in the stream, picture what a 20 foot
wall of water would do. Try to image how it would deflect off walls of bedrock
ledges, how it would sweep around bends in the stream. Try to picture what
happens when water goes down a straight shoot. With that thinking in mind, now
figure where in the stream there would be velocity decreases in the water.
There will be decreases in the velocity where the streams go from steep to
flat, where the stream goes from narrow to wide. There will be decrease in
velocity where the water will sweep around a bend, due to the fact that the
inside part has slower water velocity than the outside part of the bend. The
water there has a shorter distance to travel to exit the bend. There will be a
decrease where there is the swirling action of a whirlpool eddy. Down a
straight chute, the drag effect of the edges of bedrock on the banks will slow
water down. Those things are permanent velocity decrease zones in the stream,
they don’t change. Where as medium boulders, or wedged in tree trunks are NOT
permanent velocity decrease zones. Such transitory water velocity decrease
zones are not an important factor, this is because, it takes an extremely long
time to build a good pay streak, decades, centuries. The temporary aspect of
small boulders, or clogging tree trunks doesn’t allow for enough concentrating
time. Also it might help to picture how the gold is actually traveling. During
extreme floods, water is extremely muddy, almost like flowing pudding. The
muddier the water the more density it has, thus the greater ability to keep in
suspension heavy particles, like gold. Gold does not particularly float in
water, it saltates. Saltation in a combination of bouncing along the bottom,
being drug, getting picked up, being shoved. Gold does not move like wood
floating in clear water. Gold having a high density will be almost the first
material to stop moving during periods of saltation, and when the flow rate
drops off. The lighter materials will keep moving on, thus creating the gold
concentrating effect. Quality pay streaks tend to be long narrow, or thin
things.
When you’ve
analyzed the creek and you think you have a paystreak located, based on a
velocity decrease zone, you also have to realize that most streams, especially
in the west, have already been mined by the gold rushers, the Chinese, the
depression miners, the 1960’s prospectors and all of the modern dredgers. If a
likely area has been mined out, and has been masked with a new layer of
gravel, from a recent high water, you won’t have a pay place. Also you can’t
tell this is the case from a casual inspection. But you can tell what is what
by examining the age of the gravel deposits. If your deposit has hardtack,
well-defined clay layers, mineral staining in the gravel, the gravel has been
in place long enough to have good potential. If the gravel is loose, silty but
not clay-like, has recent organic materials like leaves or pine needles that
are not decomposed, you are looking at a new deposit. As you do your test dig,
keep these things in mind.
Lets say you have an old deposit with a good
velocity decrease, and there fore you have a high likelihood of a good
paystreak. As you mine or prospect the deposit, it is very beneficial to keep
track of where the gold is coming from. This will take careful observation.
What you don’t want to do is to mine allot of gravel and see gold at the end
of the day, because you don’t know exactly where the gold is coming from. By
careful testing, and lots of looking, you need to discover if the gold is
coming from high or low, in gravel or on bedrock, or maybe from on top of a
false bedrock like a clay layer. Discover if the gold concentrated laterally,
to the left to the center or to the right. If you can determine these things,
you now have the ability to mine a high-grade paystreak. Leave the lower grade
gravel for someone else. The process truly works. Case in point: I watched an
80 year old man take 8 oz of gold in a week, by shoveling into a 3 foot long
wooden sluice box. He did this by skimming only the top several inches of
large gravel bar. The gold was fine and flaky,, what we call flood gold, but
was gold nonetheless. Seeing his good results, a dredger splashed in a 6 inch
machine, dredged out huge volumes of gravel and got ¼ oz of gold in his week
because the dredger got underneath the paystreak. He wasted time and effort
mining many feet of depth of gravel that had little value in it. The old man
understood paystreaks and knew the gold was only in the top few inches, the
dredger did not.
Next installment, secrets the old timers had to sample select portions, of large gravel structures. The paystreaks were theirs! If anyone has any tips or suggestions, please fell free to send them in. A special thanks to Sierra for his prospecting tips. Michelle, thank you for your help this month also. Thanks to all of the new customers who have done business with us this last month. We really do appreciate it. We wish each and everyone of you the best of luck in your new hobby. Treasure hunting can be frustrating a times when things just don't go your way, so always remember to have fun. Enjoy your summer and the outdoors.
Happy Hunting Everyone,
Doug & Jarita Heidebrink
DJ's Detectors
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