echidna

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About echidna

  • Birthday 06/07/1959

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    australia

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  1. Thanks Gus, sorry for posting on your same thread but the shapes on your specimen looked very similar to some on mine. Thought it was interesting how things are really not that different where ever you go in the world... even people
  2. Hey Roo, we get a few over here as well These all came off the same patch with the one in the middle weighing 26 grams
  3. Hey Curley, I am interested in one also. Maybe we could save a bit of freight to OZ if we had them sent together and I paid you to post mine up to me in Queensland. I can pay Rob separately for my half by credit card. PM me if you are interested. All the best, Frank
  4. DON'T YOU JUST LOVE IT WHEN YOU'RE WRONG First off, since this contest is for those in the USA and not Oz, if the judge thought this story somehow good enough to win, I would like to donate the coil of his choice to Grubstake. I reckon he and his family have been going through a bit of a rough trot lately and I am sure he would provide it with a good home as well as providing the rest of us with plenty of feedback on its performance. Now back to my story. I have a little spot only about thirty minutes from home that I often go to if I need to do a little detector meditating This is in fact the place I found my very first nugget (long long ago). I know I can almost always find a few bits here but as you can see by the photo, they are always veeeery tiny. Anyway, they are fun to find and it keeps the skills finely honed Biggest piece on the scale, the one at the bottom that looks like a bit of wire, only weighs 1.2 gms and the two flakes either side of it won't register on the scale on their own Well another weekend rolled around and as my mate was tied up with honey do jobs, I thought I would ask my better half if she would like to go on a picnic . Low and behold, she suggested that maybe I should take the detector and she would take her camera (photography is sort of more her thing). In fact, here is one of her shots of the easter bunny in camo After arriving at the spot and then having our nicely prepared lunch we both decided to wander off and do our own thing. After only about 10 minutes I had my first little piece (.8 gms ) on the side of a very steep hill. Didn't seem to be anything else here so I thought I'd walk-slide down this hill, cross the lantana infested gully and checkout the next hillside. I had never really paid much attention to this gully before because it was filled with gravelly sand and debris with bedrock at least a meter deep. Since ALL of the nuggets in the area were small, I KNEW I would be wasting my time. Off I go pushing through lantana halfheartedly swinging the my little 11" DD PRO coil ahead of me purely by habit as well as giving any slippery sticks something to strike at before the rest of me stepped on them. (I like to use this small DD in this area because the gound is extremely hot and there are a lot of sticks, rocks and grass to push through. I have found gold at some amazing depths with this coil and although I love large monos I think many foolishly overlook the cababilities of this little beauty.) In an instant the steady hum coming out of my external speaker screamed into overload. #%& rubbish, I thought as I kept walking. After about 10 more steps of wondering if it was a horse shoe or whatever and remembering the glowing looks of appreciation from my wife when I gave her an old set of hobbles I had dug up (she likes that old junk), I turned around and retraced my steps. After easily relocating the general area of the blaring target, I proceeded to uncarefully sink my pick into the soft sandy gravel and then raked out a large pile of same and rechecked the hole - no signal, checked pile - blaring signal! Soooo, I started to rake through the damp sand looking for that tell tale rusty colored stain that iron leaves and casually tossing handfulls of gravel over the top of my coil when suddenly off went the detector. Quickly looking at where the last handful had landed I could see 2 or 3 pieces of coarse gravel but nothing that looked like a bit of rubbish. Reaching over and picking up the coarse bits and paying a little more attention my heart gave a little flutter as one of the muddy stones had that lovely heavy feeling. " Oh, don't be stupid. You know there are only small nuggets here and gold would never be in the top 15cm of a meter of gravel." One quick wipe between the fingers revealed a 40 grammer in all its glory Love it when I'm wrong Needless to say the rest of the day was spent checking the whole gully, lantana and all, as well as the adjacent hillside with no more luck. Back the next day with my mate (who after seeing the 40 grammer) managed to somehow get all his commitments out of the way . We covered a vast area with 4 different coils and I managed to find another little patch(?) in a completely different area. Yep, 3 bits for a little over a gram. No decent nuggets around here. I knew I was right Frank
  5. Steve, my Dad always said that you could get any job done if you had enough of the 3M's..... men, machinery, and money. But the main thing was to have enough of the last one so you could buy the other two . Wishing you all the best in your endeavor as it sounds like you are on a real winner. Frank
  6. Steve, although I live about 3 hrs from JP I have never met him. But if he told me that drilling a hole in my head would improve my detector I would ask him what size . I have a great amount of respect for his knowledge of metal detecting. From what I have read of your posts I believe you to be in the same league. All the best, Frank
  7. Steve, I think JP was speaking of drilling a hole into his external speaker housing not his detector to install a switch....just goes to show how easy things can get mis understood over the internet. Frank
  8. Hello Martin, I think you may have imperial gallons and US gallons mixed up. 1 imp gallon = 4.546 liters, 1 US gal=3.7853 liters. At the moment in Central Queensland I am paying AUD$1.18 for diesel (USD$0.98) and AUD$1.28 (USD$1.06) for Petrol (gas in US english ). That works out at USD$3.70 for diesel and USD$4.02 for petrol. Still bad, just not quite sooo bad. Lets hope our gold to mileage ratio is better. Frank (echidna)
  9. A peice of gold is a nugget when......... 1. You show it to somebody who is not involved in our hobby and they say wow! or "hey thats beautiful" 2. They ask to hold it and your heart doesn't skip a beat because you will need your detector to find it if they drop it. 3. They drop it and your heart skips a beat because you wonder if your trophy's now got some ghastly mark on it's untouched surface that you never marked as you dug it out of the ground wildy swinging a pick and raking it out of the hole with gravel and dirt. 4. You come back from a weekend prospecting dirty, battle scarred and hungry. Your lovely wife asks to see what you found and she doesn't have to hold back fits of laughter. 5. You show another prospector your find and you both don't have to make up excuses like "well as least we don't have to gut it or scale it".