Micro gold hunting on lake beaches

This is the 3mm white gold 4 prong earring that Nasa Tom uses for a micro gold test. This is the earring that is so hard to get a hit on.
5j by Rick Covert, on Flickr

Hi Rick,
Yep, that is the same one I'm using as a test target too.

Mike

Here’s the specs on a similar item from a jewelry component website

Karat/purity : 14K
Brand : Inverness
Post/wire size : .029"
Fabrication method : Fabricated
Style : Post earring
Metal color : White
Mounted stone(s) size(s) : 3mm



Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

Lytle78,

It needs to be 10k white gold, not 14K white gold. You also want to be able to read it as a non-ferrous target.

Most prospecting units can pick it up in all metal mode. Picking it up as a non-ferrous target is the kicker. That small of a 10K white gold target reacts more like a mineral target than a metal target.

My Gold Kruzer with the small DD coil can read it in Micro mode with a bouncing ferrous/non-ferrous ID at about 3/8" inches. DD coil effect is pretty strong that close to the coil....so its impossible to get a lock on id. Rick probably has the right idea in using the all metal mode and looking for the tiny sounding targets.

From what I can tell, the Fisher GOLD BUG II is still at the top of the heap.

You may notice lots of people testing with little yellow gold. Yellow gold is quite a bit higher up the conductive ladder over 10K white gold of the same size. If you can pick up that little 10k white gold earring stud up as a non-ferrous target, you can pretty much pick up any jewelry item every made in my opinion.

HH
Mike

With a 10k white gold earring would metal contents need be standard for testing or would there be a difference with other metal contents.

I know silver, nickel, zinc, manganese, platinum and other metals are used in white gold. Would the different combinations make a difference how your detector reacts.

I don't know what the metal contents are in my test earrings.

If we can agree on a standard test article, I expect it would cost about $20 per pair. I would be willing to buy in a small quantity and then split the pairs and distribute single earrings at my cost. We just need to agree on an actual item in the marketplace which would be the standard.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

Now.....you have the target.... how much trash you willing to dig near the 1 digit? Now Bury it at a 1” in the salt water sand. That may show you just what could be there you miss.

That's a great idea. The earrings should all be the same for tests. I bought mine on ebay. It would be good to know the % metal content in the earring but is very hard to find. If the earrings are all the same the content wouldn't matter.

I'm sure others would agree and buy the same earrings and would split the pair to someone else who wants one to test.

A standardized micro gold 10k white gold 3mm 4 prongs for testing.

Wow, white gold is a complex business

[www.thoughtco.com]

Platinum, palladium, nickel - most white gold items are apparently Rhodium plated to make them a shiny silver color...who knew???

Lovely thing about coins, they are highly standardized.

Another thing standardized - lead shot. World wide sizes and weights are standard and they are pure lead. Anybody want to hunt some #12 “rat shot”

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/19/2019 02:14AM by lytle78.

Rhodium is used as a very durable coating over nickel

Mike Hillis...…. correct.

Yes...…. there's a world of (detectable) difference between 14K White...… and 10K White gold.
Original Gold Bug-2 (at Op Freq 71-KHz)…… is still the trump-card.
Most detectors...…… even gold-dedicated detectors …… fall flat on their face....,,,,,, when testing a 10K White gold earring post/stud...… (as pictured above).

Got a real story:

About a Decade ago...…. a friend of mine (a VFD fire Chief)……. wanted to know all about micro-jewelry hunting. (He saw the video). I gave him a thorough rundown about this 'type' of hunting...… and the GB-2. He did not want to buy a detector.... and was still uncertain if this type of hunting....was his cup-of-tea. I let him borrow one of my GB-2's...… and off he went to the ocean beach (at a volleyball court). . . . . . just before sunrise. About 4-1/2 hours later..... he pulls into my driveway..... and throws a Ziploc bag ...full of micro-trash at me. . . . . . . and has a few 'choice' words for me. Then he throws $900.00 cash at me...… in concert with a recent/fresh photo. He had found a 10K White gold post...… with a (approx.) 3/4-Ct diamond. ((( He also gave me 96-Cents.... for the earrings gold content!!! ))) He went to his cousins jewelry shop.... and traded the micro stud..... for $900. He kept the detector, headphones...… and plastic micro-scoop!

The Gold Bug-2 is trump..... for micro-gold; yet, for those interested...… you may want to read the thread (on this forum) about the Gold Racer.

Wouldn’t it be funny if the “ultimate beach detector combo” would turn out to be from Fisher.

An Impulse AQ for the wet salt and wading and a GB2 for the tiny jewels.

We’ll see.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

I tell ya what I observed this week. I had a much needed week off from work and have been out enjoying every minute of it. Most of it has been on the lakes and rivers of east TN.

What I have noticed is...very few adult age people actually in the water swimming at the beach areas. All the swim areas I visited had the same story/theme to them. Kiddos playing in the water. Adults sitting in the shade on their phones, etc. Another shift, is the explosion of the kayak popularity, and paddle boards. This is something that I observed most of the other adults doing. They aren't going to the beach to swim, but going to the lakes and rivers to kayak and paddle board. This may be bad news for hunting the swimming areas here.

Went for a walk on the promenade this evening.
3 guys whipping Equinox 800’s on the dry sand, with a nice ridge formed from todays windy weather. Go figure??

During summer I just take in the views and walk the dog. Always have my Garmin wrist GPS on.
Can’t be bothered competing with the crowd for the daily left-over coins.
Just hit the waypoint button and save.

Come fall and bad weather,... I’m hitting all my saved waypoints and just running concentric circle’s.
Nox 800 in Beach 1 hits babies gold bracelets :-)

Micro jewelry is fun whilst watching TV in the man cave.
You just need a sturdy finds bag that can hold a decent amount of sand, a plastic cup, a gold pan, and a large vat to dump the sand in when you get home.
Oh and a Goldbug 2 with iron disc, or a minelab gold machine with iron reject.

Pick a spot, scoop the targets, pan at home. Why would you want to waste beach time trying to identify that target in a teaspoon full of sand in your handpalm!!

HH
Johnb

I have ordered a new Gold Bug 2 with the 6 “ and 10” coils to get ready for when the Fisher Impulse AQ FINALLY appears. The AQ for all the wet and the GB2 for the tiny stuff. An “all Fisher” get everything twosome!!

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

Sounds good to me.

After my brief hunt in Atlantic City I came to a conclusion. Hunting the wet during low tide I dug a few targets that were very small pieces of copper. Maybe twice as thick as a piece of paper and as round as a pencil eraser. Found in beach 1 with the 600 sensitivity 20. Maybe two to three inches deep.

Conclusion.....I really don't want to hunt small targets on a beach. If people are now wearing junk titanium and stainless wedding bands then the probability of quality earrings with big stones is remote. Yes AC is not a rich persons beach. But very few beaches I am near are. But then my beaches are crowded. The mention of 10k above makes me wonder. How many 10k studs have nice stones? More power to those with the tenacity to see it through. I also found two junk bands in that 1.5 hr hunt besides the grillz. I will gladly dig a 10k band over a 10k stud.

Atlantic City has been around since before the Civil War. Once upon a time it was a highfalutin town, gangsters and the rich. I would imagine there are many a gold coin deep under the sand. Under the boardwalk there must be tons of coin that people dropped and went between the boards to the sand.

I once hunted under the boards in Ocean City NJ,,,sooo much clad. Have to have eyes behind and on the side of your head though....the riffraff can get aggressive.

Old beaches - old jewelry. Is it still there? Seems that current machines aren’t finding much of it.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

goodmore Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

>
> Conclusion.....I really don't want to hunt small t
> argets on a beach. If people are now wearing junk
> titanium and stainless wedding bands then the prob
> ability of quality earrings with big stones is re
> mote. ...

Ditto.

Yes there's always the counter-argument of "sport" (ie. : fun to find, even if lacking $$ value). Like The "fun" (ie.: "sport" factor) of coins. Eg.: a reale or bust might have little numismatic value. Yet we all "value" it, for purposes of sport & challenge & history. But when it comes to jewelry (where .... there's much less "history" involved), I have a harder time enjoying the "sport" factor of an earing stud or feather weight chain. But .... that's just me.

lytle78 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Old beaches - old jewelry. Is it still there? Seem
> s that current machines aren’t finding much of it.

lytle,

There was a demographic's shift since about the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to about WWII, people wore VERY little jewelry. A wedding ring at most, for adults . And often then-so only taken out for photo-ops.

If you were to go back to pre 1900, you would see very little jewelry on anyone's hands. And women wore perhaps a copper broach , at most.

But heck, look at today: EVEN LITTLE KIDS are wearing toe rings, earings, nose-rings, bracelets, necklaces, etc...... It wasn't like that in the old days.

Yes you'll see people "decked out" in jewelry, when posing for old B&W photos. But that was typically only because you "put on your Sunday best" for photos, in those days. In actual day-to-day, people wore very little jewelry (at least not high-value jewelry). And sometimes wedding rings were only copper or silver. Not gold and plat. like today.

There was a guy, in a river-washout @ Santa Cruz boardwalk who ... in the course of 5 days, had something like 400 silver coins. The majority of coins coming out of the episode were old (ie.: a very low percentage of clad) . I commented to him "sheesk, I'll bet you had a lot of gold rings too !". But as it turns out : He had only 1 or 2 gold rings, despite all that beach action. And the reason was as-I-say: Prior to the 1950s and '60s, people wore much less jewelry. So in other words, if he'd have been in thick action of CLAD finds on the beach, then yes: His gold ring ratio would have been much higher.

This is why very few gold rings are found in ghost town type hunting, despite being in a "dig all" mindset.

Are there exceptions ? Sure. I've found gold rings commensurate with 1800's sites. But all-things-being equal : If gold rings/jewelry are someone's objective : They're better off hunting modern sites.

Quote Rick: "Another thing standardized - lead shot. World wide sizes and weights are standard and they are pure lead. Anybody want to hunt some #12 “rat shot”
This one came up in a recent Geotech1 thread about targets, modelling/simulation etc. Lead shot is NOT pure lead, it has other elements alloyed with it, to give it a particular flow characteristic when molten, which is critical to the manufacturing process. So it seems different size shot has different alloys, and none are pure. I don't recall what exactly the alloying elements were, the usual suspects antimony, bismuth, tin I imagine.

When that thread gets going again, we'll have to think about the ear-ring post, and it's behaviour.

Atlantic City needs a nice storm to take 8-10 feet of sand away.

The beach out in front of the Taj made for some nice hunting years ago, when the big pieces of iron and concrete showed themselves at low tide. If the 'octopus' is showing itself (a large piece of concrete and 7-8 pieces of re-bar sticking out if it in all directions) at least a foot off the sand, then it's a good time to hunt the wet sand at low tide.

Mr. Pim, you are correct of course, shot is not pure lead in the same way that cast bullets are not.

It is somewhat immaterial however if a target can be agreed as suitable to mimic small 10k gold and IF that target can be widely available and standard.

A 25 pound bag of shot from one lot of production will furnish enough targets to supply every intertested experimenter and dispatched cheaply by international mail.

By the same token ordinary aluminum foil is pure aluminum as far a I can determine. A defined size square of foil of a defined thickness which is found by testing to be a good test of the sensitivity of a PI or other detector to small 10k white gold....?

Here’s another joker in the deck. Almost all white gold is plated to make it shiny - usually with Rhodium which is very conductive!! I have no idea what effect if any that has. Tom has often stated that 10k and white gold are hard to detect, so....

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2019 02:02AM by lytle78.

therover61 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Atlantic City needs a nice storm to take 8-10 feet
> of sand away.
>
> The beach out in front of the Taj made for some ni
> ce hunting years ago, when the big pieces of iron
> and concrete showed themselves at low tide. If the
> 'octopus' is showing itself (a large piece of conc
> rete and 7-8 pieces of re-bar sticking out if it i
> n all directions) at least a foot off the sand, th
> en it's a good time to hunt the wet sand at low ti
> de.

I was there for that. Found silver coins easily. The iron at the time was unreal. The Sovereign was my detector then and it weaved its way through it pretty well. Right now it is all about fresh drops. Just like any other public beach hunt. Well...There was some gambling. The Equinox did well with the EMI of the piers. I was surprised. With this detector you never know until you get there. Something else to. consider if one ever tackles a beach with a high frequency gold machine? The city itself seems to be recovering a little. They took a huge hit when surrounding states started their own casinos. My buddy likes to dry sand hunt and said the trash was unreal. So keeping with the topic I will state that micro hunting on that beach would have been nearly impossible. Any studs or small gold in that dry sand are a sacrifice to the surf Gods. In the wet I probably dug 50 targets in a 200 ft section of beach. And I ignored the 21 VDI penny signals.

Sand replenishment is a reality. If there is enough sand on a beach to cover the huge iron that we know is there then just think about those good targets down there.

Rick: The ear-ring is certainly a good subject for replacing with an equivalent 'dummy' that is reproduceable. But its odd shape of wire combined with the clasp on the end makes it trickier.

Interesting that you're mentioning aluminium foil as a test target. This is a 'love' of Mr Green over on Geotech1, and I dislike it with equal enthusiasm. While it does generally seem to be made from only two alloy choices, both of which are nearly pure and measure up as having electrical conductivity pretty close to data-sheet values for pure Al, the thickness is very variable. Measuring it isn't that easy, a micrometer, and a carefully-prepared multiple-thickness sample is what we've been using.
One problem is that to mimic the low-carat gold ear-ring, you would really want to use metal with similar electrical conductivity, so that the 'dummy' is physically similar. And aluminium is not at all similar .. more likely candidates would be CuNi, lead, tin, 60:40 solder, zinc, but even they may be too good. It's the nickel content in the white gold that's the killer as far as electrical conductivity goes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2019 01:27PM by Pimento.

Pimento...…. Very well stated!
Yes...…. A 10Kt White gold post cannot be duplicated easily at all...…. and certainly not with aluminum...…. which is substantially higher in conductivity. The jagged shape of a regular post/stud earring..... also plays a fairly large role in detectability/indetectability. The good news is...… you can walk into a reputable jewelry shop...… and buy a 10Kt White gold post (without a stone...… or with a rhinestone)……. for just a few dollars. . . . . for those who desire to create their own standardized test-standard target....for micro-jewelry basis testing.

Another spectacular target to test...… is...….. a 10Kt White gold cross/crucifix. Get a gold cross that's length is somewhere between the length of a Quarter and Half-Dollar. Save yourself some money.... and get a hollow cross. ((( Besides...… the bulk of eddy currents flow on the outer skin of the target. )))

goodmore Wrote:

> micro hunting on that beach would have
> been nearly impossible.

Without a doubt. When I do make the trip to A.C. to hunt, it's always wet sand and suds hunting. I never venture into the dry there.

Even Seaside is a pain in the butt in the dry sand with all the .22 casings from the old shooting gallery arcades let alone the aluminium trash and arcade tokens that hit hard in the quarter range !

I can see, however, concentrating on areas where volley ball nets have been put up. At least there it's probably cleaner in the respect that people don't lay out there and bring their chairs, blankets, garbage since it is a volley ball area. That and the fact that people move around a lot when playing so the potential for any jewelry to fall off is higher.

I would never randomly search the dry sand with a high frequency unit on most if not all NJ beaches. Way too much trash to contend with. I do like the idea of volley ball areas though. Maybe swing set/play ground areas too.

Any useful test article needs to be both useful and a measure of sensitivity (hopefully well matched to sensitivity on a small item of white gold 10k) but equally important, absolutely uniform.

It shouldn’t be too hard to find something which meet s the first criteria, but the uniformity is also important. Since the 10k white gold ear post has been nominated as a good proxy for measuring sensitivity for a salt beach metal detector, the simplest soulution might be to select a particular item of jewelry, and then source a sufficient quantity of them from the same production lot to distribute to interested parties. That could probably be done at a cost of less than $20 delivered by international or domestic airmail.

How much simpler it would be to identify a common item of suitable overall “detectability” to mimic the earring but which is guaranteed to be uniform.

How about Monel? 65-70% nickel - balance copper. It comes in many forms for marine and non-corrosive uses - Monel staples are available everywhere and Monel hardware is not hard to find. Conductivity is about 3.6 on the IACS scale, a bit below Cupro-Nickel alloys which come in at 4.5-4.6

Hardware - [www.torqboltinc.com]

Staples - [www.amazon.com]

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2019 03:53PM by lytle78.

For fun...…. try some small stainless screws in front of a coil.