1/1/24
Hope you all had a good Christmas
I hope to go out tomorrow for a few hours, intend to use my Deus 2 having just moved the software back to 1.1 and done a few tweaks.
Whilst delivering Christmas goodies last week (23rd) I was hoping for a quick drop off and to do all the Farms within 1and a half hours, 1st farm I got to, 2 hours! but I did learn a lot of local Farmer gossip which will come in handy, second farm half and hour then managed the rest in another half an hour,
Tomorrow I will be going to a field (Rain permitting) that the first Farmer told me there used to be a few houses on in the 17 century, worth a go !
On my way back from Farmer Deliveries there in front of me was a recently fallen tree, we had a Log Burner installed in the Summer so now I carry at all times a Chain saw in the boot, 10 mins later the tree was in my boot! It’s very much like detecting, looking for recently fallen trees, free fuel! It’s a new world for me , you have to be quick, the other day a tree fell in the Village , before I got wind of it , it had gone , no need to phone the council any more if a tree blocks the road, it will be gone in 10 mins!
I had no idea how competitive it was out there
So good luck if you are out tomorrow, hope you end the year on a high
Happy New Year!
13/1/24
Went out last Sunday for three hours, it wasn't raining for a change but the ground was very wet, went on a well battered area , got a couple of low conductive buttons, then i got one of those 'too good to be true' signals, which should really have not been there, about 10'' down i could not see much between the tree roots, but i could feel what seemed like a spoon bowl, i managed somehow to get it out complete more by luck really , i was thinking it was a 1950's desert spoon so was not being too careful and was shocked to see a Tudor Pewter spoon , 1st one i have ever found, good start to the new year! (using the Manticore)
Rain permitting i'll give the Deus 2 a run out tomorrow.
Loads of detectors coming in at the moment , a lot because of over spending at Christmas, same happens every year, wait till the credit card bills come in!
I have about 45 detectors here at the moment, but sold 11 today so that helps.
I had 2 Deus 2's in the other day and both had broken coil lugs, so keep a look out for them, apparently broken lugs on a Deus 2 are not covered by the warranty !! so beware.
I am told that XP coil lugs do not break , hmmm
I am also told that XP are the only company that sell replacement lugs you can glue on, not sure why if they don't break, or am i missing something??
You couldn't make it up some of the bullshit, cover up's, smoke and mirrors i have to deal with.
19/1/24
Thank you for all the messages wishing me to 'get well soon', Had Flu for the 1st time in 25 years so been too knacked to do anything all week, now i have a Chest infection, giving myself another week off, but if you want anything just email or text me.
WARNING the rest of this is a bit heavy going and boring some of it may have been mentioned before, I’m sure everyone has tales to tell about their chosen careers
This is an insight into my working week.
I normally kick in about 9am, any orders that have come in overnight are packed , Couriers are normally booked the night before if I have sold detectors and these are normally packed the night before in case the couriers turn up early, then of course most days someone will buy a detector after the courier as gone, so these are taken to the post office and will go by Special Delivery or Parcelforce 24, along with any other small parcels I have (Coils/Probes/Books/Covers whatever)
The ideal is to get everything sorted by 10 am, this rarely happens, and I get up thinking I will start to clean detectors about half nine and have 5 done by lunchtime, then it hits the fan and a few phone calls will change your plans, someone may want to call around to sell me a detector, or they may want to pick one up, then I’m waiting around for them to arrive, then I have couriers dropping off parcels, some may be part ex’s or swap’s, so then I need to unpack them check them out quickly because there will be one or two going back in the opposite direction as part of the part ex/Swap deal , these I try to do the same day or if it’s too late then the morning after.
I may have also had between 1 and 5 detectors sent for me to buy, these again have to be opened as soon as possible regardless of what I am in the middle of , checked over in case of problems and the customer paid, in most cases the Customer will have being tracking the parcel and as soon as it lands on the doorstep they want their money, normally because they have already spent it , or have another detector lined up they need the money for.
Not all customers sending, detectors need the money within 5 mins, but about 65% do.
So, my typical day (this was the last day before Flu set in) is now at 11.30 and not started cleaning detectors yet, one of the parcels I got in was sent with just an address, no idea what the deal was, presumed I was buying the detector off him? No idea what the conversation was about, because it probably happened 3 weeks (100 phone calls) ago , no idea of what money I was sending him for the detector, and no phone number or amount we had agreed, so two choices I either wait for him to phone me before I can do anything with the detector or I send him a letter asking him to ring me, I know what I would give him for it based on seeing it, but he might have told me on the phone it was new/Unused in which case I will have given him an higher quote, it’s very nice condition but has been used, difference in price between new and used.
Amazing how many ‘New/Unused’ detectors I get in covered in mud!
Local guy calls around, here for 20 mins sold me a detector, paid by Bank transfer off my phone, off he goes.
But not without annoying me first, despite having said to him , DO NOT park across the drive , blocking our drive and the one across the road in the process he does just that, we live in a quite Cul de sac and the road is fairly narrow, no problem parking anywhere else as long as it’s not blocking a drive, this totally confuses most people and they cannot get their head around it, I have no idea why , it’s one of the biggest mystery’s I have ever come across in life, how simple can it be, the amount of long conversations I have on the phone about parking is crazy.
Then you get ‘oh you have funny neighbours, do you’? Thrown at you, no it’s because for 25 years, every day, they have been stopped from getting out of their drive!
Probably about 85% of visitors cannot park or follow simple instructions.
The best one i had a few years ago travelled 70 miles to buy an XP Deus from me, his mate gave him a lift as he did not drive, true to form he parked across the drive, so I asked him if he could draw forward 3 or 4 yards, or reverse back a couple of yards, ‘no’ was the answer, ‘I’ll park where I like’ so by this time the guy who was having the detector was out of the car ready to look at the Deus, but with the drive still blocked , I asked him again, (same answer), so I explained to the guy who came for the detector to get his mate to move or no Detector, he also failed to get the Car moved, so I left them to it and carried on with what I was doing saying to them , ‘just give me shout if sort the problem out’
Half an hour later they were still in the Car, shortly after they drove off never to be seen again, crazy!
Anyway, back on to the ‘typical day’
By now it’s 12pm and despite my best intentions no detectors have been cleaned yet still got the Post Office to go to before dinner, Wife volunteered for that, so with a bit of luck I will get a couple done, from my pile of 10 (which in the last 2 hours have become 16)
Picked an easy one off the pile, a clean looking Deus, it was dirty but better than most, the stem was in excellent condition, but the middle stem was badly scratched and I could see that the mount on the end of the stem had the fixing screws missing, so I presume the guy who sold it to me had taken a decent middle stem off it and swapped it for a scratched one and in doing so had lost the very small screws.
Half an hour to clean the detector and replace the stem with a new one (£30) then nearly an hour of looking to find a couple of screws.
End of morning.
One cleaned, raining so no pictures taken.
I have afternoons off, at the moment that’s the time between 2.30 and 4.30, because of light problems, during this two hour spell each day (unless I’m lucky and get three) then it’s doing the million and one other things I do in life)
Then come 5-o-Clock back to sorting stuff out, packing parcels, printing manuals to send out with detectors I will be sending out the next day this is because people rarely send me the manual with detectors they are sending me
I have loads of older/Rare manuals on my Computer, but it the more modern one’s I have to find nowadays
Deeptech ones are the biggest nightmare, because you have to sign up on their website (not a problem) then you have to buy the manual for ‘Nothing. ‘Zero’ by Bank transfer and it gets sent to you electronically, bit of hassle, totally pointless, but hey ho, problem is they do not always send you the manual or they send it a week later, bit of a pain when you are sending the detector out the next day.
Being as i have just lost a week, although i may be a bit better next week i have (again) a backlog of detectors and coils to sort out which is very time consuming, i am getting to the point where i cannot work 24/7 /365 (or at least it feels like it)
Looking forward I may have to open alternative weeks to give me time to keep on top of things, we will see, but something has to give.
Main problem is cleaning the detectors, if i get an old Tesoro/C-Scope/Fisher, or similar from 15 years ago and further back, then i can clean it and test it in 15 mins, then i need to take photos of it, edit the photos put it up for sale, testing is quite quick because there were not as many settings/Menus/Options back then, no piles of cables/charges/wireless headphones to test and take pics of.
Then we come to the more modern detectors, these can take between 45 mins to 2 hours to clean because of the plastic or whatever they use to make them nowadays and all the nooks and crannies i have to retrieve mud from, all the multiple leads/Chargers/Wireless Headphones and other bits that have to be tested/Cleaned/Photographed.
Mud gets deeply engrained in the modern material's and you can clean it several times before it looks half decent, then you leave it for half an hour and mud re-appears.
A lot of you may be reading this thinking that most detectors i get are clean, wrong! very rare i get one that does not need cleaning, maybe a dozen in a year, and some weeks i can get 20 detectors in or more, and probably 90% of those have never been cleaned properly or not at all from new.
So, the really bad ones i strip down into multiple pieces and clean them bit by bit before reassembling it, that takes ages, along the way i will find bits that have been broken or repaired that the seller may or may not have known about?
I have a vast amount of bits here so can replace a lot of parts, but now and again i will come across a bit of plastic that's looks about 10 pence worth that can cost me £100, then you find you can only get it from the US.
Then of course you have the detectorists that need to modify something on the detector to suite their own needs, this normally means they drill holes in various parts of the detectors, for various reasons?? (some you never know why) and the most common one is bits of tape stuck all over it for no apparent reason, a lot of this comes off within a few minutes but some of it fetches the paint off with it or leaves a sticky coating on the detector that is a pig to remove, adding to the cleaning time.
Then you get a strip of tape on a coil cable, you pull it off thinking there is going to be damage there and it’s fine??
Best mod I have seen (not) was a Minelab Explorer 2 that (because of it’s weight) had been butchered and mounted on a Whites stem, must have taken hour’s and it ended up weighing a pound more !
More extreme examples are a Minelab Vanquish (Red) I had in that had been coloured in with a black marker pen, and various other detectors that have been painted pink or whatever.
I few weeks ago a guy sent me (after months of ringing me) an Equinox 600 he had bought but, because of ill health could not use, new in box and he had paid top dollar for it a year before and wanted virtually what he paid for it, he kept phoning in case my offer had gone up (it didn’t!) so he eventually sent it, with all the original receipts, I opened the box but there was something missing, something looked different then I realised there was no serial number on the coil?
I looked at the detector and the serial number had been butchered on that as well, I rang him up, he was in his 80’s and had sent me the receipts so not going to be anything dodgy going on and there was a couple of numbers left on the serial number that matched.
I phoned him up and asked why he had removed the serial numbers, and I was told he did not like them, and he had always taken serial numbers off everything he bought!!
Anyway, reluctantly he paid the postage back.
Couldn’t make it up.
I could go on and on.
Another one is the seller paints over the scratches with a marker pen.
Then there’s the broken coil lugs, if you miss them, it can be an expensive mistake or the outer cable falling off the coil lead, mainly Minelab and lesser so on the older XP's and early Makros.
I normally mention this to would be sellers, 90 % of them take great offence to the suggestion that their lugs may be broke on them.
E-Trac/Explorer/Equinox/CTX’s are the normal culprits, ‘’no I look after my detectors, I would know if the lugs were broken’ is what I normally hear, I’m only asking so they do not get a shock when the price I offer for their detector suddenly reduces by £100 or more because the coils are knacked when I get them, and most of them are!
So having purchased the detector with knacked coil it’s get chucked up a corner until I can drop on a second-hand coil for it, maybe a week, maybe 6 months
Nokta screens are a nightmare, you only have to touch them and they have faint scratches on them!
Another problem nowadays (that had not used to happen) is someone turns up with a Detector to sell and charges/cables are missing , so many things to remember with today’s detectors easy to forget things, headphones all sorts of things are forgot, what I normally get ,’no problem, sorry about that I’ll post it off to you when I get home’ so you give them the money and you never hear from them again, once someone has an financial advantage you get screwed, once they have what they want you are history. That happens 99% of times surprisingly.
A couple of Months ago I vowed never to let this happen again and to not give them any money until I had all the gear, some of these chargers/Cables they forget cost me £30 to £50 , that your profit gone! My fault as I am too trusting.
So first test of my resolve was shortly after my vow, guy came with his wife to sell a Vanquish 540 Pro, we had agreed a price on, one of the coils was missing so we adjusted the price to suite , then the wireless headphones had been left at home apparently , so I said I would pay him what we had agree minus the price of the headphones then the rest when I received the headphones, He went into melt down, told me how he was the most honest person in the world , and he would never, ever not send them as soon as he got home, so noting his reaction to my suggestion that he probably would not send the headphones I paid him the full amount, on is return home he texted me to say he had found the headphones and would send them on the Monday after , nothing appeared of course, I texted him again a week later and he said he had forgot and would post them the next day, a week later nothing and no reply to my text’s , this is a typical story and something that has happened many many times before, but never again, when given the opportunity people will rip you off 99% of the time, no matter how nice they seem.
This is just a typical example, most of the time people do not turn up with the idea to rip me off, but as soon as I give them the money, they have no incentive at all to send the missing item.
The best ones I buy in are the Prizes that people have won on internet raffles, either some people are very lucky, or they buy a lot of tickets, sometimes winner’s offer me 3 or 4 detectors they have recently won, normally unused.
Then of course there are the people who buy a detector and do not for whatever reason get in to detecting and have probably used their detector once, then I get offered it.
I had one the other day phoned me up and said he needed to swap his detector for another as he felt there was something wrong with it, I asked what the problem was and apparently, he had had it for 3 weeks and had not found any Gold with it at all!!
Think there might be something wrong with all my detectors as well!
I have 100’s of stories like that.
There are a few stories I have had to remove because of the content and the fact the persons involved may be reading this
So hopefully everything will be back up for sale again on Friday including my backlog of coils and detectors.
95% of customers are great and I have dealt with quite a few for over 20 years.
It’s just the 5% you have to watch!
18/2/24
Since announcing my retirement recently quite few customers have gone into meltdown! i have lot of customers who are swapping and changing all the time!
I'm a bit like a Library!
Banged 8 detectors on ebay last week (on auction) and they are just coming off this weekend with mixed results, some aren’t fetching anything like they are worth and some are going for silly prices much more than I would get for them for on my website, so I suppose it balances out.
It's the beginner’s that pay the silly money, and there are plenty of those about now, more at the moment than in 25 years of me being in the business.
I’m putting detectors on e-bay to try and reduce my stock, ( I don’t get any part ex’s on ebay!)
Still got a few more coming in and to list, everything must go, there will of course be loads of odds and ends put on ebay after I have shut down.
I will be then kicking in to field testing detectors and more, results will be on my new website when I have closed this one down.
I have been out the last three Sundays, not a lot to show for it, mainly musket balls, Halfpennies and buttons
All three sessions were on the same field mainly because it’s on a hill behind a Church, its nice sandy well-draining soil meaning it’s not flooded like everywhere else seems to be at the moment, it’s got to stop raining soon, surely
25/2/24
My stock of detectors is nearly depleted , just 4 left at the time of writing, plus 17 coils, so i could close the website down at any time, but first i need to create something else so i can transfer any content on this website i would like to retain, nightmare job!.
Been out again today on a totally baron Pasture field , well it was the last two times i have been on it, worth another go i thought, K2 came along and managed to do something i have never seen happen before, i have seen Hammered coins chopped in half before with the spade but never a milled Sixpence!!
Lee who used to go detecting with me managed to chop a cut quarter in half once, that take some doing, i have never done it (yet)
Found a few buttons, but it was hard work with a long time between signals, eventually i wandered across to one of the 4 Stubble fields i have permission on, it was seeded and the crop was about 4'' high, just had a look over the hedge and saw that the River that runs along the bottom of the field had overflowed and modified about 100 sq yards of field, the top soil was missing, some of it had also lost the subsoil and layer of stone beneath to the depth of about about 3 feet deep, so worth a look i thought, pottery and glass on the surface everywhere, found 3 buttons and a George 3rd Halfpenny , this field has been well battered over the years so looks like the river has stirred a few things up, last signal before i went back to the baron field then home was what looked like a Sovereign, i could the Gold edge of it , it was covered in Mud, not found a Gold Coin for about 15 years, started to remove the ground in clay off the surface and......... there is was, a nice Gold coloured aluminium 10 Frances -1950 aghhh
13/4/24
Back again!
Will start to list the stuff i have knocking about in the next couple of weeks, a few coils, Headphones, stem's and other assorted bits and bobs,
Just retuned from a week in Norfolk, a lot drier there than in Staffordshire where most of the land i have permission on is boggy, stayed in a Cottage next to the Coastline (about 20 yards away) i have in the past found that detecting on beaches in Norfolk is a waste of time, but i gave it ago, one and a half hours and no signals whatsoever, wouldn't think that was possible, until you come across the sign post telling you there has been 200 Million Tons of sand deposited n the beach to create sea defences!.
So back to the land, got permission on some set-a-side next to the Cottage, only manged about 3 hours during the week due to walking the coastal path all day /everyday and lack of time, (i have loads of other hobbies)
I got 3 buttons, a pot mend. 10 Pence, and a Spindle Whorl , ground was quite hard and was cracking , wait till tomorrow when i go out and the holes are filling with water.
I have started to collect a few detectors ready for my next project , Field Testing /Test bed results and my settings.
18/4/24
Went out last Sunday for a couple of hours on my Roman worked out site, it's on an hill side so i was expecting it not to be waterlogged, It was not too bad , i normally get about 3 signals on this site in 3 hours, this week i went on the edges of of the epicentre , i dug 19 signals , mainly cartridge cases /bullets e.t.c., also included was a musket ball and a Georgian button, strange really because we have never found many Georgian finds on this site, it's all been Roman/Saxon Medieval , i was using the Deus 2, i took the Manticore as well but it stayed in the car.
On the way back to the car i walked though the 'slaughtered ', 'no chance of a signal area', and 'bang' i got a signal 😲 it was giving me a high conductive target signal , no way was this going to be something non ferrous, i dug the hole and the signal disappeared, i know it was a very good signal so it's got to be somewhere, not on the end of my spade , first place i look, haven speared more than one nice find in the past, nothing whose than seeing a nice hammered penny bent on the end of you spade, i once went detecting with someone who managed to chop a cut quarter in half!
I checked the immediate area, nothing, i filled the hole in and started to search further away from the hole and there it was about ten foot away a large button, i presume it was flirted away when i dug the hole, no idea how it had been missed in the last 20 years ?
The morale of this story is if you get a good signal and it disappears , it's still going to be there somewhere, just a matter of finding it again!