Just got back

Hi All,

Just got back from a six week stint out there for three ounces between us, we started near Stake Well for 5days for 0 gold and then moved on to Quinns for 5gr after two weeks and realized this wasn't working for us and decided to go to Gum Creek

Rough roads caused the table benchtop to split the laminex in half and vibrate all the screws out and the benchtop ended up on the floor, the pantry cupboard came open with double locks on the door and the hinges broke off the door, the sauce bottles tomatoe, BBQ and chilli all had their lids vibrate off and sauces on every shelf mixed with Italian herbs and pepper as the lids came off them as well

Our door to the caravan is two piece as the van is hydraulically lifted into position but travels at half height, the screws worked their way out-had to super glue them in and did I mention the dust!! as the back window came open as well

Gum Creek is an out there place, very mountainous as we could not get reception for internet or phone so it was a bit dangerous to hang around for long. A guy is opening up an old patch with a bulldozer and apart from that I found only 3 graded patches out there for three small nuggs almost thought to throw them back for someone else to catch

Decided to head back to our old hunting grounds and the next week we were over 1oz so back on track as we are happy getting an ounce a month/ a gram a day. After 4weeks we had 2oz's, finished with nearly three ounces and went three days with nothing and decided to call into Nannine and that arvo pulled a .3gr and 7.5gr nugg's to make up the 3oz's - at a place I named Two Steps as you couldn't walk two steps unless you ran into a tin lid or can

If anyone is after Jasper we found an area which has been drilled to bits opposite side of the road to a place called New Australia, the area is totally covered by very large pieces of it and in one place a "Blow" of it was there, pieces as big as a football

All in all a good trip with minor problems, one other problem we had was with the fridge freezer modification I did in replacing the temp controller with an after market one from ebay. Every time we disconnected the battery chargers from the inverter or pulled its 12v supply(there is no switch) it would freek out the temp cont. on the fridge and I would have to reset all the variables to get it running again.

To fix the problem I had to convert all the chargers over to 12v and this didn't interfere with the fridge and we got back on track, it seems as though I was getting a spike by pulling the power supply from the inverters which in turn spiked the fridge

Something like 15 species-all small, the largest was 8.8gr of gold in it most were around 1gr's, the biggest nugg was the last, 2 5gr's.....One run I found with about 12 nuggs, the smallest as .5gr the largest was the 8.8gr specie....but quite a few deep holes were dug, one 500mm for a tin lid by Sherri with her Sadie and one by me at about the same thru hard rock into a rabbit hole for a beer can but several were for the good stuff and a good time had by all!!!!

Ron, Sherri and Yoda

Well done Ron sounds like you and Sherri had a good time, sorry about the damage to your van. Do you lower the tyre pressure in van tyres when your travelling on rough roads, from my experience driving 4000klm last year across corrugated roads without any damage slowing down and reducing tyre pressure sure helps. Cheers Max

Enjoy reading of your adventures Ron, good to see you're getting out there and enjoying yourself, we get away about once a month for a few days. Any way keep living the dream and keep hitting your old spots, looks like you must have missed a few when you lived in Cue. :)

Hi, All,

Ole dragon,Don't be sorry as it's part and parcel with being out there doin it, I havn't had a trip yet that something hasn't broken or fallen off

As for shaking the sh?t out of the van I'm running 55psi in tubeless truck tires and the springs have a rubber bumper put between the chassis and the springs to prevent bottoming out but the springs actually sit on the rubber bumper(probably my source of the problem)

Hi Shorty,

3 years in Cue and one of us detecting everyday of the week, mainly because the shire wanted two people to run the park but only paid enough for one wage which gave us the extra time to detect and I can't think of a place in the near vicinity of Cue that we didn't get to

In the 3 years we were there we got a kilo of gold (32oz's) of hard won gold, that was working on the principal of a gram a day-1oz a month, so I am sorry to say that I think we did cover most of Cue!!!

What I'm thinking of doing now is the "greenfields " type of detecting but I need a new quad bike that is totally dependable as I have a chinese quad with the Honda copy motor(GY6) and would not trust my life with it

I would spend half the detecting season on known areas and half getting "out there", but in the meantime I need to fix a few things and get back out there for one more bash before summer weather hits

Ron,Sherri and Yoda

PS: thanks for the replies fellas!!, appreciated

sorry to here about your dramas out there Ron but thats detecting, sounds like you had a lot of fun anyway. its all good you just need to be prepared to do what it takes to get mobile again. how is the ebay fridge temp controler working for you apart from what you said about the inverter power spikes. i have one to fit to my fridge soon and they are supposed to save on power use.

Hi Martin,

The fridge temp control works a treat and like you said, it saves on power, compared to its original controller in that the original system comes back on as soon as the temp drops below the set temp.

With the after market setup you can set the slew timing by degrees, I set the difference by 3 degrees and it works real good from -7deg to -4deg and it cycles between those settings

I looked up the internet on how to fit the wiring and there is a similar make with exactly the same wiring setup but it requires different settings to operate, but the pictures helped a treat and a material list for all the parts you need

It does say to run the STC thingy on its own as the other wiring can spike or interfere but there is limited room to put it on it's own

Ron

Hi Ron,
Good to see you and Sherri still getting out amongst the gold, back roads and bush tracks can be hard on caravans and vehicles for that matter.
Been here in the park at Cue for past week, the hot showers have been great after the bush camps we have been doing, out bush again Saturday
Sherri mush have nearly worn that sadie out by now.
Upgraded to a bit bigger tent than the one we were camped in here for a few weeks back in 2012.
No repeat of the "4 ounce " this time   
Er think you should get those springs looked at.
Good luck when you get out there again.

Cheers,
Peter.

Hi SaltD,

Hi Peter, I didn't think you would have been back after finding that once in a lifetime stray nugget under the tree, but like the old timer in Cue found the 31oz'er a while back sun baking and the 17oz'er where heaps had been before, there still there you just gotta walk over it

That missus of yours still making those facinators(hats) I would look good in one while prospecting and on the quad bike

We spend two weeks in the bush then back in to get 200L of water and bread and fuel, showers under the stars, best thing though is you camp right on top of the gold and stake your claim

Anyways good to catch up, probably see you out there one year

Ron, Sherri and Yoda(cat)

Hi Martin,

The installation document for temp controller was for a CAREL Temp Cont. I have the PDF if you can't find it

It was exactly the way to install but programming is different and the Ebay one is in Chinglish so, was very hard to decipher, but I worked it out and if you have troubles and you will, give us a call

Ron

Hi Flouro

Yer Ron the missus still making them from time to time, something to suit your needs could all ways be arranged    tin hat with eagle and emu feathers with perhaps a dingos tail hanging of the back ??   
Got her a detector for this trip and she has been finding quite a few nuggets, our finds all small stuff this trip so far.
Had to drop back to Cue for a week or two just to see if could get lucky again.   
Heading out and will be bush camping for a while.
Good hunting,
Cheers
salt-d

yep . the old Gum creek yarn in Gold n Ghost has pulled most of us into that area , found bugger all there , but he missed it by that much ( dehav ), the new 1. 100 maps show that area now much better , 160 oz & that's all im sayin .albo.

Hi Albo,

That guy just setting up with the bulldozer would be chasing that sort of gold, he had one of the workers from the station with him so it could be the station owner, not sure

Meanwhile!!!...I just got bombed with a win32/adware and a Microsoft programme popped up and said it would remove it for me so hopefully it removed it and not downloaded it as it shut down the computer and restarted it

I looked on the net and it's a fairly lengthy process to remove normally, it also said it was used for advertising purposes....hope everything is alright!!!

Anyways, that place...Gum Creek is a very large area, huge hills,open pits everywhere and the gradings that are there are baron. If you had a whole season to spare, a sat phone and a decent bike you would find it eventually, very salt and peppery

Not a good place to break down or get hurt as you are miles from anywhere and no one in the near vicinity, we were lucky in that the dozer operator was working there at the time, we spent four days there just enough to get a feel for the place

Would I go back....no, unless I changed a lot of things, maybe oneday in the future

Ron

Hi Ron it's a very simple process using malware bytes, just download and install, it will do automatic updates and when that's done click scan, if there is anything on your PC it will bring up a menu of infected files and all you do is click quarantine. Hope this helps

https://www.malwarebytes.org

Cheers S&jv

Ron

Don't want to make you feel too sick but I found an 82 oz nugget at Gum Creek in 1980.
320 mile peg of the rabbit proof fence. Those were the days.......
I hear the cockie isn't too friendly there.

Hi Alan,

That's interesting Al, 320M peg would be near the intersection of one of the other fences, fairly flat ground if I remember rightly although a lot of recent drilling and a new part of the fence has been put up

There was some hills a bit back which had spinifex or something similar growing in all the bare patches, looked like a wheat crop from a distance, it grew in clumps, tightly packed and was about 5' high

Thanks for that, I will check it out for future ref.

Ron

BUMP:

We've been back for a week now, only lasted 3weeks out there this time round

We started out north of Reedy's where we had trouble with the Waeco again,the after market electronic digital temp. controller started playing up

To regulate the fr/fr at the right temp I had it set to -7deg and the slew at 3deg which means it will start up again once it gets down to -4deg

What it doesn't do is control how regularly it comes on and off, I had to put the NTC in between two bits of meat to get the timings right which made the cycle go from every 10min. to 1/2hr between cycles.....then

I heard a pop and found out it was a capacitor in the temp. controller so fitted one out of a 240v charger and got it going again only for it to fail again.....so

To get the fr/fr working again I could bypass the digital temp. controller and flick the compressor on switch which will allow the fr/fr to work but it gas to be regulated by hand 1hr off 1/2hr on.....but to do this I had to revert all the wiring back to original so that the switch would operate

But surprise, surprise the original temp. controller decided to work and continued to work for the rest of the trip!!!!!!!!

We moved on when everthing started firing after 3 days of sorting out and went to a place called Judges , northwest of Meeka

5km's of gradings, something like 20 sets of gradings which actually were heavily dryblown and in one spot actually sluiced....for 1 nuggy at1/2gr, so moved on

Called into Mikaburra or Holdens find but that place has been shagged to bits as well

Back to Meeka ..2weeks for less than 5gr, so back to the place we know Quinns was there for 2days when a ute came around a kicked everyone off as Silverlake was going to move in...leases are signed off as Cue Constructions as being the owner of the leases

Ended up behind Burnakarra and found 6graded patches and picked up an ounce in a week, it all dryed up and I had run out of places to go and the quad bike had shite itself again as the clutch had thrown all the shoes off so headed home to a full on winter storm....can't freekin win

$40 from Queensland and arrived 2days later and the quad bike is going again...time to sell it and get something a lot more reliable

So until next season,

Ron, Sherri and Yoda(cat)