Excal - First Impressions

[Tin Fin]

Hi all,

Ok, so I bought a used Excal 1000 from one of the members here - good deal in my opinion; has some extras that I won't need to buy now. I have never owned an Excal, so I don't mind starting with the older machine. All I can say is "I'm a gonna have a suma fun!" I was fortunate enough to have bought Basic Ear Training for Excalibur, and am glad I did because if I hadn't, I would have thought I made a really expensive mistake - but, I know it's not a mistake for me.

I played in the backyard just to get used to the feel of the knobs - they are different, and see if I could guess what I was hearing - I limited my self to surface finds only this afternoon, for now, and that was probably a good thing for me to do as well. However, I have found two spots that I suspect to be gold items just from how low the sound is - very consistent, very low, and not a large item.

I'm getting a pretty good collections of trash as identifiers as a result of today too; bottle caps, pull tabs, pennies, dimes, and a few other items. These are giving me sounds to compare and contrast with each other. Sure enough, using three different gold items that I own (man's ring, woman's ring and woman's chain with locket on it) to compare the sound of what I think are gold in the ground, sound real, real similar. Now, I'm not going to be surprised to find out they are something aluminum - but the aluminum items I have are higher in pitch, and rougher sounding overall. The ramp-up is real short on the items in the yard that I suspect to be something good, and the sounds are very repeatable, very consistent no matter the way I approach the spot. Again, I'm not going to get my hopes up too much yet, but will probably be letting you know what these suspicious things are sometime on Sunday.

I can say that I'm going to be making or getting a straight shaft to counter-balance this with. It will be used mostly for water hunting, so chest mounting it is a viable option since the rigging for that came with the deal. But, if I want to beach hunt, then I will want a straight shaft. I got this setup now, because I intend to "know the sounds" by the time the weather is warmer. By the time I can get into the water without freezing my skinny little rumpus glorialous off, will be about twelve weeks from now - but I can wade chest deep with my waders until then.... I can honestly say, I'm now the proud owner of an Excal, and I really look forward to using this in some old, and some new territory.

Water is no longer a limit to me now, and I will get to break out the scuba gear again, and combine interests now.

Oh, one more thing - Now that I have this, I can get my other MD into my dad's hands, so we can go out together. It will get him out of the house, get him some fresh air, and give mom some space, all at the same time. Beyond that, it will be something for my dad and I to do with each other. In his mid 80's, he would love to do something besides go to doctors...

Thanks for listening to my ranting... I just had to tell someone though.

 

[EasySwing]

Excellent post bro
Wish i could hunt with my father, but he is not here any longer. In heaven walking on streets of gold.

 

[hershey1]

Good post. Enjoy you father while he is here. Mine has passed away also. Experience is the only thing that will help with your machine so get out there and get on with finding stuff. Get a good scoop. Good equiptment will pay for itself. When you come from the beach clean your machine to get the salt residue OFF every time or you will have problems. Good luck and congratulations on getting a great detector. HH

 

[MHirschmann]

Hi, and congratulations on your new (to you) excal. The excal is the one machine that I would never get rid of. I have had 4 and currently own 2 excal II 1000's. You will love this machine. I have made more finds with this machine than any other. If there is one piece of advice I can give you, it is to run in Discriminate 1 and never move it from there. Alot of people think they can get rid of pull tabs and aluminum but I recover valuables for a living, and own the most successful valuables recovery company currently operating in the United States. No matter what you "learn" about pull tabs, dig them anyway. Most gold falls within the parameters/characteristics of pull tabs and you simply have to dig all of them to get gold. The excal is my favorite machine I have ever owned. Every recovery specialist on my team has to be trained on this machine as a prerequisite. You will quickly learn to get rid of bottle caps, don't worry about those. You will also quickly learn different coin sounds.

My settings are as follows without fail every hunt:

Discrimination: 1 (always, I don't ever change it from this setting)
Sensitivity: I run it as high as I can while the excal remains stable. If you don't know what that means, turn your sens all the way up and I assure you, your machine will sound "crazy." Slowly turn your sens down until your machine quietes down and leave it there. I frequently make adjustments to get the best depth. If your machine is running quiete for a while after turning it down, try slowly bringing it up bit by bit until it is unstable and then turn it back slightly. I also rarely run it in Auto. Auto robs me of depth, especially in water but auto is good for learning.
Volume: Wide open in the water and 3/4 out of water.
Threshold: Barely audible. I usually turn it on to where I can barely hear it and then back it down just a hair.
Disc/Pinpoint: I am a disc hunter. I know a lot of people that "reverse hunt" in pinpoint but I prefer disc. Reverse hunting is good if you are looking specifically for deep targets or extremely small targets as pinpoint can, in some instances, pick up these targets when disc can't. In general hunting, I don't think reverse hunting is necessary because you have to switch to disc anyway to figure out what the target is after you have found it in pinpoint. This firstly wastes time and puts a lot of extra usage on the disc/pinpoint knob which I find not worthwhile.


I am in no way an "excal guru" but I know this machine very well at this point. I make a living using this machine and the above settings work very well for me. Everyone is different so maybe what works for you is different than what works for me. I wish you the best of luck with learning your new machine. It is one of the easiest machines to learn and use, in my opinion. I look forward to you hopefully posting all your great finds very soon. Have fun with it and don't think about it too hard. Get out, dig a bunch of targets and you will know this machine inside out in no time. I always like to see a new enthusiastic person come on here. Good luck to you and please keep us posted on how you are getting along. HH -Marc

 

[dewcon4414]

If you have been a long time hunter the first thing you will notice is the Xcal is one quiet machine. Im so used to the tones and sounds of the Exp. that i had to wonder if the machine was working. I dont think anyone close to water would regret buying this machine. Marc has a lot of good advice and settings. Reverse disc can come in handy if you dont have a PI and want a tad more depth when targets are scarse. I believe the additional depth comes more from being able to set the sensitivity at a point that is unstable in disc. I think i set my threshold just a tad higher than he does because i like to hear the nulls because even they can tell you something about the target. Either way i like knowing it has the ability to hunt in both PP and disc..... most machines dont. There are times when you are just better off gridding an area looking for deep targets if your beach is huge and you just arent finding anything. People hunt differently, some dig every target that gives the slightest sound others want to cover more ground looking for the bigger tickets. Enjoy the machine if you use it it will pay for its self much faster than a dirt digging machine will.

Dew

 

[Tin Fin]

Thanks for all your replies -

The deep sounding item that sounded so much like something gold turned out to be some foil from a bottle of juice or something, but, it was also 13 inches deep in clay soil - yikes! I am not at all used to that kind of depth in soil like this. Still, I kept that bit of foil to use as a "sound comparison" tool. Today I found bottle caps, foil and pull tabs, nothing else much. I only had an hour or so of using the Excal today though, so I can't say I'm surprised at all.

If I get an hour a day with it for practice, learning sounds, then I will be doing good - IDing the bottle caps was actually easy for me, and I dug all of those I found just to prove to myself that's what they were. The pull tabs messed with me some as the ones on the surface sounded "larger" than they were. But I also learned more about pin pointing with the Excal as a result of all this too.

Hershy and EasySwing - it's because my dad is still here that I want to spend time with him, and I figure if we can do something more than have a cupa-joe with each other, we will be doing pretty good; At 86, he is the baby of his family and has only one of his siblings still alive. So, I plan to make the most of the time we can get with each other. Dew, I played with both settings on the threshold - noticing the nulls was interesting; takes a bit of time for the processors to bring back the hum - that's new to me as well. And the excal does tend to run real quiet. There were several times that I adjusted the threshold because I didn't know if the darn thing was on anymore! And putting my digging tool close to the coil doesn't do any good to find out if it's on!

Marc, thanks for the information and encouragement. I used the settings you suggested today; only thing I would add to what you said is what I found out today - the Excal is real sensitive to High Tension wires - and that interference is exaggerated if the wires are near a chain link fence - I had to laugh at myself after I figured out what was going on there. Learning how to determine depth with this might be interesting, and I can't say I quite grasp that yet, but I will.

And I reinforced for my self today that this was a good purchase for me; I probably learned more in the last three days about metal detecting than I ever have from relying on depth meter/indicators. The sound differences are subtle to me - but then I have hearing difficulties. Once I do learn them, or learn what I need to listen for in order to separate the sounds, I will be more sure of my self. And I do intend to still dig the pull tabs - it's just too close to gold to ignore and I rather doubt that will change for me.

Overall though, I think I planned this out well in terms of getting this now to be ready for spring/summer use of it in the water. And it's from the folks here that I have learned just an awful lot about what I wanted to purchase, why, and enabled me to do some comparative shopping.

I really look forward to using the excal, and I hope to be posting some photos sometime of some good finds.

Happy Hunting all,