So, I figured out what the problem with the pin pointer attachment was.
The reason I used a 6.35 mm plug to attach it was because I had a good quality guitar cable that was laying around in my junk pile. It had gotten stuck in a tuner. It had special plugs which were supposed to not fall out of a guitar when you're playing a gig. Unfortunately my (17 yr) son or one of his band members got it stuck inside MY Korg tuner. They completely smashed up the tuner trying to pull that thing out. (ok I might have helped a bit with that) Anyway it was still stuck.
So that was many months ago, but I still had that thing laying in a junk pile. I decided I could at least use the cable, and although I had bought an RCA plug for my pin pointer attachment, once I sat down to cut the wire from the broken tuner, I thought I'd have e close look and started to disassemble the tuner. The plug hadn't been damaged, just the casing so I realised I could still use the female 6.35mm jack to plug in my pin pointer. Then I wouldn't have to solder a plug to the cable at all.
When it came around to connecting the female jack to the board I wasn't sure which two of the three connections on the end of the female jack needed to be wired to the board but I tried my best guess. I started flipping through my multimetre booklet, as I thought there should be a way to use the multi meter to solve this problem, but it wasn't obvious where I'd find that information, so I figured I'd connect the two points which were the farthest apart on the back of the female jack. Unfortunately that was a mistake.
When I eventually turned the detector on, and didn't get a signal from the pin pointer, I wasn't sure if the way I had soldered the female jack was wrong or if the pin pointer did in fact not work. I was quite concerned because even though I had tested it after wrapping enamelled copper wire around the ferrite rod, I hadn't tested it after gluing the rod inside the PVC tubing, and thought that maybe I had snapped a wire inside the tube or had caused a short circuit somehow.
I decided to test the pin pointer by taking the ends of the two wires that connect to the board where it's marked "coil" and taping those wires straight on to the tip and sleeve of the male 6.35mm jack coming out of my pin pointer.
I switched on the detector, and swung the pin pointer past some tools on my workbench and "BEEEP". it worked!
So I knew I had soldered the wire from the board to the wrong points on the female jack. I was able to pull out all the metal points from the female jack and work out what was going to be touching what part of the male jack, put it back together and it now works great.
almost too great, actually.
It gets a signal from 55mm. I don't know what the standard pin pointer range is but I kind of thought 10-20mm would be what you'd want.
As far as the headphones go I did manage to scavenge a female headphone jack from a radio/CD player that had been thrown out.
The headphone jack is on a little circuit board and has a few resistors, which I didn't really know their function, but I hoped they would be fine being left on. Fortunately this had proven to not be a problem. Also as this was the first time opening up a radio, I noticed there were loops of wire around some ferrite rings on the wires leading to the speakers. I've not learned what those are for. Since there was a ferrite ring on the wire coming from the little board which had the headphone jack I left it on. This also hasn't caused any problem.
Adding the "LED Voltage Indicator" kit was very handy as I would have otherwise panicked when I stopped getting a signal after having to reconnect some of the wires the other day. The voltage indicator let me know that it was merely a power issue.
Now that I am using the three 18650 batteries totalling 12.74V I am getting a very clear strong signal at about 50 cm in air.
I tidied up what I could by shortening some wires, but I still have some wires going across the length of the board. I had already glued the board into place so that's just going to be a lesson for next time.
I had a walk around the yard today for my very first real treasure hunting and found a 50 cent coin! (and a belt buckle)
There were several areas on our property where the detector gave a signal, but we couldn't find anything metal. There is a lot of white quartz, so maybe there are traces of copper in the soil.
Posted on: February 15, 2015, 05:01:11 am
Today's finds.
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