Vintage 1965 White's Gold Master

fastforty

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Joined
Jun 29, 2006
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131
Location
In a kornfield in Kalifornia
I forgot that I had this thing, a friend gave it to me & it's been in the basement for years.

It's a "White's Gold Master Metal & Mineral Detector", Model GM63 with a manufacture date of 7/65.

It has knob type switch controls for:
Metal/Null/Mineral
Batt check (off/1.5/9/67.5)
Power On/Off

and knobs for:
Speaker Control
Radio Tuner

The "Radio Tuner" is intriguing, it has a small inner knob that turns a lot while the big outer knob goes slow. It tunes from 0-100.

Oh yeah, and a 3-scale "DC Voltage" meter:
Top scale: 0-100
Middle scale: 0-10
Bottom scale: 1-2
(Seems like that might come into use when operating the battery check feature)

It has a small (appx 4") solid coil & a large (maybe 12-16") ring coil. Both look like plywood.

It had some interesting Eveready cardboard box type batteries in it, one for 67.5 volts, and another for 1.5 volts (each a little bigger then a pack of cigarettes), in addition to a standard 9 volt battery.

My questions are:

1) Is the thing of any value?
2) Where on earth could one get batteries for it & would they be prohibitively expensive?
3) Being a tunable Mineral detector, could it be tuned to find say, arrowheads in loose sand?

The guy I got it from said that at one time, you could send these older units back to Whites & get them upgraded to use a more modern power source. Dunno now.

Any info would be appreciated :)
 
Duh, I got an answer for question #2 with a quick Google search for "67.5 volt battery", they are available all over the place for $19.99 - $29.99.

The ones that came out of the unit are tagged $4.55 (for the 1.5 volt) & $11.67 (for the 67.5 volt).

Seems that it'll be 30-40 bucks to energize this thing, & those $$ could go a long way towards a sniper coil for my new ACE250. Need to know if it's worth the expense to put it into operation or not.
 
Nice old detector but in my opinuion not worth getting the battery for. Good conversation piece though :yes:
 
Donate it to the Metal Detecting Hall of Fame :roll: and write it off your taxes as a valuable antique worth $1000!  :yes: :lol:
 
My friend got an old tube type radio once, it needed a high voltage battery also. We used a bunch of 9 volt batteries to get it to work. I can imagine that you would have be pretty strong to swing that detector. The weight of the batteries alone would be a killer.
 
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