D-Tex Search King

[ivconic]

First; glad the forum will recover!
Coincidentally the same day I was unable to access the forum; I couldn't even access my Protonmail account.
After a couple of hours Protonmail worked and I got a notification from them that the system crashed because "the server overheated" !??
No matter how crazy it sounds!
...
Anyway... I came across an "antique", it's a Bill Mahans Vintage D-Tex Search King.
It shall work fine (accoridng to the man who brought it) but hell who is going to put 6x 9V batteries in this !!!

[ivconic]

Logical... I'd like to have a schematic of this old beast...

[Carl-NC]

I had a like-new Gold Mountain VIP. Look at the controls, the C-rod, even the meter; they appear to be the same design. I believe Bill Jr. worked for Garrett for a while, left and designed detectors for Gold Mountain and also produced his own under his dad's old D-Tex brand. Or something like that. I've never seen any schematics for these models.

[ivconic]

If you don't have any document... then no one does! Then I'm condemned to trace the pcb myself... over the winter!
But... let's console ourselves with a story, part of a story, that I "stole" from a website!
The story is so good and exciting, even if it is not true; it is worth remembering here!

"...Well, Bill Mahan did not know that and… he also did not know the battlefield was a mile from the river crossing.
So… he started hunting around the river crossing, itself, and got a signal he thought might be a cannonball.
Digging down about 18” his shovel, he heard the satisfying “clunk” of steel shovel on cast iron.
Reaching down to the bottom of the hole and brushing aside the sandy dirt with fingers, he saw rusty iron and could see that it was rounded.
He thought sure he had his Civil War cannonball and went back to work with his shovel, eager to get it out of the ground.
But… the more he dug, the bigger it seemed to be.
He saw it had three pointed pieces of iron projecting from the surface in a triangle and suddenly realized that what he had found was an old cast iron cooking pot upside down. Disappointed, he started to fill in his hole and just leave it there.
Then… he got to thinking that his wife liked old antiques like that pot and decided to dig it on out and take it home to her.
From the top of the pot on down, it was embedded in clay… not sand.
It took Bill an hour to dig all the way down to where he could get his fingers under the lip of the pot and lift it out of the hole.
When he did, he got the surprise of his life!
The upside down pot was covering a cache of U.S. gold coins!
That cache would be sold for $60,000 (Figure at today’s prices, worth 10 times that!) and the funds from the sale would be what funded the founding of D-Tex Electronics..."

WOW!

[ivconic]

[ivconic]

Varios crumbs collected from the long text:
"...Of interest to note, Charles Garrett would work for Bill Mahan for a time before starting to manufacture his own brand of detectors..."
"...Names like Fisher and Whites were on the scene with detectors for sale but Garrett would not come into existence until 1966."
"...the line of D-Tex detectors was greatly upgraded to match or slightly exceed the Garrett line in 1980."

[kt315]

[kt315]

[ivconic]