Murray/Modern Magazines, reproduce for personal use only
The revealer
A.J. Lowe
 One of the simplest detector circuits of all times — its
ETI: How To Build Gold & Treasure Detectors, 1981 — Copyright
performance belies its simplicity.
HERE IS one of the simplest metal
detectors of all time! It was originally
designed to spot rust holes in cars which
had been filled with epoxy, putty, etc,
but has subsequently been used for a
thousand and one other purposes where
one needs to detect metal — or its
absence — over short distances.
The detector consists of three ele-
ments — a search coil, the electronics
(which are in a small tin) and the ear-
piece. The circuit generates a tone in the
earpiece. When the search coil is placed
over and close to steel, the tone changes
significantly.
Thus by listening to the frequency of
the oscillator one can readily tell
whether there’s steel — or something
else — under the paint of a car. While
moving the search coil over the suspect
areas the note should remain steady. If
it varies take heed, all is not well.
The search coil
The search coil used in the prototype
is a 1.5 henry choke of 85 ohms resis-
tance and 10 mA rating, which
happened to be on hand. The iron core
Geotech
is made of E and I laminations, with all
the Es facing one way. After removing
the choke from its mounting frame, the
Is are discarded, thus leaving the choke
with open-ended Es only.
The sensitivity of the search coil is
increased by discarding about half of
the E laminations, so that when the
open ends of the remaining laminations
are brought near any steel, then this
steel makes a significant change in the
inductance of the coil, and hence in the
frequency of the oscillator.
On the prototype the remaining lami-
nations were wedged securely with a
wooden wedge, which also held a suit-
able small steel handle. See Figure 3.
Constructors who do not have a simi-
lar choke on hand should experiment
with similar chokes, or small transform-
ers. An old transformer with one
winding open-circuited would do, as
long as the coil in use is continuous.
Practically any small transformer will
work just try whatever is to hand. Natu-
rally the smaller the search coil the
better able it is to locate small flaws
beneath paint.
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Murray/Modern Magazines, reproduce for personal use only
Construction
Construction is not in any way criti-
cal. In the original model the
components were mounted on a printed
circuit board measuring 4.75 mm x 2.5
mm, and assembled with the battery in a
small tin box which once held throat
tablets.
The jack used for the earpieces was of
the type used in some transistor radios,
with three terminals, and fitted with a
normally-closed switch. Before use, this
was adapted, by bending the fixed con-
 tact of the switch, so that the switch
ETI: How To Build Gold & Treasure Detectors, 1981 — Copyright
became normally-open, and was closed
by the insertion of the earpiece plug.
Figure 4 shows the jack after adapta-
tion. The battery negative lead goes
straight to one of the terminals of the
jack.
Geotech
This switch is used as the battery on-
off switch, SW1 in Figure 2, so that the
device is switched on simply by insert-
ing the earpiece plug.
If constructors use a choke different
from that in the original then they
should experiment with the value of the
capacitor Cl to adjust the frequency of
the oscillator to a satisfactory value.
The layout of the copper side of the
printed circuit board is shown in Figure
5. Figure 6 shows the component posi-
tions on top of the pc board.
Constructors who are not equipped to
make a little pc hoard could easily
mount the components on a tag strip or
on Veroboard.
Well there it is — a one evening low
cost project, but it could save its maker
hundreds of dollars on his next car deal.
HOW IT WORKS
The tone is generated by a unijunc-
tion transistor relaxation oscillator.
This oscillator is quite conventional
except that, in addition to the usual
capacitor between the emitter and
negative rail, there is an inductor in
series witn the capacitor (Figure 2).
The value of this inductance deter-
mines the frequency and tone of the
note generated.
The indicator is actually the search
coil, and its inductance is varied by
the proximity of steel to the open
ends of its iron core.
When the inductor search coil is
close to steel the frequency of the
note decreases, when theres no steel
there it remains high.
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