Dead BH SS II

[Top]

I saw somewhere that someone had bought a yard sale SS II and it was dead. Well, here is my recent experience.
In 2008 I bought a Bounty Hunter Sharpshooter II. After about 10 - 15 trips out, it died.

Importing it to Brasil was not cheap so sending it back for warranty work and getting it back again was too much to deal with.
I had plenty of other things taking up my time and didn't have any tools to work on it either so it was stuck into a corner for seven years.

My wife and I are going to a beach front condo for almost two months (Feb/Mar) so I started thinking about detecting again.

Yesterday, I got the SS II out of the utility/storage area and dusted it off (it was REALLY dirty). Went out and bought a couple of 9v batteries (very expensive here, can I use rechargeables instead of alkaline?). Put in the batteries, yep still dead :-)

Opened it up and started a visual to look for broken wires etc. Poked at a few solder joints with pointy tweezers (still do not have any electronics test equipment) was able to make it beep as I recall the power on sequence sound before. Interesting ... so something might work.

A closer visual inspection revealed that there was actually a small segment of foil missing in the trace that runs from the + battery input to the On/Off switch.

Replacing this trace with a piece of stranded wire solved the problem.

Sorry I didn't think to take any photos. But it is pretty easy to see that the segment of the trace that was missing is quite a bit narrower than the rest of the trace.

Anyway, I am hopefully back into the MD hobby again. :-) It target ID correctly on US coins and some gold and silver samples I had available so I will assume everything is working as designed.

52 days of beach combing coming up.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Treasure of Victoria Peak - Grab it through Amazon!

[Treasure_Hunter]

Top, just remember SS-II will not work well at all on the wet salt sand at the beach so need to stay in the dry sand above high tide line...If you try to run it in wet sand you will need to turn sensitivity way down to get it stable, unfortunately that will also cause it to lose lots of depth......

 

[Captain Caveman]

Good Luck! I hope you find enough to pay for your vacation!

 

[Top]

Top, just remember SS-II will not work well at all on the wet salt sand at the beach so need to stay in the dry sand above high tide line...If you try to run it in wet sand you will need to turn sensitivity way down to get it stable, unfortunately that will also cause it to lose lots of depth......

Yeah, when I used it on this beach in 2008 I was just getting used to adjusting it in the all metal mode to work the wet sand a little.
But since there are so few detectoristas here in Brasil, I can find plenty of coins and maybe a ring or two in the dry sand. :-)
Brasileiros wear very little jewelry on the beaches. But Carnival will bring a lot of Argentinians to this beach.

 

[Top]

Good Luck! I hope you find enough to pay for your vacation!

Well, we inherited the condo so the vacation is pretty cheap. It just needs lots of rehab and TLC at this point.