There have been a lot of rumours of Minelab not repairing modded detectors and unfortunately this is true....

I was recently contacted by a person who had modded a 3500 and in the process he did some damage. He took my advice and sent it to Minelab after discussing it with them. He received his detector back a few days later by COD mail and with this letter attached:


I took off the name and address details to protect the owner.

I also had a modded 2100 (and have seen numerous other detectors similar) to add and remove some mods and below are the photos.














I phoned Minelab and asked about this new policy and was told that because of things like the above and the radical changes that they have seen make it very hard for them to ascertain what is causing the problem. They generally didn't mind the modded detectors but now with having to spend hours removing the hot melt glue to return the detectors back to normal and the radical changes to circuit they no longer will service a modded detector. I asked also asked if we returned them to standard would that help but they said that then makes the job just as hard because they then don't know whether the returned parts were normal or correct.They explained that they have enough to do just servicing and repairing the range of detectors that they cannot spend the time to do all this extra work.

As a technician I understand and support this even though the policy has the end result to limit the sale of modded detectors and also whether you mod or not. This also means that dealers will also not be able to sell detector that are modded because they also cannot give a guarantee. The other point is that if you buy a detector that doesn't have switches and is modded you won't know unless you are told and if for some reason such as you reverse the battery connection for instance and you send the detector off to Minelab, you may well get a surprise when it is returned to you COD!

I know that a lot of problems that could happen could be repaired by myself and others but if for some reason you have a detector that blows the MCU (2200 upwards) then none of us regardless of what you may be told elsewhere can fix or replace that. We do not and can not get the code to reprogram it and without the MCU all you have is a boat anchor!

I will be posting in the DIY section all the known mods for those that wish to do it themselves and supply circuit information on the additional circuits for things like the VCO and GP series digital gain mod I have developed.

As a summary. PLEASE THINK VERY CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU MOD A DETECTOR. It may become instantly worthless.