The 3D is virtually the same thing as the 5, except there's a minor difference in how the nonferrous categories are scaled. Someone else here can probably explain it better than I can.
I left Fisher in '95 because I could see it was headed downhill with no plan to fix it. When I returned to take a look at the place before we bought it in (as I recall) 2007 I was shocked at what I saw, both physically and the accounting data. I told the boss we shouldn't take it even if it was free, but he thought some aspects of it were salvageable and in the long run he was proven right.
Among the things we didn't know at the time, was that after I left they'd decided the CZ calibration procedure was too time-consuming, so they developed a shortcut method that could sorta fake it as long as you didn't actually test the unit afterwards. When we brought manufacturing to El Paso, we didn't know they'd abandoned the correct procedure and therefore the new people received the wrong training. It took us a while to discover what had happened. I dredged the original procedure out of the files and we went back to that with some very minor changes.
What most people don't know is that the "old Fisher" had been shipping them improperly calibrated for years, as best I can figure probably close to a decade. It was the "old Fisher" that created a nice little side business for Dankowski, who was deeply enough involved in the CZ3D revision to figure out how CZ's should be calibrated.
There were numerous other things that happened at the "old Fisher", involving CZ's and other products, which we inherited and took some time to discover. The "shortcut" CZ calibration procedure was just one example.
When people post that the "old Fisher" was this great company that did everything right, and then First Texas bought it and screwed everything up, they simply don't know what they're talking about. The "old Fisher" was losing a million dollars a year on $7 mil revenue-- and their sales were falling off a cliff because dealers didn't want the product any more. That's what the "old Fisher" had become.
Fortunately there were several products worth saving, and several people who were "keepers".
--Dave J.
I call B.S. on this.
Fishers' downfall was spurred on by the fact that they made and built a quality product in AMERICA, and refused to compromise it's build quality and engineering.
The dealers did not want to stock and sell them because there was not as much profit in it for them as there was with the high-markup cheap detectors.
This is evidenced by the plethora of cheap, chinese made, ho-hum, unstable operation, shallow, erratic, poorly engineered, and exceedingly cheaply built dime-a-dozen detectors on the market nowadays.
Detector engineering, design and build quality peaked in the 90's within the Fisher line, and there is nothing you can buy these days that is comparable.
This holds true for many products that used to be designed and made in America. It is just a fact of life.
When First Texas bought Fisher, - is was only to gain the benefit of their technologies, and the only true Fisher products they continued to produce were the ones with strong enough demand, and the ones that could
be produced cheaply enough to make sufficient profit. Probably due to already having some parts still in stock from the buyout etc. As they ran out, and it was no longer cost effective - that line would be dropped and/or replaced
by a cheapened model (lower manufacturing cost).
Great detectors are expensive to make.
Cheap detectors are easy to sell.
The rest is all Marketing and CYA.
