Staffordshire Metal Detectors was created in 2000 from scratch as an extension of my hobby of metal detecting.

Most dealers at the time were mainly selling  new detectors , so i decided to specialise in second-hand detectors.

Because i worked from home none of the main dealers would supply me with new ones  because they needed you to have a shop front.

So i went about getting some stock, not easy if you are selling second-hand, i could not just phone up a supplier and get them to send me X amount of certain make or model, i placed wanted ad's in Searcher and Treasure Hunting magazines, first item i bought as a result was a 15'' Whites XLT coil, then it just went from there really, created a Website, took part ex's, Swapped detectors did any deal possible, customers seemed to like that , the other second-hand dealers that were there in 2000 soon disappeared and there was only me doing it on a large scale, the main dealers have slowly stopped taking part ex's over the years so a lot of people sold their old detector/detectors to me so they could go and buy a new one, so the main dealers started passing people with detectors to sell on to me , i would buy them and the customer would then go back to the dealer and buy a new one, win/win.

There are of course loads of other ways to sell your detector other than offering it to me, but for a lot of sellers i  was the easiest and most people do not want the hassle of ebay /Facebook or similar.

Detectorists phone me or email me asking what i think of a certain detector , i am no salesman and if i thought it was rubbish or had issues i would tell them, i have no particular bias towards any brand or model , i sold anything, sometimes i would tell someone a detector was not great but they still bought it, it was just my opinion.

Worst thing about dealing in second-hand detectors is the cleaning , not to bad on the older detectors but now there are so many nooks and crannies you cannot get at, the plastic seems to have changed over the years, nowadays the mud seems to get ingrained more so.

Before cleaning i would test them out to see if they were good to go, thought i might as well record the results as i had a testbed with 40 different tests on it, i listed all my findings on the website and it's very popular , but most of the detectors tested are now out of date, the test bed was a challenge for the 2000 to 2015 detectors, but now things have moved on and my test bed is too easy for the more recent detectors.

Sold thousands of detectors/Coils e.t.c over the last 24 years,and a lot has happened during that time,  time now to retire from the sales side, detector sales have now hit an all time high and at at my age i do not want to be working all day/everyday.

New test bed will be created soon and i will start to test again , might be the odd detector put up for sale in the future also i have loads of spares/bit's and bobs to sell and will start to list them next month.

Moving forward the website will be aimed at information , Manuals/Tests/Blogs/Finds and maybe videos one day! this is not all going to happen over night , it will be a slow project.

Thank you for you custom over the years

A new chapter will now begin!