I have major hours beach hunting with an SE Pro and have owned every model since the original Explorer. The SE Pro is the best balanced of the bunch, the weight is somewhat reduced but overall yeah its a work out swinging it for hours on a beach when targets may be few and far between. But here's the thing, the SE Pro and SE Pro coil is a beach jewelry gobbling monster. It will slap hell out of any Whites machine on a beach, we have sent Whites users scrambling off the beach mumbling to themselves by walking behind them and digging rings and jewelry. So what to do?
You have to be willing to chop shop your Explorers. Start with a Whites S shaft and lower, they weigh almost nothing and are dirt cheap. You will have to fabricate an adaptor or some washers to attach a Minelab coil as the coil wing spacing is different. To chop weight off the Explorer bits you will retain start with the coil connectors, they are large and heavy. Consider dedicating the machine to beach hunting, snip off the coil connectors and hard wire an SE coil into the control box. As part of this process you can install a plastic waterproof cord grip, there is room in the front of the Explorer control box to drill a hole for this. You have enough room on the opposite side for another cord grip for the battery cable. You can then also seal up the bottom of the Explorer control box which gives you a fairly water tight unit for beach hunting, even in heavy rain.
You will have to fabricate a clamp to mount the Explorer control box onto the Whites shaft. You will want to physically locate the Explorer control box back further towards your elbow to improve the balance. You will fabricate a housing for the Explorer battery, this you will locate at the extreme rear of the shaft under your elbow. Its possible to even over due this where the nose of the Explorer gets too light which is to say balancing the Explorer is entirely possible. Pro tip #39 make your own beach hunting battery packs using not AA but AAA batteries. Use 10 rechargeable cells instead of 8. The Explorer is designed to use 8 regular AA cell batteries each 1.5 volts producing a total of 12vdc. As some of you know rechargeable batteries only produce 1.2 volts per cell, giving you only 9.6 volts total. So you can up this to 10 rechargeable cells and a 10 cell pack of AAA rechargeable batteries will give you quite a lot of run time. You will drag our butt back to your vehicle exhausted long before a 10 cell rechargeable AAA pack dies. This reduces the battery weight significantly vs AA's. You will want your battery housing to be light, but rugged. You will find several types of plastic pipe/tube up to the task. You might be tempted to use an Excalibur battery housing, that will work but those things are really heavy and they have an oddball Ikelite connector. You could hard wire the battery pack via a cord grip or use a small waterproof fitting, this would let you swap battery packs and modify your charger with the same connector.
If you use your Explorer for both beach and land detecting and want to retain use of an X1 probe, there is even enough room on the Explorer control box for a connector for the probe and a toggle switch, eliminating the X1 probe box and switch, connectors and extra cable.
Finally a note about the Explorer housing itself. It might be tempting to think about fabricating your own housing but in my experience you will be very hard pressed to fabricate something that's as light as the factory housing already is. You will have to retain the front panel no matter what for the buttons and that panel has compound curves that's not easily adapted to the front of something you might build. The guts of the Explorer are odd shaped with some larger capacitors jutting out, there's a sandwich of boards that stack together, they just fit inside the factory housing. If I were going to go this route, and I have a design I have been kicking around for years, I would separate two of the boards from the screen board, relocate both the batteries and these two boards to the extreme rear of the shaft under my elbow, and build a small thin housing just for the screen and buttons out front more similar to a Whites machine. The reason I have not taken on this challenge thus far is the large number of wires required, I think its like 13 just for the button panel, another 20+ for the screen so the wire cable would be thick and heavy possibly defeating the purpose of weight reduction. I had considered using very fine magnet wire inside a water tight length of tubing.
Anyway that's a quick brain dump as I have been down this road. I built one of these Whites shafted Explorers years ago and even the WOT wasn't bad swinging.
