surreality
starting to spend too much on rocks
is picking up too many rocks at the beach again
Member since January 2012
Posts: 217
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Post by surreality on Mar 14, 2012 15:13:00 GMT -5
These are from the latest round of beach crawling. Since they don't easily fall into the category of 'quartz', which is more or less all that's listed for the location, I'm a bit at a loss. (They also list 'jasper', but that's pretty dang vague -- not even a type!) My vast collection of leaverite grows by leaps and bounds! These pieces are all fairly small, 1x2in through 2x3in, all pictures taken wet save for one. #1 I'm fairly sure this is, of all things, coal, as there was mention of a coal processing plant near the coast ages ago. This does not seem like tumbler fodder even at a glance, so I'm not going to try it in there. (Before I remembered to spray it down, dry.) #2 I'm completely at a loss again. It looks to have some kind of fossil remnants crushed into the jumble. Also doesn't look like good tumbler fodder at all, but the piece was interesting enough to snatch up. #3 Fairly certain this is flint, since I've seen some with similar patterning here and I know the location does turn some up. I'm only hesitant on that ID because the patterning looks particularly nice compared to a lot of what I find, and I am highly doubting my luck in finding a piece like this. (Yeah, I know, it's not terribly impressive, but for me, it ain't bad!) #4 Agate? Jasper? Some other style of flint? (Yep, that debate again!) #5 There's a lot going on in this one. It has a patch of fossil coral, some seamy bits... Rock of All Trades, Master of None? #6 Completely bland, smooth, and ivory from the other side, weirdly vuggy on this side with what seem to be little eye spots around the edges. No multi view on this one, since this is way too image heavy already, and the other side is dang boring. Some kind of agate? *squint* I find a few like this, but usually they're much smaller and I only get a hint of what's under the 'rind', while this one seems to have cracked open somewhere along the line before washing up. It's coming out a bit more vividly colored in the pic than it is in person.
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Post by mohs on Mar 15, 2012 0:08:05 GMT -5
I couldn't positively ID any these but it was an informative post and you got a good eye for detail verycool Ed
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jason12x12
freely admits to licking rocks
Member since October 2011
Posts: 798
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Post by jason12x12 on Mar 15, 2012 1:23:40 GMT -5
pretty sure they are rocks but not sure about the third one.....:-)
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Post by helens on Mar 15, 2012 2:07:49 GMT -5
Interesting pix! I'm no rock IDer anyway... but few questions might help people give you better answers... how hard are these 'rocks'. You think the first one's coal... um... coal isn't very hard at all. What made you think it was coal? You could scratch it with a penknife?
That last one, I found something like that. No vugs, it's butter smooth all around, and I tumbled it. My guess is calcite, just because I couldn't find anything else that YELLOW (with a whitish rind).
The one above that looks a little like the pix of petrified wood someone posted about a week ago.
The rest look like some odd petrified coral thingies, and if you hadn't said coal, I would have thought that black first one was a sort of pumice.
Did they come out of the Atlantic ocean?
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surreality
starting to spend too much on rocks
is picking up too many rocks at the beach again
Member since January 2012
Posts: 217
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Post by surreality on Mar 15, 2012 11:14:09 GMT -5
The coal one is a bit of a long story. Brian (my long-suffering partner) actually found another piece I wasn't set up to get a pic of this time, since it was considerably larger and I was playing around after setting up the light box we picked up to get some jewelry pics for later in the year. (Not made from any of this material sadly; we have a ridiculous backlog of beaded jewelry on hand to get out the door first.) It looked like concrete -- except instead of the rounded pebbles we're accustomed to seeing in concrete, it has more angular chunks of black material in it. There's a sunken concrete ship right at the end of the jetty near where we collect, and since his chunk didn't look like modern concrete at all, we thought it might be a fragment from the ship initially, so we brought it in to the shop there since we were chatting with the owner to ask her about it. Her son stopped in, and is apparently an expert on the history of that specific area and the things that wash up there. He mentioned that chunk was likely dumped from an anthracite coal processing plant that used to be just a little ways up the shore from the beach itself. The first one there looks like a bigger hunk of what's imbedded in the 'concrete' Brian found, just worn down by the water. In his on some chunks, and a bit on the one up there, you can spot what looks like iron stains or rusty 'growth' of some kind, which is likely the pumice-looking bits. They have that rusty patina to them in spots. We've found some slag chunks with it that you'd swear were pumice until you hold them and pumice together and feel the weight difference, too -- all of that still more 'it isn't going into the tumbler, but it can perch on the shelf in a bowl of similar weirdly knobbly bits'. (I could have thumped him, seriously, his weird chunk was the neatest thing we spotted on the trip and he barely spends time looking! *shakes a fist at the sky* I console myself with the fact that it's about fist sized, and he literally tripped over it, complete with the withering stare downward as if to accuse it of doing that on purpose.) It doesn't feel crumbly, but to be honest, it's pretty to me in the shape it's in, and it looks like it could flake a bit at best. I'm a little hesitant to scratch it since I'm likely just going to perch it on the shelf as 'pretty rock #umpteensquillion', but might. I'm almost able to draw perfect sketch lines with a corner of it on paper with very minimal pressure, so I'm pretty sure it's awfully soft. (Now there's a part of me tempted to keep it perched on the desk if I can't ever find a pen quickly enough to take down a message. Might have to look for more of it just for that reason in the future.) They're from a pretty unusual spot on the whole. It's the very tip of New Jersey, at the exact spot where the Delaware Bay side (fed by the Delaware River) meets the Atlantic Ocean side. We find a lot of things there as a result that are likely not at all native to the immediate area, since they're coming down the river from much further north. We tend to go at the unusually low tides, and as often as we can after storms to see the strangeness that washes up. So far, the strangest find thus far is not a rock at all! It's the handle of a child's pink porcelain teacup, worn down like sea glass, which there's also a growing pile of. We ended up getting the tumblers in part just to get the cracks and rinds off of some of these kinds of finds to get a better idea of what some of them even are, since unless they're cracked open, it gets really hard to tell, and most are too small to crack apart without shattering them into a million tiny useless pieces. We find a truly unholy lot of quartz, but don't pick up as much of it as we could, since the patterned and blotchy and strange chunks seem a little more interesting, along with the little fossil bits. (My icon pic is a closeup of one of those.) Most of what we run across, I spend hours searching mindat, or the forums here, for something similar, and there's usually 'a little looks like a this, the other half looks like that, on the corner it's more like that over there... which means it's Mutt Rock and probably none of the things it sorta resembles.' I figure these are mostly combination (hardness) stones and will give me fits over getting them well-polished in many cases, but it's worth the effort just to actually see some of the patterning on them without potentially centuries of grime and sediment. In a sense, that areas would be more matte and other areas more polished, while anathema to the whole idea of tumbling something to get it to shine, has some appeal to me since it helps add a little contrast to the specific patterns of the stone. If nothing else, I think of it as my rapidly growing leaverite collection, since I'm pretty sure most of it would bore the folks looking for very specific or more valuable stones, but pattern and texture junkie that I am, they're still weirdly interesting to me and might have some potential in some really earthy jewelry designs in the future.
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Post by mohs on Mar 15, 2012 12:10:02 GMT -5
O admit it surreality your a hoarder with a good eye I jest ;D search on ! Ed
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surreality
starting to spend too much on rocks
is picking up too many rocks at the beach again
Member since January 2012
Posts: 217
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Post by surreality on Mar 15, 2012 12:56:51 GMT -5
Oh, I so am. I just know at least I have a yard to unload anything that doesn't come out interesting into, and hey, if I keep at it long enough... no more mowing!
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Post by helens on Mar 15, 2012 21:41:47 GMT -5
Hey... if you're searching in the ocean for things... keep an eye out for ambergris... I've been trying to find ambergris for years, and I do not think it's allowed to be sold anymore because it's a whale product (but no one can stop you from TRADING IT privately). I haven't checked the laws in a while, not sure exactly what you can or can't do with it. One of my other hobbies (yes, I have several odd hobbies) is natural perfumer, and I can't get any ambergris.
Ambergris is stinky whale vomit ... looks like a black or grey oily rock, usually pretty small. You can tell what it is by heating a piece of metal and poking it... because it's organic, heated metal should poke right through. Whales eat krill and other planktons, and then they vomit back out the exoskeletons and other stuff, coated with stomach oils. That's the ambergris.
Real ambergris is no longer needed, because there are chemical substitutes, and also because all the traditional perfume animal fixatives (ambergris-whale vomit, civet - civet cat piss, musk -deer testosterone/secretion), are HEAVY, and the perfume trends today are very light. But I've just always wanted to try the real deal, and due to the ease of cheating and making it out of chemicals, you cannot trust buying any.
That's an aside. Your story about the shipwreck and coal is really interesting. Hey, not everything has to be a rock. Having a little piece of history is fun by itself:). Sounds like a great beach to collect at:).
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Post by Woodyrock on Mar 16, 2012 0:44:59 GMT -5
Number 1 is probably clinker (partially burned coal/limestone), number 2 appears to be agatized fossil material, 3 is flint, likely from ships ballast, 4 is agate, 5 agatized material, and 6 is an agate. Even though there is little colour in number six, you might get a clustered orb effect that would make an interesting cab.
ship wrecks provide quite a wide variety of rock. In the days of sail, ships that were carrying light cargo would need ballasting, usually rock local to the port in which it was loaded. Shipwrecks are often identified by the ballast rock. Woody
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Fossilman
Cave Dweller
Member since January 2009
Posts: 20,685
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Post by Fossilman on Mar 16, 2012 11:23:21 GMT -5
Quote"ship wrecks provide quite a wide variety of rock. In the days of sail, ships that were carrying light cargo would need ballasting, usually rock local to the port in which it was loaded. Shipwrecks are often identified by the ballast rock.Quote" Woody
Wow,learn something new everyday,I did not know that Woody........(thumbs up)
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Post by catmandewe on Mar 16, 2012 17:03:15 GMT -5
Hey... if you're searching in the ocean for things... keep an eye out for ambergris... I've been trying to find ambergris for years, and I do not think it's allowed to be sold anymore because it's a whale product (but no one can stop you from TRADING IT privately). I haven't checked the laws in a while, not sure exactly what you can or can't do with it. One of my other hobbies (yes, I have several odd hobbies) is natural perfumer, and I can't get any ambergris. Ambergris is stinky whale vomit ... looks like a black or grey oily rock, usually pretty small. You can tell what it is by heating a piece of metal and poking it... because it's organic, heated metal should poke right through. Whales eat krill and other planktons, and then they vomit back out the exoskeletons and other stuff, coated with stomach oils. That's the ambergris. Real ambergris is no longer needed, because there are chemical substitutes, and also because all the traditional perfume animal fixatives (ambergris-whale vomit, civet - civet cat piss, musk -deer testosterone/secretion), are HEAVY, and the perfume trends today are very light. But I've just always wanted to try the real deal, and due to the ease of cheating and making it out of chemicals, you cannot trust buying any. That's an aside. Your story about the shipwreck and coal is really interesting. Hey, not everything has to be a rock. Having a little piece of history is fun by itself:). Sounds like a great beach to collect at:). It is illegal to sell vomit? ?? A little over regulation I would say, if you can get money for vomit you are a dam fine salesman.
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Post by helens on Mar 17, 2012 2:32:47 GMT -5
LOL! Yup, Tony:). Whale vomit is from whales... and it is illegal to trade in whale products in the USA. Here's the actual regulation pertaining to it: www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/laws/mmpa/fulltext.htm#section102Ambergris has been used in perfumery for hundreds of years... I have heard people say that the scent ranges from DISGUSTING, BLEH, OMG I AM GOING TO RALF, and Get that away from me before I kill you!... to... heaven on earth. Same stuff. This is why I so badly want to get my hands on some. How can it evoke such DIFFERENT responses from diffrent people?! On the other hand, I've met people who actually thought that skunk spray smelled kinda good, so I know some people have broken noses (and I don't mean because they got hit there). I actually do have some of the synthetic version... smells kind of ozony to me, but I have no clue how close to the real deal it is. A LOT of synthetics don't even smell close to the real thing. Now ambergris is actually worth a good bit of money, and it IS legal to sell in other countries. But my thought is, ordering some subjects you to arrest or a gigantic fine for trading in CITES banned goods (like trying to import elephant ivory or rhino tusks or tiger skins). Why selling something floating in the ocean as a form of poop would bother anyone, I'm not entirely sure... except I've read that people have killed sperm whales trying to find a few lumps inside their heads. I don't think they really care that much domestically if you found something on the beach tho, because obviously you didn't kill a whale. Also, other day, someone bought a whale boner at an estate sale that they posted here... so maybe it's a grey area (or that whale boner was ancient, but still would fall under 'whale product' restrictions). There's a lot of disagreement in the perfumery world about it, but the vast majority of US perfumers won't go near it... because how do you SELL a product that contains something that is illegal to sell? You add ambergris, a perfume becomes a 'whale product'. So gift/trade only item in any form in the US. I just want to KNOW if it truly stinks or smells great:)!!! And asking someone else is useless, I have to smell it:P.
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surreality
starting to spend too much on rocks
is picking up too many rocks at the beach again
Member since January 2012
Posts: 217
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Post by surreality on Mar 17, 2012 10:07:14 GMT -5
*grin* I know that feeling so well -- sometimes you just have to know. (I have a slightly broken nose; I used to get sinus infections and inflammation so often the interior of my nose needed to be 'shaved' to stop it from swelling shut during allergy season when I was younger. Something has to be pretty strong to get through since then. ) I'd guess it's a little too briny-musky for some folks; I have noticed that general undertone in a few scents over the years, and I can almost picture how the hint of ozone might swap in for that particular blend, or at least echo the 'earthy and still sharp' aspect of it, albeit in a different way I'd think. That it's especially strong doesn't surprise me -- especially considering the popularity of it in history. Just looking at costume history, and how many garments had pockets or charms and such to hold scents to distract from the natural body scent (in times when bathing wasn't what it is today) the stronger scents would definitely have a pretty solid use. Even if it's 'stinky whale', it's not 'stinky person', and that distinction alone could make a world of status difference in some eras. In a weird way, I have to wonder if it interacts in some way with sweat/etc. that helps the effect? Maybe that sounds crazy, but it could explain a lot. While I didn't find any this round, I will keep looking. Stuff like that, if I know to look for it and know there's a home waiting for it, I never have any issue picking it up and sending it along. Similarly, if anyone ever wants 'random quartz pebbles' for tumbling... I can probably grab one or two small flat rate boxes of them some time when we go. I keep meaning to, and getting distracted with shiny shiny shiny. I'll likely update this post in a couple of days to avoid cluttering up the forum since there are a few other unusual finds from yesterday. I'm pretty sure I know what one of the ones I know I'll need help with is -- it's a weird fossil concretion -- but I definitely need advice about what to do with it. It's... well, a picture would explain better than I would. It's going to be in need of some help before it goes into the tumbler IF it even does, but while it's rather interesting as it is I'm betting it would look amazing with a nice polish on it. (It's vuggy. As in, very fine veins of vugs running through some of the divisions of coral, and a few formed between the layers of the concretion itself. Nothing hugely impressive in there, as they're dinky teensy small, but I'd like to try to preserve them rather than have them grind out completely or just become grit collecting pockets that would ruin the whole piece. There's also a notable crack that seems to have started to develop some crystal growth toward one end.) I'm just not sure if opticon would do the job, since I've never experimented with it. Everything with vugs, other than pieces I stupidly threw into the first batch just curious about what would happen with them (they pretty much ground out into smooth dips or became grit collectors needing a few more rounds before they become the former), is being presently set aside for 'figure out a solution or just ooh at it as is' sorting later -- this one just kicked me in the rump enough to realize, 'yeah, a solution needs to be found for that soon!'
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Post by helens on Mar 18, 2012 0:58:15 GMT -5
Hey Dee, I've done some tumbling, and the one thing I've discovered is that the vast majority of little teeny crystals do not survive in the tumbler. There's the rare druzy types that do, but they are mostly 'solid', as in crystaline, but not actual crystals. Everything else I put in the tumbler just got cleared out:(.
So if you have a really neat something with vugs... and there's anything neat in the vugs, or it's got cracks, you run a good risk of cracking the piece completely along those cracks.
I'm in the same boat about polishing really nice pieces with cracks and vugs. I'm going to get some polishing dremel bits with diamond embeds, and hopefully those will work out for those little really neat pieces that I can't stick in the tumbler:).
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surreality
starting to spend too much on rocks
is picking up too many rocks at the beach again
Member since January 2012
Posts: 217
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Post by surreality on Mar 18, 2012 17:07:41 GMT -5
Thankfully these tend to be on the super small side, so I'm hoping the opticon solution might work. I am just not sure how thick it is -- basically if it could 'fill the hole', or if it would just put the equivalent of (sorry for my moment of epic girlitude here) a layer of 'topcoat' on it like a layer of nail polish, essentially, and wouldn't really fill much. I've heard about some folks using pressure washers on tumbled pieces to get the grit out of spots like this, but it doesn't solve the problem of them wearing down or off in the first place. (And I think I read the phrase 'be careful with this thing or it'll put a hole in your finger' in regard to one of the small scale ones that is supposedly best for it, which... nnnnnnngh, yeah, I like my fingers where they are, intact!) I think there's one in the polish barrel now, so the moment of truth for it will come in a little under 24 hours when they're cleaned off. There's also the matter of... wouldn't a pressure washer make the stones skitter around, potentially scratching them, and requiring a re-tumble? So many potential practical problems -- I see why the conventional wisdom is to shy away from vugs! Thankfully, most of the ones I run across are teensy tiny. They're more like 'split seams' with a little sparkle visible. I'm pretty sure the opticon would work nicely with those -- it's mostly a matter of ordering it, learning to use it, and the always-a-pain 'making a safe space to work with it in the first place in a house built in the 1940s with a kitchen the size of the average modern bathroom'. *laugh* For now, the 'set them aside' approach seems to be the best call until I get more experience working with them. The new pile gets bleach-rinsed and sorted today, so hopefully the pics can follow soon after.
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Post by helens on Mar 22, 2012 2:53:51 GMT -5
Dee, I'm not sure what Opticon is made of... but I THINK it's a type of epoxy. I don't have any opticon... but I do have epoxy:). The reason people use Opticon is I think it's got UV inhibitors in it... epoxy will yellow with age, so that's a big huge deal. Rocks last forever. If you use a sealant, it would defeat the purpose to seal with something that will yellow... but isn't coming off. That said, I don't think epoxy is particularly dangerous... they say to wear gloves, but I got it all over my hands last nite and I'm still breathing...
You could pick up a UV protected epoxy locally if you are in a hurry. A supposedly super great solution is windshield repair kit also. It makes glass scratches disappear, so it may make cracks disappear too (haven't tried that either, but opal people have suggested it).
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surreality
starting to spend too much on rocks
is picking up too many rocks at the beach again
Member since January 2012
Posts: 217
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Post by surreality on Mar 24, 2012 14:14:12 GMT -5
Oooh, that is a GREAT idea! Since that has to 'patch' tiny holes as well to some extent from impacts, that would probably be ideal for some of the tiny little vuggy bits I'm talking about. I think Brian was planning on looking into some anyway to keep on hand since he's had repeated issues with a few tiny windshield dings that he'd like to prevent from spreading. Most of what I need to fill are tiny spaces no larger than a fingernail's width -- basically, shiny spiky glittery cracks that look like little seams with teensy crystal growth. Just deep enough they're never going to grind out until the rock's thin as paper, and just wide enough to be like a big open mouth singin', 'feed me some grit I can hang on to forever!'
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