Ugly Petoskey Stones - Updated 5/6/2024

Wow definitely a winner!

The "coal" pieces are definitely different and I will see if I can do somthing with them.   Agree on the hexagonal sections.  

Hopefully there will be a few more in the group.

Thanks.   I was happy I could finish it so it was triangular.  

Thanks.

Thanks.

2nd row, 3rd rock from left.  This is another one that would have been good if not for some mud and kind of small size.  I wondered if it would get better so did the back and it doesn't look good at all so left it as is.  

Unpolished Dry





Polished Dry





4th row down, 3rd rock from left.  Not very good.  However, if you look on the upper right of the polished pic, you may be able to make out the pink hexagons (rare in Petoskey Stones).  

Unpolished Dry






Polished Dry


3rd row down, 5th rock from left.  Not well defined hexagons and a lot of "mud" in the eyes.  

Unpolished Dry





Polished Dry




Thanks for looking

Chris

Another great update on these different pieces Chris! 

I've been trying...to a point...to see if I can see anything in the before pics which will indicate whether it's going to be a decent piece when finished. I'll admit...I can't!


*This was a pretty big undertaking to pass on this kind of information for us on the sidelines...so a BIG thank you for doing this! 

Maybe we just have to go further.   

So what happend and did I learn anything? 

I polished all the rocks to at least 3000 grit although a lot of them I went really fast through the wheels.   I wouldn't have done that if I wasn't posting all the results.   You can usually tell after the 220 grit wheel how the stone will look polished so a lot of these I woudl have thrown out at that point.   Also, if I hadn't been trying to figure out what was good or not, I probably would have left a lot of them on the beach.  

There were 26 stones.   Here are the three that I think were best.  Not a good average.

Row 4, rock 1.  This is the best one by far.  Like the triangle shape also.  


Row 1, rock 4.  I would say this one is seond best.   I should go back and see what I said about this one origianlly but now it is looking pretty good.   Based on the unpolished side and bottom, it looks like it would be pretty good quality and I might go ahead and polish the entire rock and try to get rid of the "muddy" eyes on the polished face.   I will have to do small radius edges or a lot of the rock will disapear.  




Row 1, rock 2.  This one is ok but not great.  The back side of this one is really rough and would take a lot of time to polish and I am not sure I could get rid of the bad spots.  




Here is a group shot of the polished stones in the same locations as the original unpolished group photo.




The next pic shows the 3 good ones, 9 others that are so so, and the two "blac eye" ones.   The other 12 have been donated to the driveway repair fund and might be used if we get a heavy rain tonight like the are predicting.   The 9 on top will probably go to my brother and his wife to give as gifts to people that rent the small cabin on their property.   I may end up treating these by baking in mineral oil (my sister-in-law likes them this way) and if I do will probably show before and after photos later.   The two black eye ones I will see if I can stabilize and make cabs from them since a couple people liked the interesting pattern. 




I started this with the idea of maybe being able to tell which ones are good and which ones aren't while I am on the beach.   When I collected these, for the most part, I didn't try to figure out if they were good or not.  Just looked for different looking ones to get the most variety.   

A couple things come to mind about trying to figure out if they are good or not on the beach.   The one that is best I thought when I picked it up that it felt dense.   That is why I cracked it and it looked decent on the cracked side.   If you look at the seond best one, you will note that one of the unpolished sides is cracked (found it that way) and it looks dense and doesn't have voids.   You can also look at the bottom of this one and see a portion that looks dense.    

Both the best one and second best one had the tanish crust or hard coating on at least a portion of the rock.   These were somewhat similar to the one Rob polished from this area.  But so were some that didn't polish well.

So I guess I could always crack them to see how they look on the inside but that would make the nicer ones way smaller and might get ranger Rick upset with me (I don't know if there is anything against that but I have heard that they frown on chipping away on larger rocks).   Not to mention that my arm and hand woudl get sore.   My best guess at the moment is look for something that seems dense, maybe has a portion (without the encrustation) where you could tell it looks good, and look for the tanish crust on them.   Another thought I had is maybe getting a battery Dremel and grinding bit and take a little portion of the crust off to see if they look good underneath.   Not sure if that would work well or not.  I will have to try these ideas next time I am there and see if I can improve my percentage. 

Hope this didn't get too long winded and thanks for looking.

Chris

** Note to self: Go hounding with Chris...pick up everything he does not!!  LOL


chris1956 - Your idea of taking a battery-powered Dremel is intriguing! I was thinking that would be a bit (pun intended) of work...but it might be less work than lugging the "unknowns" home and finding out they were Leaverites!