Post by paulshiroma on Feb 10, 2012 0:49:53 GMT -5
For those of you in SoCal, I thought I'd put a plug in for Walt Lombardo, owner of Nevada Mineral and Gem up in Orange, CA. Walt's got a great store with a beautiful selection of gems and minerals. If you've got kids, he's got a lot of materials for under $5 as well as materials for teachers. A lot of material he's collected himself and sometimes he runs field trips out to various locations in SoCal. If you're into the prospecting side of this hobby (addiction), he has a large reference library of old claim information. You can find his site here: www.minbooks.net/.
A few weeks back, he was running a sale, clearing out stuff so that he could pull in additional inventory that's in storage. I was the lucky finder of a crate of geodes that apparently, he had gotten buried and forgotten about for six years or so. Walt told me that he had bought a hundred pound sack or so of geodes, directly from a mine and sold of most of them back in 2005. The crate I ran across he had just pulled from storage where it was hiding since 2005. Since it was a great sale, I purchased the whole crate. ;D Here's the first group that I cut last weekend.
1. This one had a nice smokey quartz interior with a beautiful clear quartz inclusion:
2
3. This one had interesting crystal plates that ran across the interior:
4. I cut this one in thirds.
5. Another smokey quartz
6. My [current] favorite:
7. The rest of the crate. Haven't had a chance to cut these yet.
Walt's great with kids and his passion extends to the educational side of the business. Often when we're there, he'll pull out rocks so that Andrew and Nathaniel can get a close up look at the materials. And he goes out of his way to help out Andrew ID the materials we haul back from around SoCal.
So, for those of you near Orange, CA, this is a great shop!
Thanks for looking.
Paul
A few weeks back, he was running a sale, clearing out stuff so that he could pull in additional inventory that's in storage. I was the lucky finder of a crate of geodes that apparently, he had gotten buried and forgotten about for six years or so. Walt told me that he had bought a hundred pound sack or so of geodes, directly from a mine and sold of most of them back in 2005. The crate I ran across he had just pulled from storage where it was hiding since 2005. Since it was a great sale, I purchased the whole crate. ;D Here's the first group that I cut last weekend.
1. This one had a nice smokey quartz interior with a beautiful clear quartz inclusion:
2
3. This one had interesting crystal plates that ran across the interior:
4. I cut this one in thirds.
5. Another smokey quartz
6. My [current] favorite:
7. The rest of the crate. Haven't had a chance to cut these yet.
Walt's great with kids and his passion extends to the educational side of the business. Often when we're there, he'll pull out rocks so that Andrew and Nathaniel can get a close up look at the materials. And he goes out of his way to help out Andrew ID the materials we haul back from around SoCal.
So, for those of you near Orange, CA, this is a great shop!
Thanks for looking.
Paul
We were chatting about this, that, the other, school, the business, etc and somewhere along the way, he told me the name of the mine. Well, that was almost three weeks ago and the way things have been going at work, that's like two years ago. LOL
