Big Petoskey Stone

I've had a large Petoskey stone sitting in my basement for a few years. The plan was to have someone make a sphere for me, but I never got around to doing that. The other day, I decided to polish it by hand. It was mostly covered in gray algae crud from the lake, except where I had ground off a small area on top to see if that rock was any good. Turns out that it's not a great rock, but not bad either. The worst part is that there are a lot of muddy eyes. There's also a non-Petoskey part on the bottom, but it doesn't show.





There are quite a few concave areas on this rock. I didn't want to change the shape much or make the rock a lot smaller by grinding the surrounding areas down, so I mostly used a drum sander on my cordless drill to do the rough grinding. There were a lot of holes where the eyes were, so it took a lot of grinding. The sanding cylinders were not made for water, so I went through about four of them. All the other steps were done by hand with wet/dry automotive sandpaper and then aluminum oxide on denim to polish it.

I might put it here if my wife lets me. Otherwise, I'll stick it wherever she tells me to. I learned to behave a long time ago.