Very Large Polished Pudding and Petoseky Stones
Aug 9, 2018 11:03:22 GMT -5
rockpickerforever, fantastic5, and 5 more like this
Post by Jugglerguy on Aug 9, 2018 11:03:22 GMT -5
I finally got outside to use my Makita wet grinder. I spent about four hours one day and another four hours about a week later working on two rocks. One of them turned out pretty nice.
Let's start with the good one. There's not much to say, it's just a big pudding stone. I put about five hours into this one. That's a twelve pound Lortone barrel in the background. The rock weighs 35.5 lbs.
I got the Petoskey stone from a trip to the local cement plant limestone quarry. There are huge Petokey stones there, but I've never been to the quarry to pick one up for myself. I had doubts about the quality of the rock based on past experience with large Petoskeys from another nearby abandoned quarry. I thought it was worth trying to polish one. I spent around three hours on this. The finished rock is much smaller than what I started with because I had to saw off some large pieces to eliminate deep concave places I couldn't get the grinder into. It was also much rougher than the pudding stone, which was pretty smooth already. The good news is that Petoskey is soft so it grinds fairly quickly. The bad news is that this looked better before I touched it.
Before:
After:
The pattern is washed out, and there are huge cracks throughout this rock. The cracks weren't obvious until I had done most of the rough grinding. I thought about breaking the rock along the cracks, but I would have been left with a pile of little pebbles. I decided to leave it in one piece and have the size be the only interesting thing about the rock. I guess explosives aren't good for producing solid rock pieces.
The only other interesting thing here is that there is some sort of metal in this rock. I'm guessing it's pyrite because that's fairly common in the limestone around here. Usually It's just small crystals in a thin layer, but this looks a little chunkier. I'm not sure that it looks very metallic in the picture, but it does in person.
Let's start with the good one. There's not much to say, it's just a big pudding stone. I put about five hours into this one. That's a twelve pound Lortone barrel in the background. The rock weighs 35.5 lbs.
I got the Petoskey stone from a trip to the local cement plant limestone quarry. There are huge Petokey stones there, but I've never been to the quarry to pick one up for myself. I had doubts about the quality of the rock based on past experience with large Petoskeys from another nearby abandoned quarry. I thought it was worth trying to polish one. I spent around three hours on this. The finished rock is much smaller than what I started with because I had to saw off some large pieces to eliminate deep concave places I couldn't get the grinder into. It was also much rougher than the pudding stone, which was pretty smooth already. The good news is that Petoskey is soft so it grinds fairly quickly. The bad news is that this looked better before I touched it.
Before:
After:
The pattern is washed out, and there are huge cracks throughout this rock. The cracks weren't obvious until I had done most of the rough grinding. I thought about breaking the rock along the cracks, but I would have been left with a pile of little pebbles. I decided to leave it in one piece and have the size be the only interesting thing about the rock. I guess explosives aren't good for producing solid rock pieces.
The only other interesting thing here is that there is some sort of metal in this rock. I'm guessing it's pyrite because that's fairly common in the limestone around here. Usually It's just small crystals in a thin layer, but this looks a little chunkier. I'm not sure that it looks very metallic in the picture, but it does in person.
