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Post by puppie96 on Oct 18, 2004 2:18:00 GMT -5
Bison Basin Rd. had a Twilight Zone occurrence. I'm embarrassed. Trying again. I found Bison Basin Rd. following a rockhounding guide while driving across Wyoming. It's supposed to be a site for "apple green jade." Of course, the writer of the guide cautions that it's easy to overlook the jade, because there's so much wind polished agate lying around. Sounded like my kind of place. It was a 2 lane nicely graded dirt road that headed out straight as an arrow across flat desert to the mountains. The same all around, and rock glittering everywhere. We started picking up sacks and sacks of quartzy looking and interesting colored rock, of course anything green or greenish went in the sack. Not all of it is tumbled yet. I sorted out the green finished rocks from the rest and will put them in a separate post. These are some of the others. As usual, I don't know what they are! This first one is an overview of some of my favorites of them.  Next, a couple of smaller groupings.   And smaller ones.   And finally, a few close ups of some I thought were prettiest or most ususual.  The next one is Notta Rock.  That's cause its a salad! Yuk, Yuk! Somebody at the puppiehouse got possessed by Martha Stewart. More close-ups:    So I sure hope these posted better this time and in an appropriate size. If anybody knows what anything is, please let me know. Thanks so much for looking! |
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rollingstone
starting to spend too much on rocks
Member since July 2009
Posts: 236
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Post by rollingstone on Oct 18, 2004 2:47:03 GMT -5
Ah yes, much better sized photos this time!
The snacks don't look like pita and hummus this time, but I'd still go for them.
You've obviously got a lot of quartz there, maybe they are the agates? Much more colourful than ordinary quartz, but I have no idea what the impurities are that give them the colour.
The second-to-last photo is the potassium feldspar (pink) with the quartz band. I think there might also be some K-feldspar in the first close-up shot. Nice rocks.
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Post by puppie96 on Oct 18, 2004 2:59:13 GMT -5
Hey Rollingstone,
Potassium Feldspar! Cool! This is great to know because I get that stuff a lot -- it seems to show up all over the place and I've never known what it is. So. IIRC, feldspar isn't a great tumbling rock because it breaks apart? This pink stuff seems to do that, it fractures and the quartzy parts will polish and the pink sometimes will, but it never will get smooth, keeps breaking.
Thank you for that! I liked it because the bands through it were so visible.
The BIG YELLOW ROCK may not be a great beauty, but it's the biggest rock I've tumbled to date by several orders of magnitude, it seems, now that I've got my new big barrels. It could use some smoothing, but the way it's fracturing, since it has a pretty good polish I might not mess with it.
These rocks were tumbled in various batches, as is usual with me a lot of them chaotically went back and forth between vibe and barrels. IIRC, though, I polished it all in the vibe and I have been using Raybrite-A (I think it is A -- whatever it is, it's the stuff in their kits) along with a product called "Glossine," a polish additive for vibes that I found on a website, also a Raytech thing.
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Post by puppie96 on Oct 18, 2004 3:27:28 GMT -5
I'd be especially interested in anyone's input about what the first close-up rock might be -- it's the one with the honey colored rock with pieces of green throughout -- I've never had anything quite like it. The thing that's really fascinating about this stuff is that a bunch of it, like the one yellow rock in the close up, as well as several in the group pictures, are basically transparent and kind of molded, as if they were clear colored plastic getting poured in a mold, the one really shiny yellow one has a lot of bubbles inside and inclusions, but you can see into the rock. There's a piece of brown that's clear. It looks like the usual quarty stuff except that it's not crystalline at all, it's more like glass but seems harder. The honey/green-speckled rock has that "looking into" quality on the surface. The back, btw, doesn't have the green markings.
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rollingstone
starting to spend too much on rocks
Member since July 2009
Posts: 236
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Post by rollingstone on Oct 18, 2004 4:01:42 GMT -5
Well, here's a pic of what I believe is potassium feldspar that I find locally...some of it is pure, some has quartz inclusions, some is pink, and some is darker, almost red. It has amazing cleavage (and not in the cheerleader sense of the word), but I haven't noticed that as a problem when tumbling the stuff...seems to smooth out nicely as the grit gets finer. Well, maybe I speak too soon , as it's been many years since I've tumbled this kind of material through to polish. The stuff in the photo spent only 5 days in 60/90 in a rotary tumbler. Going to take 2 to 3 weeks in coarse grind alone, then all the finer stages, before I can really judge the results. Looks promising early on though.
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rollingstone
starting to spend too much on rocks
Member since July 2009
Posts: 236
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Post by rollingstone on Oct 18, 2004 4:04:07 GMT -5
Oops, forgot to include the photo.....  |
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Post by Cher on Oct 18, 2004 7:07:28 GMT -5
Oooo Puppie, what a great shine you got, awesome
job! I'm sorry, I don't know what any of it is, but that
first one below the salad and the biggun on the dollar
are really gorgeous. Thanks for sharing, the salad looks
pretty interesting too, were you able to get the
"martha" ghost to leave? LOL
Cher
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Post by cookie3rocks on Oct 18, 2004 18:11:47 GMT -5
I guess "Yummy" truely applies here! I covet your shine ;D Quartz, if done right, has that capability of having the "see inti the stone" effect. I've done a couple that turned out that way. I think you have a nice smokey quartz there for sure. Almost all the quartz here has lots of color in it. Probably because of the soil, clay and such. Great Job!
cookie
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Post by puppie96 on Oct 18, 2004 23:02:30 GMT -5
Thanks for all the nice compliments!
Rollingstone, that stuff looks real familiar. Mine tends to be orangey or pink with inclusions (usually like veins) of quartz. The two on the left interest me because they look like some of the stuff I picked up at this site that's been hard to smooth out. These have looked to me more like quartz, only very fractured, not so much like the pink ones which are opaque pink or orange with clear. But I have a lot of both the gray/brown and the orangey/white combo.
I've got a whole bunch of stuff like this from the Black Hills area, some attached to quartz crystals and with almandine garnet inclusions in the part covered with the silvery stuff (schist? or is it gneiss?) I'm hopeless.
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AgateHunter
starting to spend too much on rocks
LAKE SUPERIOR AGATE Minnesota State Gemstone
Member since September 2004
Posts: 107
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Post by AgateHunter on Oct 18, 2004 23:59:47 GMT -5
The one right befor the salad looks to me like a type of granet. I have tumbled some granet rocks from Minnesota's north shore myself. I have one that is green and red. I call it my Christmas rock. ;D They all look great. Nice job.  Chris |
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Post by creativeminded on Oct 22, 2004 9:50:50 GMT -5
You did a great job on those rocks. Looks like you have a great system to get that great of a shine.
Tami
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Post by puppie96 on Oct 23, 2004 3:28:33 GMT -5
Thanks again for all the nice compliments.
Tami, I have generally gotten very good to great shines with the barrels, but the vibe is very consistent with producing great results and the speed is wonderful. I just follow the Raytech instructions and use their polish (the one that comes with the kit). It works as well as any of the others and often better. This "Glossine" stuff is a real weird one. I've only found it sold on one web site and it is advertised there as a polish additive with a ratio to the Raytech product, and they state it's a cushioning assist. You can order this stuff for a few bucks, which I did, but it then arrives with NO instructions or information of any kind -- the only directions are on the website. It seems to pop the polish a notch in my limited experience.
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Post by creativeminded on Oct 24, 2004 12:14:35 GMT -5
That glossine stuff sounds interesting, does it only work with the vibes or can you also use it in a barrel as well?
Tami
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Post by puppie96 on Oct 25, 2004 0:41:15 GMT -5
Tami, I was wondering the same thing myself today. I've got a batch of obsidian in titanium in a barrel, it's the second time I've put it through the full cycle. The first time I tried tin oxide with no luck, they looked very cloudy. These had a lot of white inclusions/pits, sort of resembling snoflake obsidian, a few of them had the more classic snowflakes. There were also some surface imperfections. Regretfully, I took them all the way back to start, they shrink so much that I'd been trying to preserve them, but the surfaces just needed more work. This time I put them through 60/90, 120/220, 500+. 1000+ and now titanium. I was considering experimenting with Glossine, then after looking at some of them and seeing that they appear to be coming along, I decided against it -- didn't want to mess up a good thing.
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