"Is This Anything?"

Wow I am so glad you answered, I'm hanging out wanting some opinions. I have been assuming it is agate, but I am never sure! To me it looks a lot like those lakers I've been seeing posted, but I could be an optimist. Yeah, more like MOST LIKELY I am being an optimist!

hey pup im bad with id-s but that last pic looks like a cool piece of pet wood when you took the close up of the crystal looks like wood grains on the left what ever there all cool lookin

Cher, our local rivers and streams are loaded with this stuff. Pieces of it show up in my back yard rock. I've been looking at it for years, and while it's pretty, obviously, nobody has ever made a big deal of it. Then when I got the rock sickness a year ago, I started looking closer. So if you ever come to STL, sure, I'll take you out to where I picked up this stuff, a gravel bar where, so help me, there are NO bad rocks.

Meanwhile I just finished polishing up a batch of local creek bed rock, but it is different from this stuff because it is more of the opaque chert/flint/jasper type stuff. There were a few of these agates or "agate-like-rocks" or whatever they are in that batch, but they are in the minority. I don't know whether I have the energy right now to photograph them, but I will when I can. It's a colorful batch with a lot of pink in it, probably a lot of it is Mozarkite, a chert. I actually surmised this even before I found an article that mentioned that there is, in fact, a small Mozarkite deposit in that creek's watershed.

I've got a 12-lb barrel of the latest stuff going since Saturday night; I peeked of course, this morning, and WOW -- the banding is really jumping out now. It's cool rock. The challenge is going to be figuring out how much grinding to do without destroying the crystals and other neat things in this stuff. Most of it is very irregularly shaped with cavities that usually have crystals inside like geodes.

Thanks for looking, I hope I can update SOON!

pup

AHA! the doc speaks.....

LOL I think I'd just have to bring a tent and generator
with me, and all my tumblers. Just sit there and pick and
tumble. Can't wait to see 'em polished puppie!

Cher

I had to look up Fairburn agates, so for anyone else not in the know, they are the state gemstone of South Dakota, noted for having strikingly contrasted thin bands, mainly yellow-brown, but often also white and dark red, and less commonly a range of many other colours. They occur mainly in a fairly thin north-south arc in the Black Hills region of South Dakota.

John, I'm really lucky to know a Fairburn fan in SD. He showed me a bunch of them and talked about collecting locales. According to him, the original collecting area (around Fairburn, of course) is fairly played out, but you can luck on to them in other places. He suggested road cuts, which I tried but no luck as far as I know, though I still have some un-tumbled SD rocks. He thought mine looked like Fairburns, but this far from the actual Fairburn and in such abundance I suppose they must have some other name. He pointed me towards Crowley Ridge agate, which I looked up and is in Tennessee mainly, not MO (or not in this section of MO, at least), but a bunch of my stuff looks like it from the photos I've seen. He says they look very close to Fairburns and if he salted a field with them people would thing that was what they were. It was all very interesting.
I'd love to borrow your book, but I've been thinking of buying it and with a rock show coming up in 8 days, I may well find it there. My hope is to have a few polished by then, which is possible if I time it right and use the vibe. I'm one of those people that drags stuff to the shows and tortures the vendors -- who are actually very nice about it, since demos and education are so much a part of it.
I'm really pleased with how these are coming along, though I'm scared that if I'm not careful I'll grind off great features, so I'm proceeding with caution.

Rollingstone, I'm such a rock neophyte that I figured if I knew Fairburns, everybody did. I've been thinking Lakers or something resembling them. There's an igneous outcrop in the area where these occur, which would be the conditions under which Lakers form.

pup

I was afraid you would say that. I have a whole bunch of it, but I'm not sure what I want to let go of. I'm sure at some point I'll be able to look at the outside and know what the inside will be like, but I'm not there yet. For instance, one of the coolest ones I have is in a sort of wine-red matrix which grinds off and produces blue lace agate, I guess it is, and now I am finding out that there seems to be a consistency here with that color matrix, which is an unusual matrix color in this mix.
Yes. I would love to send you some. It would be great to have an expert look at them. Seems like I ought to be able to pick out a few. Just give me a few days, okay?

Hey John, payment isn't the issue at all, nor is scarcity (hardly!) Here at the puppyhouse we've been talking about what to send you for your purposes. What's got me sort of stymied is that so much of the best features seem to be on the surface and if they grind off that easily how are they ever going to cab? That, plus this rock is seriously irregular. Downright swiss cheesey. Now, here's a thought. I can imagine slicing it with the holes left in it -- kind of like swiss cheese. That might make for some interesting pendants. Not sure about cabs. I'm thinking, maybe it would be best if you looked at a photo when I finish the first run through, then maybe you could evaluate better and suggest which kinds would work best for you. I could even send you tumbled ones if there were particular ones you wanted. Just tell me what would work best.

I'm not interested in payment at all, it feels like a major bargain for me to be able to send you stuff and get some expert opinion about what it is and what can be done with it. I've seen pictures of your work and I'd say my rocks would be safe with you.

Weather here is great for the weekend, sunshine and highs near 70 today...and tomorrow, another little drive to southern MO with the rock book and the map. As if I didn't have enough already.

pup