Quarry finds

hi gromit is that the rock they call fools gold ? if it is you wanna trade for a piece of it if you find more,, i bet my daughter would get a kick out of it ---it dont have to a big piece ill trade ya rock for rock or id make ya a cabojohn if you would rather have that you decide eather way is ok with me --seeya ---john

thanks gromit no rush man even after the holidays --im gonna tell her i found a gold mine hahaha---she wont belive me cause when she was young i was makin her breakfast one morning and i was makin french toast for her and she said dad i didnt know you could cook haha so i told her a whopper,, i said that i was so good at makin french toast i got a trophy for it from a guy in france and i had the award in the basement,, that when i found it id show her hahaha she believed me for awile till i couldent show it to her hahaha now shes knows im a B-S-ER haha

Not sure about the hardness and such. Is that what MOH means?

Never tried tumbling one. I usually just wash them off and throw them into a bucket of dilluted hydrochloric acid to get most of the limestone off. (We use the acid to soak light lenses when they get covered with cement dust).

Some come out pretty nice, but some are destined for the landfill.

It will tumble if the crystals are large enough. I accidently tumbled a piece in quartz. When it was done, before it had been in the air long, it looked like a gold vein.
I would guess it is about a mohs 6 as it definately went quicker than the quartz. It does take a good polish.
Pyrite is a sulphate of iron. It does leave a black spot when it is worn. I have made jewelery with pyrite and it looks ok, but it does print black. If it is made into jewelery, it has to have a backing, either gold or silver to not print on the skin.
Iron pyrite is some really cool looking stuff. I have never seen it with copper. Way cool. You must be finding malachite with the pyrite. Malachite is a sedimentary sulfate of copper. So is turquoise. Where you are, your water must smell like rotten eggs from a well. Where we are, we have high sulpher, but no real minerals except for calcite. We get sink holes from the sulpheric acid. When folks here water the lawns you can smell the rotten egg/sulpher dioxide smell. The sprinklers also leave a brown trail from the iron in the water. It is from iron bacteria rather than an iron deposit.

The crystals are tiny on these things. Much smaller than I've seen in rock shops. I thought the copper color was a defect. Maybe I was wrong.

These are generally about 75 to 100 feet down just below the yellow limestone layer, but in the gray limestone. I haven't noticed a sulfer smell in the water, but we have an aquifer that constantly exchanges water here. Also, lots of spring water that tries to fill the quarry. We have to keep pumps going to keep it accessible.

I'll look for other rocks the next time I'm down there. A few pics of the quarry site might help figure this stuff out, too.

Hi RosebudMN!

I'm in South Central Texas. The quarry is just south of Buda, Texas, which is just south of Austin.

I used to find pink quartz when I was a kid here, but didn't keep much. I always held out for the purple stuff. Not as plentiful, but some laying around where they cut through a hill for a railroad track. I might revisit that site, since pink quartz seems to be a keeper.

Most of my finds are just walking around and stumbling across whatever is laying there. I guess it's a target rich environment, but I haven't noticed it until now.

My brother always seemed to find the good stuff. Geodes and such.

hi all doc the pyrite in my yard is real flakey and i that it was pyrite fools gold it looks like gold. and its crumbles prety easy you couldnt tumble it so what you thank i have real gold haha im ritch ye ha . and the thang is about three feet by three feet by two feet thick about 600 pounds

Hehe...This is more fun than I thought it would be.

The caverns are a few miles south of us. I'm not aware of any in the quarry itself.

There are several areas of the quarry and they have different limestones. In a new section that's pretty shallow, they've just started plowing up the ground in preparation of digging. My wife found a bucket load of flint out there in a couple of hours. Here's a few that I grabbed out of the bucket...



I have no idea what the orange rocks are, but they look cool anyway. The one in the forefront has a little pinkish-orange stone embedded in it. Kinda shiny.

I think ya'll have created a couple of monsters now. We're going to go back to the quarry this Friday to snap pics and pick up a few rocks. ;D

Dang,Gromit you live just a hop, skip and jump from me. I'm in the thriving metropolis of Medina, just the other side of Kerrville. My oldest nephew and his wife live in Buda. Don't ask me where tho because I can't remember the name of the street - something Circle. I can get there, but sure couldn't direct anybody else there!

Did ya'll happen to go to the rock show last weekend? I wanted to, but didn't go.

Yeah, take some pics of the quarry! I would love to browse a quarry one of these days. There are a number of rocks that can be found in that area. Can't remember what they are and right now am too lazy to go hunt down my Rockhounding Texas book.

Since ya'll are in Austin, BSchultz in San Antonio and BE and I in Medina, we ought to plan a trip to the gravel pit in Eagle Pass sometime. I have heard there are lots of Rio Grande agates and other neat stuff to be found there.

We have a couple of flint knappers on board here, so they might be interested in flint that you find at the quarry (or anywhere else) that they could use for knapping. I am trying to learn what to look for in good knapping flint since we have tons of it here. It also tumbles beautifully. I sent cookie3rocks some and she made some killer jewelry with some of it.

llana