Post by Bob on Jan 19, 2021 11:18:07 GMT -5
"I broke my foot in May...having just discovered my passion the previous Fall." Boy could I tease you about that sentence and that your previous fall must not have been enough to satisfy.
Having just seen and read this thread, yeah, you were overthinking it in the beginning. The whole point is to grab some collected rough, throw it the rotary, coarse grind a week, then clean it up and inspect and learn. I don't make too many decisions until that is done. Then you see the rocks clean and can figure out what you have. OMG, the thought of using a Dremel on rough rocks makes me wince in pain. I say devote your energies elsewhere.
As you get more and more experience with that first week results, you learn more and more about what to pass up in the field. There is no shortcut to that. I see crap to be discarded in the photos of the rough, fractured quartzite, rocks too soft, etc. but that eye only comes with experience.
There are times when I do those first week runs, throw the results in a box, do it for several weeks, before I even get time to examine. As others have said, keep a hardened metal pick around (get a marking pick from a hardware store which is merely a larger version that one which pulls out of the head of a combination square) and after that first week cleanup test each rock with it. I no longer keep anything that scratches because it's less than Mohs 7 unless it's some gorgeous green epidote, serpentinite, some forms of feldspar and some other things. But you have to get the dirty rind off of field found rocks before you can do a meaningful scratch test most of the time.
You actually remind me of me in the summer of 2014. I went through a divorce and a friend had me buy a Lorton 12lb tumbler and I went nuts in the field. I figured no matter how ugly the rock or how pitted, it just meant a few more weeks of grinding. Well, after 1 year I learned. Then you go through your collected rocks and purge. Then you purge again after another year. Then again after that. After 3 years, I finally learned to pick up a whole lot fewer rocks. It's a disease. You are most definitely infected!
Having just seen and read this thread, yeah, you were overthinking it in the beginning. The whole point is to grab some collected rough, throw it the rotary, coarse grind a week, then clean it up and inspect and learn. I don't make too many decisions until that is done. Then you see the rocks clean and can figure out what you have. OMG, the thought of using a Dremel on rough rocks makes me wince in pain. I say devote your energies elsewhere.
As you get more and more experience with that first week results, you learn more and more about what to pass up in the field. There is no shortcut to that. I see crap to be discarded in the photos of the rough, fractured quartzite, rocks too soft, etc. but that eye only comes with experience.
There are times when I do those first week runs, throw the results in a box, do it for several weeks, before I even get time to examine. As others have said, keep a hardened metal pick around (get a marking pick from a hardware store which is merely a larger version that one which pulls out of the head of a combination square) and after that first week cleanup test each rock with it. I no longer keep anything that scratches because it's less than Mohs 7 unless it's some gorgeous green epidote, serpentinite, some forms of feldspar and some other things. But you have to get the dirty rind off of field found rocks before you can do a meaningful scratch test most of the time.
You actually remind me of me in the summer of 2014. I went through a divorce and a friend had me buy a Lorton 12lb tumbler and I went nuts in the field. I figured no matter how ugly the rock or how pitted, it just meant a few more weeks of grinding. Well, after 1 year I learned. Then you go through your collected rocks and purge. Then you purge again after another year. Then again after that. After 3 years, I finally learned to pick up a whole lot fewer rocks. It's a disease. You are most definitely infected!