Leopardskin or wildflower rhyolite? + Other slabs

I work from home (out of my pole barn), so I just roll the saws outside on a cart and let them do their thing while I am working inside.  All I have to do is step outside every 30-40 minutes to reset them for the next cut.   It's a fairly painless process ever since I bought a box of the super thin disposable gloves.  I put on a new pair each time I touch the saw to keep the oil off me as much as possible.  The saws are actually cutting about 8 hours a day since I'm not hovering over them all the time.  But still a lot of cutting.  

I mistakenly said it is an MK303 blade.  It is actually an MK301 blade, the one with the sintered teeth, not a smooth continuous rim.  I was worried when I first started cutting with the new blade because it was leaving pretty bad saw marks on every slab.  I usually use MK303, and I don't remember those taking very long to break in, but the MK301 took a full day of cutting.  After having a bunch of softer slabs with noticeable saw marks, I stuck a big chunk of polish flint in the saw.  After a few cuts of that it started making very smooth cuts.  

Well, my opinion is that your piece is a beautiful example of wildflowers rhyolite.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure...

I have a friend who does (did?) the northern CA gem show circuit selling slabs of many different types of quality rocks. One day I ran into him at a show and he had a bin of a very unusual and colorful orbicular material and it caught my eye so I asked him what it was. He had no idea but he knew it was from Mexico and it was simply labeled "orbicular rhyolite." After studying it we agreed it wasn't leopardskin - the pattern is completely different - and I made the comment that it looked like wildflowers. Anyway, I bought all the slabs he had and a few end pieces he had cut the slabs from and I started cabbing and selling it as wildflowers rhyolite. Every time I'd see him a the next show I would ask if he had cut any more wildflowers and so he started calling it that too and that was that.

So all I really know is it is an orbicular rhyolite from Mexico - as is leopardskin - so it's entirely possible that wildflowers is a variant of leopardskin or from the same region. I highly doubt however that it is "old stock" because my friend got it, and later got more for me, from a current mining source.

jasoninsd

My cutting requires about 10 minutes of my time per hour of cutting. But you can probably cut in an hour what I can cut in 5 or 6 hours with the slab saws.

The "Montana" slabs are nice because they are not Montana agates. They are Madagascar river agates that look almost like Montanas but with few fractures. After cutting the Mad river agates, I'm not very motived to cut up 10 Montana agates to find one that is not full of fractures.

I recently got some bigger Mad river agates as well. First 3 are 10+ pounds each. Those are 11" long vise grips, which give you an idea of size.

My gosh! What awesome agates! Almost worth keeping for a specimen collection.

jasoninsd

Good info, Tommy.  Thank you.  I would like more similar material if it is still being mined and I could find a source for it.  

I didn't mean old stock in the sense that it's not being mined any more, but rather, that these particular rocks were mined a while ago.  I can't tell you how old it is, but it had brittle, yellowed, peeling masking tape on it that said "Leopardskin Mex"  How long does it take for masking tape to get brittle and yellow?  Maybe only a decade.  Who knows.

I think I paid a little over $3 a pound for it, so new or old, I'm satisfied.  (Buying rhyolite by the pound gets you a lot more rocks than buying something like tiger's eye by the pound!)

I was recently talking with a Mexican rock dealer in Texas and he seemed to think that some of the Leopardskin that was being mined in the 80s and 90s polished better (higher or more evenly distributed silica content?) than the vast majority of it being sold today.  He also mentioned that the yellow dominated material seems to be softer, red seem to be somewhat harder, and the red / green mash up is all over the map.  Finally, he said that the "good old stuff" had a lot more color variation, but it wasn't as psychedelic as a lot of the material that has flooded the market in recent years.   Just one opinion from one guy, but he's been selling Mexican rocks for something like 50 years, so he probably knows at least some small sliver of the full story.  

Those are beautiful, the Non-Montana Agates.