Hey everyone
I recently met up with Tom from the YouTube channel Live Your Wyoming Adventure
he's originally from Michigan but lives in Wyoming now, and he was back visiting
family over Christmas and stopped by and visited and brought me a few rocks
so these two are nephrite, or jade that he found out there
I'm going to try to slab and cab these and send him a cab back, he wants
to make one for a gift for someone
so he's going to make it into a pendant, I'm just going to make the cab
this one is petrified wood, and he believes it's opalized. He had another
one like this that he had polished the end of it, and it was really shiny and looked
really cool, so
I'm going to also try to slab this and make something out of this
so no more talking, let's get slabbing!
I've got these all slabbed up now
take a look at them, we'll start with this petrified wood, I'll just leave that little
piece, that's the end cut
you can see the color of the outside of this, and this was showing on the end
if we look inside, it's completely black
there's just a really thin, maybe a sixteenth of an inch of weathering rind
on the outside that turned a more wood looking color
and everything else is black. That fracture right there is completely healed
I can't feel it at all. This one I can feel just slightly, so that one's not healed
as well
and then here's our nephrite, or jade
so on this one can see the weathering rind goes in a little deeper
quite a bit deeper
so you've got one color here, and just a slightly different color on the outside
edges
it's like that all the way through
and then this is the really nice piece of nephrite
I don't know what you call these little marks, they're not really dendrites
but some sort of little marks there
now we've got a crack on this one, you can see the rock was like this
I cut off a little of - got thrown away here, but you can see this crack that
goes in here
and then, this one's got a fracture also
you can see right along here
and then that's the little uneven end cut, I had that glued to a two-by-four
to hold onto it. I'd polished this up when Tom was here, and I had to
grind it off so the glue would stick well
kind of killed me to do that
so
let's take a look at
how we're going to set this up to make a cab
I think I've decided to use this piece
so Tom liked the same teardrop shape that I almost always use for my cabs
I'm kind of in a rut there
when you're setting this up, you gotta be careful you don't get too close to the
edges - see how that edge is angled back?
so it might fit on the top, but not on the bottom, so, gotta stay away from that
I'm not going to worry about getting into this a little bit, because it's pretty
thin there and I'm going to be doming it anyhow, so that's going to be
ground off
anyhow
I think I'm going to go like that and get those at kind of a little bit of an angle
and we'll just mark it out here
and there we go
and then
he didn't ask me to make one of these into a cab, but I think I will anyhow
my black sharpie isn't going to work very well on there
so
I'll try using something else
just checking the back for fractures
and I'm just going to put it right there
and this is an aluminum scribe, it's just a piece of aluminum
kind of sharpened on the edge here
the end, I should say
so
kind of go like that, and
(aluminum screeching)
sorry about the nails on a chalkboard sound there, but
that's
not going to wash off in the water, and it's real easy to see. So
sharpie for the light colored stones, and the aluminum scribe for the dark
colored stones
so the next thing we're going to do is cut these out on the saw!
(saw whirring)
next thing to do is just grind up to the line here, and I'll just use the
first three or four wheels to do that
(wheel grinding)
well I just finished up the black one, the petrified wood
and there's a little one of those
kind of healed fractures on the end there, so that might pop through a little bit
when I dome it
but look at the water. This thing's dirty, made a mess, so
a little difference between doing a
more or less clear rock and this darker rock
the next thing I like to do is make a girdle line
so that's just a line along the side of the cab here that the dome is going to
go up to, and then when it hits that line it's going to be flat from there on down
so I take my pen and I just sort of use the back of my hand here to - or my fingers
to raise or lower it a little bit
and hold it in place
while I draw the line
so
I want it right about there
and so then we've got a line all the way around
okay, this is called a dop pot, and these are called dop sticks, which are just
little wooden dowels that I cut to length
and we use these for a handle to hold onto the cab easier
so this is just wax in here
and down here on the bottom it's nice and melted
this is warming up on the edge here, so that the wax sticks better
and then you just kind of go like that
I sometimes widen out the base a little bit
that gives you a little stick to hang onto
I should mention that some people don't use a girdle line, and some people don't
use dop sticks, you can do it either way, it's just a matter of preference
I happen to like both of them
next thing I need to do is dome this, so I'm going to leave the bottom part there
flat, but the top part's going to have a nice dome to it. So I'm going to start
over here, and I'll run this at about a 45 degree angle to the wheel here
and I'll work all the way around there, and then I'll tip it in a little bit more
and go a little bit flatter and work it all the way around. And then I usually
end up rocking it back and forth, just rocking to the line and stopping, or close
to the line, I actually don't go all the way to the line on this first one
the next one I get a little closer, the next one I get a little closer
that leaves me a little room for error
so that's what I'll be doing now
(wheel grinding)
by the way I don't have any formal training, I just learned this from the
internet, mainly the Rock Tumbling Hobby website
where people help you out with this sort of thing, so
I might not be doing things the proper way but this is the way I do them
so what I'm going to do from here on out is just work on the top at first
and then after I'm done with all these wheels, I'm going to come back and work
on the side, and I've already done the side up to this wheel
I'll probably hit it again briefly, and then get those edges on these last
two wheels, and then I'll go around to the end and finish her up
(wheel grinding)
alright, now I'm just going to pop these into the freezer for a few minutes
takes about, maybe 15 minutes
and they - the wax releases, and
we can do the next step!
(water running)
fronts are all done, and I just have to polish up the back real quick
that won't take long
I'm just going to do the last four wheels here, and that's it
because they're already pretty flat from the saw
well I got this nephrite all finished up here
I think that turned out really really nice really pretty stone
and then check out this petrified wood that doesn't really look like petrified wood
how much more black could that get?
None. None more black.
if you like this machine that I'm using, I've got a link for it in the description
and I'll post a couple more videos here so you can see me do some other things
with it. It's really good for polishing Petoskey stones, and I polished up
a nice little agate with it the other day too so
check those out, and I'll see you over in one of those videos!