If you're from Michigan, you probably know that our state stone is the Petoskey stone
and if you watch my videos, you've seen lots of Petoskey stones
but we also have a state gemstone, and it goes by a bunch of different names
the easiest one is greenstone
or sometimes it's called Isle Royale Greenstone, because it's found on
Isle Royale, but it's also found on the Keweenaw Peninsula
it's illegal to pick it up on Isle Royale, because that's a national park, but you
can pick it up legally in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is where this came from
if you want to get more technical, it's called Chlorastrolite, which is a type of
Pumpellyite
so, I could never remember Chlorastrolite until, when I was doing some research for
this video, I saw that it's made up out of three Greek words, the first one is "Chloro"
which means "green", and they're green
Green stone, so that's easy
the middle part is "astro"
which is, well it's the dog on the Jetsons, but it also means "star". So we've got
"Green", "star", and the "lite" comes from "lithos", which means "stone".
So green star stone - Chlorastrolite
So anyhow, I've got a pile of it here, and this came from one of the people that
watched my videos, by the name of Kyle Martin and I've got to give him a huge thanks
he founds this in a legal spot, in the Keweenaw Peninsula. He found a piece
of basalt that I guess was just full of it. I have a piece of basalt, or several
pieces of basalt with some really small ones, these are actually kind of huge
for Greenstones, I think the biggest one ever was 3 inches long
so anyhow, he sent me these to play around with, I'm going to try polishing
them on my cab machine. I've never polished one of these before, so I'm kind
of excited to see what it looks like. So let's take a little closer look at them,
and then I'll start polishing
these don't look like too much right now, we'll have to polish them to see how they
really look
but they get what they call a turtle back pattern on them, it looks almost a little
bit like a Petoskey stone pattern
but I read that only about 5% of them actually are gemstone quality
so I don't know what that says about the rest of them
if gemstone quality just means they're the very best, or if it means that the
other ones don't show that turtle back pattern at all
so we're going to have to try it and find out
Kyle also sent me some broken ones
and I want you to look right in here, and I'll see if I can get it to do it, but
these are chatoyant, like Tiger's Eye, if you move Tiger's Eye around in the light,
it shimmers back and forth
hopefully you can kind of see that
we'll try a couple of them here
so in the middle there, I guess that can be different minerals. Look right along here
It can be calcite, or quartz, I think there were some other things also
and I haven't tested to see what it is, but obviously you don't want to polish in
that far. Can you see that kind of moving around there? Right along the edges there
Alright, so let's take these over to the cab machine and see what I can do with them
Well, this is the stone I've decided to start with, you can see it's broken here
on the back, so it'll make a good practice stone, it has a really nice kind of flat
surface here on this side, so I'm not going to attempt to polish any of that
I'm just going to work back here
this is a fairly soft stone, it's 5.5 on the Moh's scale of hardness
so I'm going to start here on the 220 wheel
and then kind of work my way from there, I don't think I need to be as aggressive
as this first wheel. So, we'll just start there and see what happens
Kyle did tell me if you polish too deeply or grind too deeply, you go past the green
the turtleback, and it gets into kind of a black color inside a little bit more, so
I'm going to be careful not to go too far here
(wheel grinding)
well I just dried this off after running it on the 280 wheel
and I don't see any turtleback pattern there, at least nothing too obvious
but I'm going to keep polishing just in case it comes out later, since I don't
know what I'm doing here, this is the first one ever
so let's continue on
(wheel grinding)
alright, here it is dried off
I didn't run it on the cerium wheel on the end, but
it's pretty shiny
but I don't see any turtle back pattern
so I'm going to keep trying, and when I find one that looks cool, I'm going to
show it to you
Okay, I'm going to try this little guy
you can see it's broken back here
and I'm just going to try some of these other faces, maybe just a little bit here
and here, maybe skip the bump, I don't know, we'll see what happens
as I said I'm just learning this, so I can see a little bit of cool pattern right there
the rest all kind of looks plain. I'm looking here, and seeing that chatoyant
part kind of stops right there, so maybe I need to grind off a lot more of this to
get into it
on this side, I'm right up to it, and that's where I'm seeing some better stuff
so I'm going to go back and grind this one more and see if I can get down to the
good stuff
just experimenting here, and hopefully I figure this out
Okay, so I've done two rocks, the first one didn't have any turtle back pattern
at all on it
and the second one at first didn't, but as I ground deeper, I got into the turtle back
you can kind of see that this
this stuff here didn't go all the way to the surface, so I just ground down
until I got to it, and it's looking a lot better
and you can see that chatoyance in it sometimes
getting the glare of the light on there, sorry about that
so let me show you this one
okay, there's the
the chatoyant part, and there's a bunch of rock on top of it. Can't really see what's
going on over there so much. I might grind in on this side a little bit more
but you can kind of see it comes out right to the surface there, but not over there
it's much deeper. So I don't see any harm in grinding a lot more of that off
since it doesn't look like now, I may as well go deeper and see what I can find
Alright, I am learning a lot here
this is that same one I just ground deeper
I think there's a little bit - you can see a little bit of a dip there
so I think there's a little valley in there that I didn't really get into
but that, I thought was a dud and it's not a dud at all
It's kind of amazing
I don't know if you can see it, I hope so, but along in here - well in this bad
spot here, it's kind of
it's not super shiny. There's like little pinholes
I've got some of that around here
and a little bit right in there
So, I tried to go, I've done this a couple of times now, I've gone
a little bit deeper and deeper. I'm afraid to go too deep, but
these are not easy to polish. But isn't that cool looking?
I'm very happy with how that one's turned out
Here's the next one I'm going to tackle
so I'll show you when I'm all done
things sure do get tiny by the time you get done with them
not doing a perfect job, but I think I'm getting a little better as I go
alright, it's the next day now. I decided to stop and try to learn a little bit
more about what I'm doing before I ruin anything
so I posted a question on a Facebook group called "Michigan Greenstone Enthusiasts"
and Chris Cooper answered my question. Chris is also an admin at Great Lakes Rocks
and Minerals, another Facebook group that I go to quite a bit
so anyhow, he said - he taught me a new word - he said it's called chasing the pattern
he said that pitting, you can grind past it sometimes, but other times it goes
all the way through the whole stone
so you might get all the way down to where it just turns black. So it's kind of a
guessing game, and I suppose with more practice you'll get better at knowing
when to stop and when to keep going
so, with that knowledge, I think I'm going to leave this one be, because I've
already gone back and ground on that part quite a bit
but I'm going to try another one
I'm going to try this one, which is sort of lumpy, it's another broken one
I'm only working on the broken ones. It's kind of cool right in there
so
this part looks easy enough to work on, and I don't know if I'll work my way
around the other sides or not
we'll have to see as it goes
I have started using this 80 grit wheel, it doesn't seem to be too aggressive
and you just have to know when to stop and move on to the next one
(wheel grinding)
well this one ended up breaking in half
here's the other half
this is really thin, and
wasn't much left and I just couldn't get down to the pattern on that bottom
half there, I was just getting a little bit along the edge
so anyhow, here's the
the successful half
I'm going to give this one a shot next
and I'll just show it to you when it's done
Okay, so I've been grinding on this one for a little bit
and you can see that it's got kind of two nodules stuck together, there's
like a complete one on the right
and then I've got some stuff showing up on the left, but
I think I'm just going to grind this side off
I'd cut it on my saw, but it's a pretty delicate cut, these things are really
small, so I think it might just chip up
so I think I'm going to just sacrifice this
and see if I can get get a complete nodule and do all the sides over here on the left
that's my plan
well there it is
not perfect, but it's so small, hard to hang onto
there's a hole there on the top left you can see, and one underneath it
but it's so thin there that I just didn't feel like it was a good idea
to go any deeper
tiny little things, but they sure are cool
alright, I think I'm going to do one of the ones without a chip in them
I just grabbed one
that's the one I'm going to try
looks pretty good on the back, there's kind of a bump there, but
this is going to be my last one, so wish me luck!
well, that's the best I could do on this one with my current skill level
there's definitely some pitting there
I decided to stop on this side, this was actually the smoother side
and I just wasn't getting anywhere, so I went to the other side and that's
kind of where I found the pattern, so it's so thin
I thought I should stop while I was ahead
so I've got a couple of other videos you might like here, so click on one of those
and I'll see you over there!