Welcome back to the shop everybody!
So, it's been a little bit since we've done a shop video other than the Saturday videos.
So uh let's let's do some cutting today! Let's do some investigating of stuff.
What you're looking at here, up until recently, this was my largest agate find.
This came out of a road in southeast Oregon
when we were down hanging out with uh Backcountry Shaughn, down by Graveyard Point.
And uh well, I think I saw, I think I saw like that nub
sticking out of the road, a dirt road out there,
and uh started picking at it and pulled this guy out.
It's got a little bit of a jasp-agate but you can see here well we got some banding.
Now, I say this is my second biggest because well
look at the photo of it with my current biggest agate.
Uh, this one is a little shy of three pounds. It'll be a little less uh well later on.
And um, the other one is about 114 pounds. So uh, quite the jump.
But uh, what I would like to do with it is make it so kind of...
It doesn't really want to stand up. So, we have some banding here.
So what we're going to do is we're going to take it over to the saw and we are going to
chop that off and hopefully well see what's going on inside this guy.
This here is my slab saw. We're going to get this guy kind of chucked up here in
the vise. I'm going to really um I guess kind of, kind of do some eyeballing of it.
It's a pretty flat rock so we should be able to cut it and get it to stay upright pretty easily.
I am running in my saw a low viscosity mineral oil that's made for lapidary saws.
And I'm going to kind of walk through the process here a little bit on this.
I know for those of you with slab saws this is old news.
But not everybody has seen these so let's kind of really get into.
I'm cranking this guy down
and let's see here. Okay, so the way this works is uh we have a vice here and it slides.
It feeds into the saw automatically on a drive shaft.
So uh the slide...the vise also moves back and forth for making uh slabs.
So what I'm gonna do here is uh back it up so it clears the blade,
we're gonna push it into, well, it's all the way through. Hook up the chain.
And I'll show you this in a little bit more detail here.
Hook up the chain, that will turn the saw off when it's completed its cut
so we don't have to stand here and babysit it.
And then uh we're gonna slide the rock in.
I think uh, oh let's see, here. Right about there ought to be good.
And then uh well the blade's not deflecting at all.
So I like to push the rock in and look for the blade to have any kind of wiggle.
And if it does that means the blade's going to deflect when it starts in on its cut and
we don't want that blade warping or getting it out of out of alignment. So I think we're good here.
Really get that guy nice and tight. Cool. So I just back it up a little bit and uh I
throw the lever.
So now it's locked in and it's ready to turn on and start pushing the rock in.
We are all hooked up here. I got oil to wipe off of my apron here. You can kind of see the setup
how this all functions.
So all that's left to do now is uh well we're gonna close the lid, plug it in, throw the switch.
We got a little motor down here that drives the vise in. Got another motor that spins the blade,
and uh well, we'll have a cut rock here.
You can see how slow this one moves.
That's pushing the vise into the saw blade which is spinning quite fast.
It'll shut itself off when it's done. We'll give it a few minutes to uh let the
mineral oil that's been kind of
aerolyzed, turned into a vapor by spraying in there, and uh we'll let that settle.
You don't want to be breathing that.
You can start to hear it start cutting.
I'll check back with you in a little bit. This is a very slow process.
Well, there we go. She's all, all done. Let's see what we got.
I think that's gonna be uh very nice.
Let's uh
do this. There we go! That looks really pretty!
So uh, first step is to unclamp it. I'm gonna throw it in some kitty litter and
uh suck up all the oil off of it and let's uh, we'll get it nice and clean.
Here we are, all cut up. Look at that! I am very, very happy with this.
There's the little end cut. However, it's not done yet. We gotta put a polish on this.
Maybe you can have that in the house, on a rock shelf just like that.
Have that polished little face and keep the rest of it nice and raw.
So let's uh, let's take it over to the polisher.
Maybe it'll show up.
There's a little uh, well kind of like a little ding in it from the saw blade.
Normally if I don't have any of those, if I'm a little on the luckier side, I will uh skip
the 180 grit and uh start off at 325 because the finish from the blade on the oil saw is so nice.
So we're going to work our way up through the grits.
This is uh, the 8 inch High Tech Diamond uh flat lap.
So, just flat discs, different grits. Work my way uh all the way through all of them.
If you wanna see a video, kinda more in depth, on that I'll put a link up there.
I do want to build a water system for this, something better than these little cups
but uh that'll be for another video.
That ought to do it. So uh, overall, um let's see, that took me about oh 25 minutes to complete.
I'm gonna take this into the house, I'm gonna wash it off because I've been wa...
It would have been faster right, but uh I have to...I've been walking
in between, um well, my shop and the house to uh wash the stone
in between grits so that I don't bring one grit...lower grit to a higher grit.
So let me go get this cleaned up and we'll get it,
we'll start looking at it you know and I'll show it to you.
See the reflection in that. Overall, I'm very happy with how this came out.
I think it looks really nice and uh well it's a nice, nice little piece for the
inside shelf of good rocks.
And I know what you might be thinking:
did that guy steal his wife's cake frosting stand for this shot? Well, you'd be correct!
As always I hope you enjoyed this video. Um,
if you did please hit the subscribe button for more content like this. As winter comes,
comes my way there will surely, surely be more shop videos so you can look forward to that.
And uh I appreciate all the support everybody!