hey there everybody welcome back for another lapidary video today we're going to be polishing
a mineral that i have never worked before and that is maripocyte so here is the mariposite
that we are going to be polishing into a cabochon today and as you can see it is in the shape of the
superman logo it has been sent to me shaped and worked a little bit by troy so thank you troy
for sending that over i'm excited to finish it up today and get this thing shining and we're
going to be polishing this on my 8 inch cab king unit and most of the stuff that i polish is very
hard on the most scale this sits at a 2.5 it is very soft so we're going to be very careful
with it now normally when i start shaping stones i start in the 220 grit wheel move on to the 280 and
then upwards to 600 1200 and 3000 and so on but because this has already been worked a little bit
i think that i could start on 600 and go up from there so we'll get started there if i need to step
back i will but i don't think we're gonna have to so we'll get the water going here on the 600.
now if you google mariposite you'll find it is a mineral which is a chromium-rich variety of mica
which is what gives it its green color
so i worked that for about two minutes and
i'm just gonna check it here to see how the 600 grit wheel is faring on this very very soft
stone so if we had some fractures in there you can see like right here
natural fractures going on a little bit of a divot there i'm gonna work this just a
little bit longer i can see a few spots that i should have hit kind of on these these are
a little awkward but yeah we'll keep pin it a little bit and then we can move on to the 1200.
so we've been working this cabochon for two three minutes on the 1200 grit wheel and it's
looking pretty good i don't know if you remember that divot that was right here when we started
we worked that baby out and there was some some marks on the side here that we worked out as well
it's looking really really good i'm gonna do one quick double check
but i do think it's ready for the 3000 grit wheel
as i'm working this too i was just gonna say as i'm pushing onto the wheel
the amount of pressure that i'm putting on is very very minimal because this is already
so soft and just the way that these wheels work you don't need to put a ton of pressure on them
so this is through the 3000 grit and it is looking fantastic so what i'm going to do now is move on
to the end polishing pad that has the 14 000 grit paste charged on it and we'll go to work on that
and potentially move on to 50 000 grit paste and because this mariposite is a
softer mineral the last thing i want to happen is for it to get overheated and to fracture
on this so we are going to be using some water on this stage here so we'll get this flowing
just a little bit there we go perfect so we're working on here for a few minutes
so we worked this through the 14 000 grit paste on the polishing pad and we are going to move on
to the 50 000 grit paste in a second here but i wanted to show you something
that i found and i wasn't sure if it would have it or not but
mariposite is known to have small flecks of gold in it and here here in a couple of these
other spots looks like it has gold so after we work it through the 50 000 grit paste i'm
going to throw my macro lens on so we can take a closer look at that and some of these other
really beautiful green and white details in this cab so let's move on to the 50 000 grit paste
so
we got our cab through the 50 000 and i want to take it off of its dopping stick now so i have
my dopping station turned on the pot is heating up and once it's heated up we'll be able to take this
little scraper and scrape the wax off the back of the cab and then we'll show you so we got it off
the dop stick doesn't this look beautiful that's a great polish for very soft stone that is so pretty
i love those greens i love it very very much so what i'm going to do now is pop the macro lens on
and i'll show you some cool details from this beautiful mariposite cab
well i had a ton of fun polishing up that mariposite especially since we did find gold
flakes in the cabochon i really hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did do me a huge favor
hit that thumbs up and click on one of the videos that pops up on the screen right now thanks bye