Settlement Canyon Pavilion

How To Cut & Polish

Massive Ruby

(These techniques also suitable for star ruby or sapphire.)

Orient stone: Select a flat cleavage plane for the top (highest part) of the stone. Orientation of the "silk" is necessary to obtain the chatoyancy (sheen). If the hexagonal crystal shape can be found, then you can easily orient the top of the stone across the C- axis of the crystal. In this way, the six sides of the crystal would run down the sides of the stone.

Trim: Use a trim saw to shape the rough ruby to the approximate size you wish your stone to be. A true running blade is important. Though ruby is a very hard stone, diamond cuts it very easily, so don't force it. For a straight cut, use a fence on your trim saw. i.e. use a piece of angle iron C-clamped parallel to the saw blade and as many millimeters to the left of the blade as you wish your ruby slice to be thick. Use the fence as a guide, with the flat side of the ruby pressed against the angle iron as you saw.

Preform: Dop your ruby to a dop stick. (Large aluminum nails make ideal dop sticks because of the heat conductivity of aluminum. As a safety precaution, be sure to round off the point of any nail you will use as a (lop stick, using your grinding wheel.) Grind your ruby to shape on a smooth-running 180 or 220 diamond wheel; a coarser wheel may cause pits in the ruby which will prevent a good polish. If the removal of flat surfaces seems to be going too slowly, use as coarse a grit as 100, but on a polishing pad, not a wheel. Finish the preforming operation on a 600 diamond wheel. Alternative methods (other than 180-200 diamond wheels): Use Diamond Pacific's Nova Diamond resin disc, or an expandable drum with I carat of 220 diamond bort on resin (such as Crystallite, Gem-Tee, Raytech Rezbelt, etc.)

Polish: If the previous steps aren't followed faithfully, you can't polish, and if you don't get a fine polish, your stone will be a disappointment, no matter how tine your ruby is!

Step 1. Use 220 diamond bort on a pad with a resilient backing such as rubber. Work with this until all flats are removed. This may take 30 minutes or longer. T1 is step is vital if you hope to polish in the later steps. Bort can be applied with a clean finger. Silicone spray is also helpful.

Step 2. Proceed with the following diamond grit polishes: 600, 1200, 3000, 8000 and 14,000. Do not skip any of these steps!! If you are using the Diamond Pacific Nova disc, it is already impregnated with diamond. You can charge other belts or resinous pads with bort as described above for the 220 born. Stay on each grit until maximum polish is obtained before proceeding to the next step. Keep the pad cool with water. Use silicone spray to keep pad wear to a minimum. You may wish to "finish off" by doing a final polish with 50,000 grit bort.

Equipment: We like Gemstone Equipment Co. "Diamond Eleven" machines since they lend themselves particularly well to this technique of using a number of steps in cutting and polishing ruby.

Caution: Ruby can become very hot during polishing, causing dop wax to melt. This problem can be avoided by using epoxy to dop. To remove the stone from the clop when done, use boiling water, Attack, or other suitable solvents.

Slightly edited from the original text on a yellowed one-page flyer prepared by Dennis and Ida Mullane of Mullane's Rocks and Minerals. P.O. Box 4278. Lancaster, CA. many years ago from Pegmatite, 9/99;via Owyhee Gem, 7/02.

Via THE RockCollector 9/02

Stealth

A Rock Hunter’s Technique

by Bob Biven - WGMS

While in the field, there are several rock hunting techniques that can be employed to find the specimens you seek. The one I like to utilize is “STEALTH”! In utilizing this technique, you literally “sneak-up” on the rock specimen you are trying to find. I have found that ‘stealth” does not work well when there are any small children around. They have better eyes than mine, and they have them located closer to the ground. While I’m busy trying to use stealth, the children simply “swoop through” and gather up every available specimen that can be found. An experience I had in an Arkansas “fee paying” quartz mine was that I spied a particularly nice specimen and had sneaked up on it. The problem was that by the time I had gotten to it, another fellow came up and started to talk to me. And he was standing on ‘my” 4 inch long crystal. We each talked quite a while. Finally he asked me if he could have the crystal I was standing on. I told him “yes”, if I could have the crystal he was standing on. Neither of us had seen the crystal under our own feet, but had both seen the crystal the other person had stepped upon. Some of you may remember Coleman’s “Miller Mountain” mine. The operator’s wife asked if I had had any luck. I told her that I had, but had not found any big crystals. She reached down at my feet and picked up a crystal that was about 7 or 8 inches long and gave it to me. I was amazed! That crystal must have “sneaked up on me”! I don’t think it had been there when I stopped to talk!

Another method I have used, I like to call my “GRAB & BAG” technique. The problem with this method of rock hunting is that it tends to result in a collection with an abnormally large quantity of leverite! But using this method will assure you have a large number of specimens (unless you leave a long trail of lost specimen’s behind you when your bag tears)! The quality of these specimens if often questionable, but if you collect enough, there are bound to be some keepers in the bunch. When I use this method, I tell my wife that while in the field, as much time as possible needs to be spent in accumulating samples. High-grading can be done at night, or after you get back home. The problem with this system is that as I’m busily driving down the road on the return trip home, my wife feels it is her duty to do my high-grading for me, and starts throwing “what she considers to be leverite” out the window. My problem with this is how does she know what is leverite? And even if she knows what she considers to be leverite, how can she possibly know that I will consider the same specimen to be leverite? My personal viewpoint is that “I never saw a rock that I didn’t like!” Some are better than others, but if I picked them up, they must have some kind of value.

A third method I like to call “ESP” (Extra Sensory Perception)! I don’t use this method because, although I think I have ‘E’ (i.e. “Extra”, at least around my waist), I don’t have any “SP”. ESP is the method used by my wife. She likes to be alone, and get away from any husbands, sons, or grandsons when she uses this method. She simply walks across the field, or gravel pit, or wherever she happens to be, and sends out her ESP waves. The rocks make themselves “known” and she picks them up. It doesn’t work for me. If they know I’m in the area, they hide. That’s the reason I have to use the “stealth” (or sneaky) approach.

My favorite method of rock hunting, when I don’t feel like walking around and “sneaking” up on the good rocks that might be in a particular area, is simply to sit down, preferably on a rock pile in a gravel pit, such as the one near Rapid City, South Dakota, and move the rocks from one side to the other. When using this method. you have to first make a seat for yourself, out of rocks, and you should have something to drink near at hand. I can spend hours doing this. It isn’t very tiring, but the rocks you’re sitting upon do get to feeling pretty hard, after a couple of hours. One precaution that you have to make is that, when you see a rock that you want, don’t take your eyes off of it. It can hide unbelievably well if you happen to drop it and/or “don’t throw it directly” into a bucket or sack.

I suppose the “direct approach” to rock hunting would be to simply walk across the field, or around the rock pile. or along the shore, or through the specimen area and “look” for rocks (fossils, rocks, gems, petrified material, etc., are all considered “rocks” when you’re hunting them). Most people probably use this method, but I’m too lazy to try this. I’d rather use one of my other rock hunting techniques. I will say that this method worked pretty well for me when we were in the South Dakota gravel pit. We had been looking all day for “Fairburn” agates. No Luck! So as we were leaving, we noticed that the gravel pit personnel had “hauled off” a pile of gravel that had been near the entrance for at least 6 or 7 years that I know of. It was just a small heap of rocks. Anyway, my wife wanted to use her ESP on the rocks still embedded in the “soil”. She got out and started her “scanning”. After a while, I got out and “kicked” at a ridge of gravel about 6 inches higher than the surrounding ground. One of the rocks I kicked had a “cavity” in it, so I picked it up. It was a “Fairburn”! My wife would have still been there searching, if I hadn’t told her she could have it if we could just leave! We had been searching all day, and after awhile, no specimen seems worth the effort. I guess this method isn’t really a “direct approach”? It might be more properly called the “football” method.

It should be noted that some people may even “give” you rocks. But if you depend upon this method for creating a rock collection, you may not get very far (especially if you’re depending upon me to be the “giver”)! My wife still hasn’t figured out how I’m going to be able to take my rocks with me!!! And she has told me that she will use them to cover up my burial plot area, if I leave them for her to have to handle.

Other methods of collecting rocks are those that require “bidding”, such as in rock auctions (common in Rockford, Illinois, but not so common here in Wichita, Kansas). When using this method, the object is to outbid everyone else. After the bidding starts, it will generally get down to only two bidders. At that point, if you get the bid, you’re never sure if you bid one time to many and spent too much for the particular rock specimen, or if you really got a good buy. At least you can always tell your wife that someone else bid almost as much as you did, so the purchase must have been a good deal. Or, if you didn’t get it, you can always say that some “fool” doesn’t really know how much the rock was really worth!

Another method, written up in Lapidary Journal, Rock & Gems, or some other such magazine, is called “silver picking’! The advantage of silver picking is that you can select a particular “rock and buy it or not. If you but it, you can always tell your wife that you only paid what the current market required, so it must have been a good buy. If you don’t buy it, you get to save your silver and can then use it for a trip to the field that will probably cost you more money than if you had bought the item in the local rock shop. But hunting your own rocks in the field can be a most enjoyable way to spend your time! The only problem is that you need to select, or develop your own system for “rock hunting”.

Via Quarry Quips 4/03

A Super Continent Before Pangaea?

by Michael Williams

While reading the April, 2001, issue of Rocky Echoes, I cane across an article entitled “Trilobites”. At the beginning of the article, the writer mentioned a super continent called Rodinia. The way that he chose to word his article made it sound as if Rodinia caine together and tore apart in the Early Cambrian, which is when the first true trilobites appeared. This, however, is wrong.

The idea of a super continent before Pangaea is astounding. An article in Discover Magazine in 1996 entitled “Travels of America” tells the whole story of how the existence of Rodinia was discovered.

American geologist Bill Thanas spent 30 years studying the Appalachian Mountains in eastern North America. At the same time, Argentinian geologist Ricardo Astini was studying the South American Andes Mountains. In 1995, they unknowingly switched places, with Astini studying the Applachians and Thanas studying the Andes. Soon, the two scientists finally met each other and realized that they were working on the sane project.

Thomas and Astini discovered that the Cambrian limestone of the Andes and the Appa­lachians contained exactly the same chemical composition and exactly the same fossil species.

As these two scientists were working out their new map of the continents as they appeared 500 million years ago, two other geologists were working on seemingly the same project in totally different parts of the world. The two geologists were Eldridge Moores and Ian Dalziel. Moores studied the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevada and many other parts of western North America. In 1989, Moores and Dalziel included Antarctica, Canada and Australia in their studies. They discovered that North America had been part of these continents sane 700 million years ago, in the Precambrian.

Another, astounding discovery was that of exactly the same rock types and exactly the same species of fossil bacteria in the one-billion-year-old Precambrian rocks of Peru, Labrador, the U.S., Canada, Antarctica and Australia.

So, the proof had been found. There was indeed a super continent before Pangaea. This is how scientists have now described the movement of the continents for use in college level historical geology courses:

In the Precambrian, roughly one billion years ago, several land masses began to con­verge on each other. The result was the complete formation of the super continent of Rodinia sane 700 million years ago. The super continent began to break up about 500 million years ago, near the beginning of the Cambrian period. The separation of Rodinia resulted in the formation of several smaller super continents, including West Godwana and East Godwana, both of which were completely formed during the mid-paleozoic. These two would later collide to form the super continent of Godwana, which in turn would later help to create Pangaea.

The work of these geologists has now vindicated the theory of Canadian geologist J. Tuzo Wilson, who was the first to speculate about a “super continent cycle”, where land masses cane together to form a super continent, then break apart, then cane together again, and so forth. His theory has cane to be called “The Wilson Cycle

References: Appenzeller, Tim. 1996. “Travels of America”, Discover Magazine Wicander, Reed, and Monroe, James, 2000. Historical Geology: Evolution of the Earth and Life Through Time: West Publishing, New York.

from Rocky Echoes 9/2001

via the ROCKFINDER 10/01

via THE GLACIAL DRIFTER 4/03

Gem Show Calendar

If you know of any events coming up, PLEASE let me know as soon as possible. If anything is wrong PLEASE let me know as soon as possible.

Aug. 8-10 Annual Contin-tail Rock Swap and Show, Rodeo Grounds, Buena Vista, CO.

Aug. 15-17 Lake George Gem & Mineral Show, an open air event in Lake George, the show site is right on US Hwy 24, Lake George Gem and Mineral Show, Lake George CO

Aug. 30-Sept. 1 Grant County Gem & Mineral Societies 20th Annual Show, Silver City Recreation Center, 1016 North Silver Street, Silver City, NM

Sept. 12-14 Minerals of Gilpin County, Greater Area Denver Gem & Mineral Council, Denver Merchandise Mart, 451 E 58th Ave, Denver, CO

Sept. 19-21 Wasatch Gem & Mineral Show, South Town Exposition Center, 9575 So. State St., Sandy, UT.

Sept. 26-28 Tooele Gem & Mineral Show, Tooele County Fair Complex, 400 West 200 North, Tooele, UT.

Sept. 27 Eureka Rock and Gem Club Show, Mountain Home Senior Center 1000 N 3rd East Mtn Home, ID.

Oct. 10-12 Moab Points & Pebbles Rock Club Show, Spanish Trail Arena, 3641 South Highway 191, Moab, UT.

Oct. 10-12 Huachuca Mineral & Gem Club Show, Cochise College, 901 N. Colombo, Sierra Vista, AZ.

Oct. 25-26 Lake Havasu Gem & Mineral Society Show, Lake Havasu City Community Center, 100 Park Avenue, Lake Havasu City, AZ.

Nov. 1-2 The Mingus Gem & Mineral Club Show, Lodge at Cliff Castle, 333 Middle Verde Road, Camp Verde, AZ

Nov. 1-2 Wickenburg Gem And Mineral Society Show, Wickenburg Community Center, 160 N. Valentine St., Wickenburg, AZ.

Nov. 8-9 New Mexico Mineral Symposium, Macey Center Auditorium, NM Institute of Mining & Technology, Socorro, NM.

Nov. 14-16 Flatirons Mineral Club Annual Show, Boulder Elks Lodge, 3975 28th St., Boulder, CO.