This past Sunday my friend Jason came over at noon to cut some rocks that he had collected on our last trip to Hog Creek.  I was expecting to be in the garage cutting for a few hours but turned out spending 7 hours.  It is amazing how time flies when having fun.

As Jason cut rocks I work on polishing some of my own rocks.  One piece that I worked on was a very hard piece of agate.  After spending about an hour I was putting on the final polish when the agate somehow caught on the buffing pad.  A loud thud from the slab hitting the water pan and water spraying everywhere followed.  Luckily the damage was minimal.  The slab had cut half way through a brand new 600 grit belt which caused the water spraying.  The belt had only been used for 5 minutes before this happened; this is a great argument for using silican-carbide belts over diamond belts due to the cost of the belt.  The agate had a small piece chipped off and was otherwise undamaged.   I did manage to get a small cut on one of my fingers.  This was one of those cuts where it doesn’t go deep enough to cause bleeding but stings for a few days.

The last part of the day Jason and I change places.  He polished a few of the rocks he had cut and I cut some of my rocks.  The first few rocks I cut were some of the Hog Creek rocks then I went to work on a small bucket of thunder eggs I had collected the day before.  These eggs were from a bed at Succor Creek Park in Oregon that I had not been to before.  There were some different materials in the middle of these eggs that were not present in the other eggs that I had collected in the park.

One egg that I collected is too big to cut on my equipment.  I am very excited about getting it cut.  I can see some patterns on the bottom of the egg that look just like some of the eggs I was able to cut.

The pictures below are of the material I cut and of me cutting a thunder egg.  Jason took the pictures of me.  The rocks are wet and have not been polished.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous Lapidary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.