Copper ore & metal mineral beads & cabs

Howdy DVHdesigns Fans,

I've been on a bit of a spree around metal minerals recently! I grew up in a rock club in Michigan and there were always crazy bits of high grade metal mineral ores from the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan's Upper Peninsula passed around amongst the rockhounds and we went there once to collect on the mine dumps. As an adult and professional lapidary, I've delved deeper into working withmetal minerals and ores. There's an aspect of alchemy in it for me, taking the base metal and without smelting it, recreating it into something that has more value than the metals contained within. It's also neat to see, cut, and feel the density and intensity of the rocks and ores from which we get the metals necessary to modern life.

In some materials like the native copper, the veins of copper are from the purest deposits on Earth and native peoples were able to use and fashion this metal over 6,000 years ago. It was traded from the original deposits in the U.P. down the Mississippi and ancient Native American copper artifacts have been found as far away as Alabama. I made this bead out of a material called Kingston Conglomerate. It's like a natural concrete of brown and green stones with solid, dense veins of nearly pure copper running all through it like spiderwebs! Because the metal is so reflective it's a challenge to get it to show up in the image, but all the bronze-brown-shiny webbing in this bead is native copper...

My brother knows of my passion for metal minerals so I got a box of nice, exotic, rough ores for my birthday! By far the best was the high grade silver ore from Sudbury, Ontario. 1.4 billion years ago (right around the time the first fungal and bacterial life forms appeared on Earth), a giant meteroite slammed into the area of Canada just north of Lake Superior. The intense heat fused the metals in the Earth's crust together in this region creating one of the most metal ore rich areas on Earth. There was probably also a lot of iron and nickle in the meteorite that were mixed in. These beads and cabs were made from a high grade silver ore from that area. The ore is mixed with bits of cobalt, nickle, and other metals, but very close examination of the crystalline structures of the metal oxides along with drill testing revealed that this ore is more silver than the other metals. Unlike the cobalt ore, my drill bit actually encounters solid bits of silver metal while drilling these...

I also got a very intersting chunk of pyrite-marcasite that is heavily silicated (mixed in with and turned to quartz). Pyrite & Marcasite are about the same thing, mostly iron and sulfur, and were mined more for the sulfur content than the iron. Although it's shiny and golden metallic looking (commonly called "fools gold"), it can be very brittle in it's pure or more crystalline state. What's great about the piece I got is that the silication makes it very strong and stable with great bronzey and black variegation. This material is from Australia and I just got one piece of it, so don't know if more is available. I haven't seen it in suitable lapidary form like this before!


I'll conclude with Psilomelane, a manganese oxide, and the material I cut is usually heavily silicated. This lovely piece of dendritic psilomelane in chalcedony (quartz) with fine drusy quartz crystals at the top. This material is MOSTLY quartz, but the black dendrites of psilomelane are mostly a manganese oxide. It comes from N. Mexico but the few hobby mines that produced it have closed. Manganese is used to make alloys of steel and aluminum that are stronger and more resistant to oxidation (rust).


and this piece of psilomelane mixed with white agate. This second piece is probably from Northern Mexico. The manganese can make the chalcedony and agate EXTRA hard and very challenging to drill!


Thanks for looking! I'll return to metal minerals soon, although I'm probably going to be cutting mostly jet and soft things for awhile.

P.S. I'm also having a 30% off inventory clearance in my eBay store!