Hey Folks! Hope all have had a happy new year and survived the holiday season. I'm excited about the new year and getting ready for my first show of the year, which is on a cruise ship in the Western Caribbean in 10 days! My first big batch of new stuff has been working with rare metal minerals.
My oldest brother is good about getting me cutting rough as a present and for Christmas I got some rare silver ore with plumes in it from the famous silver mines in Cobalt, Ontario. The silver mines in this area have mostly long closed, and rough lapidary material is only available from old collections or from folks who have been able to rockhound and collect on the mine dumps. If you do a google or eBay search for this kind of material you're unlikely to find any, and certainly not made into beads! The patterns in the plumes are just spectacular, but this is the one that really blew my mind... 
There is a row of natural silver crystal dendrites in this beautiful gem that formed a row of CROSSES! I've never seen any formation like it before and I doubt I ever will again! A wonderful gift for the Christian who loves his or her geology as well! A testament of faith and miracles in a rare mineral specimen. Here is what the bead looks like on the other side, and right side up...
and here is another piece I did using this rare rough that has crystallized silver plumes.
The white base material is most likely dolomite.. I got several small pieces of this stuff that had the white matrix. I got one chunk of the silver plume ore that has a black matrix and there are wires and blobs of native silver (pure metal) in this bead and the others that will come from this small chunk of rough. I really like the contrast of the silver plumes against the black..
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Those specimens are all completely natural formations of silver ore and native silver in matrix. I hand cut this fabulous shield shaped bead which measures 29x16mm with a 3mm drill hole. Weight is 47 carats. Beautiful solid natural bull quartz from Alaska that is infused with PURE, 99.9% fine SILVER through a new hydrothermal heat pressure process and then stabilized! So this is MANUFACTURED fine silver in natural quartz. 
The images don't fully capture the shininess of the dense spiderweb of solid, pure, Fine Silver that runs throughout the natural white and brownish quartz. Every dark line you see in the image is really super shiny, Fine Silver. I got three small chunks of this exotic (and pricey) material when I was in Tucson in 2009, back when silver was WAY cheaper, and this is one of the LAST THREE of them that I made with the LAST of my rough! Eureka Gems, who process and market this rough and THIN cabs that they cut from it, explained to me that because of the demand for gold in quartz cabs and jewelry, they had, "through the merging of chemistry, physics, and the art of metallurgy" developed a process in 2004 which allowed them to mimic nature and infuse precious metal into natural stone. Each 2 kilo block of natural quartz is treated and produced in a lab and takes 7 to 8 weeks from start to finish as the block undergoes the hydrothermal heat pressure process. The quartz is heated to fracture, the fine silver (or other metal) is pressure driven into the cracks, it's cooled slowly and the whole thing is pressure stabilized with resin so that every bit is tight and clean! It smells like cutting stabilized turquoise when it's cut, but it's harder (because of the quartz) and the metal veins can catch on your sanding belts if one is not careful. Here's a cab I made out of the same material...
Finally, I just finished this cab and bead made out of a dark green serpentine from a location on the Northern California border with Oregon. There are flecks of native copper (pure metal) within the stone, as well as clouds of another silvery gray metal mineral, most likely hematite. 
and here's a cab in the same material....
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1 comment:
'Truly wild and unusual gem stone.' Impressive and desirable...indeed 'Oh My'
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