Good advice on handling acids. I truly would rather transport
dynamite (which I did as a deckhand and mine rescue team member) than
the muriatic acid I have here. One wiff of this stuff could be your
last.
Someone else mentioned blackening stones with sugar and acid and I
started some trials. So far my experiments are working. Well, I got
a strong brown out of greenish-gray stone anyway. Next time maybe
black. One thing that amazes me about these field stones and river
stones etc. is that water often enhances their aesthetics greatly but
I have yet to find a surface polish which works as well as water.
Consider the gloss on a nice piece of coal. Can any urethane or
varathane do that? I think a lot of the natural glazing we get here
in the shadow of Mount Baker is from volcanic magmas on or near the
surface heating the faulted faces of stones in the crust. Two days
ago I found a pitch black vein of ? in an amphibolite region (or so
the GSC maps say). Hornblende? My guess. But maybe C in it too. When
all that “metamorphosis” took place to create the amphibolite, why
might there not have been C-bearing organics in it? Could I even be
seeing fossils utterly transformed beyond recognition? When we talk
about fossils we are talking about RECOGNIZABLE fossils. Coal
example - Only a small fraction of the “fossil fuel” is recognizable.
BTW does anyone know if coal contains microfossils as spectacular as
the diatoms in clay?
Has anyone done any stabilization of coal or Jet for use in Jewelry?
I am to receive some ( Jet - Coal ) from a friend who is coming
back. from Zuni, New Mexico. He is Zuni and uses this in traditional
jewelry. We also discussed the use of old 78 rpm phonograph records
as a substitute . during WW 2 when the traditional sources of coal
were closed.
When I get some of this material back, I will give my impression of
it. when I have the time.
For hardstone, you've only got one real choice, which is black
onyx. Black jade is better and nicer, but it's not "dead black" -
it's so deeply green that it ~looks~ black, and you can see that in
fragments and flakes.
There is another black material that takes a very good polish that is
sold as jade from Arizona. Controversial as it is a close cousin to
jade, but not the exact same chemical composition. I have blocks of
it I can sell, email me offline if anyone is interested.
when I go collecting jet I use a simple test to tell the difference:
jet has a brown streak when rubbed upon the back of a tile or streak
plate, coal has a black streak. There is a garde of coal found as
sea coal in the northeast of England called Cannel Coal that carves
particularly well. It is hard and polishes to a high gloss but is
more brittle. The great advantage of jet over normal coal is that it
comes from a single piece of driftwood and has a high volatile
content which makes it slightly plastic. Carboniferous coal is fern
based, multilayered with clay particles in it and is brittle. Jet is
thus durable whereas coal is not in a jewellery context. When I
started cutting and polishing it there was only one jet worker left
in Whitby, now there are at least 4 who can produce quality work so
you havent seen the last of it in jewellery.
when I go collecting jet I use a simple test to tell the
difference: jet has a brown streak when rubbed upon the back of a
tile or streak plate, coal has a black streak......
Bog oak, historically used as a jet substitute, also leaves a brown
streak. How is bog oak differentiated from jet?