SwordfishMining wrote:Nice ones. I just swept everything off my desk into a qt storage baggie again so I could remove my Genie wheels to be refinished. For the price I figured I would try the Johnson brothers. Need to go look at grits again. I need a new 220 hard and 280 600 1200 & then I need to decide what next; the original 14k or instead go to 3000 or 6000 (?) and flat discs/leather on the end
John I think you'll do ok with Johnson's brothers. We use them too redo the club wheel. And Lord knows they take abuse! ( why does every newby stay in the center and forget the water and ruin wheels? Augh!)
When I sold the PIxie and moved up, I found out these Genie wheels were contaminated and I've never finished a stone off the machine yet. Whenever I tried to polish it ended up with a few scratches. The nova surface material had cracked over the years and picked up something big somewhere. I since wore out the middle 2 doing rubs. Trying to decide whether to keep the 14k or put in another step. I think a lot of my problem is druzys and materials with issues on the general wear. I want to polish too many things besides clean opal that want to strip diamonds. Koroit, star sapphire, Emeralds, agates and jaspers with druzy pockets or manganese or free copper and gold ores. Never did enough of one thing to figure it out yet.
Photobucket is working again. This is a cab cut from common opal which was self collected in the Wiley Wells area of Southern California. I was attracted to the orange color and the dendrites throughout.
I was thumbing through the millions of pictures that I have and ran across this one. These are a few wraps I did a good while back... agate, jasper, and malachite. The bottom is one I did for Jenador in appreciation for our work together.