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[irockhound]

Jhon this is the material I will try and pick up for you.  It is really solid and the Feldspar takes a great polish.  Obviously the Actinolite masses tend to have a polish but not high and more diffused.  The Howlite I can collect out here also works up real nice in a sphere.  I cut one and it looks like oriental pen work since I cut down till the veins almost disappeared, never saw it when starting the sphere but lucky it was there.

[Jhon P]

Chris was going to bring the crystal by today but haven't heard from him yet. I will show him the pictures.  Are you making spheres too?

[lithicbeads]

Both are very interesting but that is probably the best use howlite has ever been put to, beautiful piece.

[irockhound]

Not really doing any.  I purchased the motors and put together a frame etc to make a sphere machine based off an old friends sphere machine that they used to produce before they passed away.  Never got around to putting it together.  I have had the bug to lately, but I have so many other projects it is on back burner.  I did hand cut 2 small spheres by hand - roughing them out and then using pipe caps by hand with grit to finish them.  By hand of course I chose soft materials and did a cave onyx and howlite.  The ones I did 20 years ago were:
Icicle Agate, Blue Forest Wood, Flowering Onyx, Palm Root, Nipomo Marcasite, Nipomo Sagenite, Sierra Pelona Onyx, Silver Sheen Obsidian are the ones I remember and the 2 shown here, most were 2 to 2.5.

I do have an area with large chunks of Ilmenite that is very unusal material when cut.  The Dark and chrome looking areas remind me of the Widman / Statman lines of Meteorites.  On top of that it has high gold content.  I had some assayed and I'll have to find the assay report but It was either .4 or 4 ounces per ton.  Of course being in Iron the recovery would be a nightmare.  I made some cabs out of it and think it would make a cool sphere.  I found out about the Gold because I had a guy in our shop take a torch to it to see what happened when it melted I was thinking forging but had no idea about forging.  Anyway he took and blasted a huge cavity in the Iron and in the bottom pooled the gold which I first blew off as Pyrite and then remembered that Pyrite doesn't melt and had a different piece assayed.