Latest Pieces from The Lap of Lapidary

Well, it certainly has been a "different" summer- in many ways.

First, there has been the weather- definitely not the year for "fun in the sun" as we have had very few nice days to date.

And then there's "the Virus".

Although there are tourists from other parts of our "Atlantic Bubble" in town, we decided not to open the gift shop because of its small size and will look to establish a significant web presence in the fall. That has meant that it is really quiet around here and while we miss meeting all the interesting people who stop by, it has given us more time to "create". Vickie has been doing some very interesting artwork which is nearing completion and when finished, I'll do a post on it.

It's been fun playing with my new toy- the 8 inch Cab King and a new old (50+ years) toy- my 10 inch Mercury oil saw that daughter Sandra updated with a new and more powerful motor.

I am in the midst of a massive project to create pendants, ear rings and rings from the beautiful petrified wood slabs gifted to me by Glenn Cooke (miss you guys!) but have taken some time to finish a few pieces of local stone that are now ready for wrapping.

The first one is a perfect Digby Neck pendant.

It is shaped just like The Neck- right down to Brier Island- with little druzy pockets in each segment and is made up of the basic rock that makes up The neck- basalt and agate.

The next piece comes from Brier Island- a beautiful piece of dark green brecciated (broken) jasper

I plan on cutting a groove around the edge and wrapping it with silver wire. Should be dynamite!

And then there are these two little gems. They come from a small stone found on a nearby beach that offered a really nice surprise when cut. The smaller is about an inch long.

The colour and detail on the patterning is awesome and deserving of a nice setting.

All for now. Hope to see you soon. Cheers!

Petrified Wood Project Update

In my previous post I showed the slabs of petrified wood with the shapes I had defined using a marker. I have a combination of pendants, ear rings and a couple of rings.

It took me two days to rough cut all the shapes using a Cab King trim saw and my Hi-Tech 10 inch saw with a thin blade to accommodate some of the larger pieces. I was really pleased with the results since I started with 55 shapes and only lost two due to shattering along fractures. Here's how they looked then.

This morning I switched out the trim saw attachment for the right hand wheels on my Cab King and got busy grinding off all the excess material using my coarse (80 grit) wheel. I was amazed at how fast it went and now they look like this.

So now I am ready for the next step where I will use my 220 grit wheel to do the final smoothing around the perimeter and grind off rock on top to produce "domes" that will allow the rocks to polish. This is a much slower process but it is worth it to get stones that are well shaped because any flaws introduced now can't be undone down the road.

I continue to be really impressed with my Cab King, especially the water delivery system and removal system. And it is really easy to convert back and forth to the trim saw.

Stay tuned for the next step in this rather large project!

Cheers!

My Next Project

One good thing about no tourists is that I'm getting to spend a lot more time in my "Lap of Lapidary" shop. So today I embarked on a rather large project.

Fortunately for me, I have an amazing amount of quality local rock to choose from. And if that wasn't enough, I have a good friend- Glenn Cooke- who has gifted me a wonderful assortment of agate and jasper from the Petrified Forest in Arizona (all ethically collected).

This rock was formed about 225 million years ago or about 100 million years later than the rocks on Digby Neck (a wink of an eye geologically speaking). Over the eons, the trees, buried in sediments, were converted from wood to rock and what a conversion! There is an amazing array of colour in the jasper and agate and many pieces have retained the trees growth rings etc..

The first step involved defining shapes and cut lines in the slabs. here's a photo of the result.

Many of the slabs contain fractures so you have to be a little careful where you put your shapes. If there are a lot of fractures, I do straight cuts first to see how the rock will split. Here is another part of the assortment.

In all, I have defined 55 shapes so far for pendants, ear rings and the odd ring.

So now it is time to convert my Cab King cabbing machine to a trim saw and start cutting. Once that is complete, I'll go through the off cuts and probably be able to get another 5 pairs of ear rings and a couple of rings. Then I'll convert my machine back to the 6 wheel grinder/ polisher and start doing the final shaping and polishing. In all honesty I have held off doing this for a long time but my new Cab King is so much faster and easier that I felt now was the time (especially since there are no tourists!).

So stay tuned as I intend to show updates as the work progresses.

By the way, did you know that the Cliffs of the Bay of Fundy are a Unesco Geopark? I live in a Geopark! You should definitely check it out.

Cheers from Digby Neck!

What We've Been Up To

So how are we all bearing up in these "unique" times? It is so strange not having tourists visiting the shop but we are still keeping busy.

The new Cab King has proven to be amazing and we are producing some really outstanding finished product.

I have run into a bit of a problem though in that the "real artist" has decided she likes working on it as well and has even demanded her own apron!

Fortunately, she got bored and returned to her own side of the wall where she has been busy making gelli prints. I have no idea of the process other than the fact that I can no longer remove any of the various weeds around the house. The results are pretty cool I must admit. Here are a couple that are about 12x16 inches.

I find the detail amazing and, frankly struck by how beautiful an image a weed can make. Almost makes up for the fact I live my life in a grade 7 science project!

Next week I will shift my attention to some cutting on the 10 inch saw and making some polished specimens on my Hi-Tech slant lap so stay tuned!

More Goodies From The Lap of Lapidary

It sure is a different summer with no visitors stopping by. We hope that you are all well and staying clear of the effects of the Covid virus.

We were able to have a visit from our daughter, Sandra, who lives in Nova Scotia about 3 hours away and while she was here, I finished some pieces on my new Cab King. I am really loving this machine and if you are serious about lapidary, check it out.

Thought it might be fun to show a piece from start to finish. During her visit, Sandra and "She with the agate eye" did a little rock hounding and came back with some interesting material. As you can see, this stone is not large.

But inside it showed itself to be pretty spectacular!

The red and black areas are both hematite and while the black usually polishes well, the red can be a bit of a problem. But not this time! I usually try to do something with the end piece when I cut a rock to see how well it works and that determines what I do with the rest. So I was able to get a shape for a nice little pendant and this is how it turned out.

The red polished like glass and the black was even better with some of the areas actually polishing to silver! So now I know I want to get as much from this piece as I can so I glue it to a small piece of 2x2.

This lets me keep the stone in the same plane as it cuts so the slices are uniform. And now, hopefully, I should get three more slices.

Also, I wanted Sandra to try her hand at cutting a groove around a stone to facilitate wire wrapping and we chose this little beauty.

It looks sparkly because it is sparkly with internal facets of amethyst surrounded by plume and fortification agate. A real show stopper! So before she left, I managed to wrap it in sterling silver wire and she wore it home on a silver chain.

I told her it's her inheritance!

If you have any questions about my work, don't hesitate to ask. Otherwise, when travel is permissible feel free to contact me and arrange a tour of my shop- The Lap of Lapidary!

A Tour of the Lap of Lapidary

Well, I have finally managed to get all the machines up and running and have decided that the shop name had to be changed. Since it now has everything I need- including a sound system- I thought it should be called "The Lap of Lapidary"!

New Sound System

To create the sound system, I had to get a signal booster so as to access the internet and now I can listen to music all day!

In order to show you everything in the shop, we created four videos and to make it realistic, I did them from the standpoint of taking a piece from a rough hunk of rock to a finished piece.

The first video takes you through the sawing of a large rock to produce a slab or slice.

Then we take the slice through the process to a finished, polished piece.

And then we take a look at a few special machines used to create specific effects in the finishing process.

And finally, I show you how I keep track of all the rock I have cut for future reference and possible use.

I hope that you have enjoyed the tour and if you have any questions about the process or a specific machine, feel free to ask. At some point I will be doing specific posts on individual machines to show them in action.

And if we ever get out from under this virus shadow, come and take the tour in person!

Why I Hate Using U.P.S.

WHY I HATE USING UPS

Recently I had occasion to buy a large item from a company in the U.S. Because of past bad experiences, I usually will refuse to accept shipping from UPS but the company informed me that this was the only carrier available so I plunked down the money for expedited shipping and hoped for the best. I knew that with customs and the Covid virus I wasn't going to get it as soon as promised but thought it won't be much later.

On Friday, May 15th my shipment of four boxes started its road trip in Chicago and winged its way eastward. I received confirmation and tracking numbers but they showed nothing until Tuesday. That is when I got a call from a nice lady in New Brunswick who told me that UPS was making a delivery the next day and that because the amount owed for tax (there is no duty) was over $500 and because, due to the Covid virus the drivers can't process any payments, I had to pay in advance. I could do so by phone or via their web site. Since I had phone in hand I tried that alternative- several times! In fact, I was still trying when my wife Vickie, who was sitting beside me said, "It's all taken care of. I went on the web site". Great! All paid for and it's coming Wednesday- sometime before 9 PM! Since I live in the far reaches of the province, I assumed late in the day but since I couldn't take any chances, and since the tracking now showed the packages in Dartmouth N.S and in transit to me, I changed my plans to go food shopping in town and waited.

The next morning, tracking showed all the packages in transit to me from Dartmouth. But at around 11:30, I received two emails saying two of the packages had been delayed at customs and would be a day late. Bummer, but at least I could check the first two. I needed at least 3 packages to be able to assemble the machine.

At 7:30 that night, I received two more emails saying that the other two boxes would not be delivered and when I checked the tracking, it said that customs was holding them because the fees (that had been confirmed paid a day earlier by UPS) had not been paid yet.

That was a little worrisome so I decided to call UPS (no small feat in itself!). Eventually I found a number and the nice answering machine said that because of the virus, the delay in speaking to an operator might be in excess of 25 minutes. 

She was spot on! An hour and 17 minutes later, a cheery voice picked up the phone at their end and started talking, unfortunately in a language with which I am unfamiliar. But after many attempts (try conveying a long tracking number when there is a language barrier) she was able to update me on the tracking. She confirmed that three of the packages had been released by customs and would arrive today (Thursday). Unfortunately, the 4th package had been "mis-sorted" and had gone to parts unknown but no worry, they would re route it and, while it wouldn't be coming with the others, it would arrive soon, probably sometime the following week.

I said, "So you lost one of the packages." to which she replied, "No sir it was mis- sorted!" So I learned something new. UPS don't lose packages, they "mis-sort" them.

At this point I must have sounded somewhat displeased because she said that she could reduce the shipping charges (remember I had paid 2.5 times standard rates for upgraded shipping) and when I didn't sound pleased enough she doubled the reduction. It is supposed to be processes through my PayPal account in 7-10 days. I'm not counting on seeing a dime!

So I went to bed comforted by the thought that most of my shipment (and hopefully all the machine components) were safely tucked away in Dartmouth N.S. a mere 2.5 hours from my home and would be in my possession by 9 PM tonight. Boy, was I in for a surprise!

I awoke with high optimism and over coffee decided to track the packages to see if they had moved from Dartmouth N.S and, indeed, it appears that they did because in the early morning hours the three were now in Dieppe, N.B.! And the 4th package? well, it was now supposedly sitting in Dartmouth!

So now once again, I wait to see if anything arrives and, if so, what?

Did I mention that I hated using UPS

UPDATE: 30 minutes after I had finished the original post, I got four emails from UPS telling me that the delivery on all the packages had been pushed back a day to Friday, sometime before 9PM. This item is actually an anniversary gift and since my anniversary is actually Dec. 11th, the darn thing just might make it in time!