u/Evening_Dish_1335

Ive been agate hunting from time to time on beaches in the PNW for years and ive only found a couple small white and orange ones. Im always trying to get a decent sized one. Then one day i decide to go agate hunting and brought my coworker with me, she knows next to nothing about agates lol.. within 5 minutes of beach combing she comes over to me with this nice black chunk of banded agate and is like “is this an agate?”… if i knew how to get my phone to let me upload a video i would bc this thing is so dark but still somehow very translucent its crazy.
I couldnt help but laugh because i try so hard to find cool agates and just have no luck but then my coworker who not only doesent know much about them, but also couldnt care less about them lol. She was like “i dont want it you can have it” and then just sunbathed the rest of the time lmfao. I had my boss polish it in his rock tumbler so thats why its extra shiny. I guess the key to finding these things is just not giving af lol.

I sacrificed a morgan dollar for an experiment that i got for spot bc it didnt have any numismatic value. So i first tried to see if i could do a reverse proof myself lol, so i masked off areas i didnt want to sand with nail polish, sanded it, then got the polish off with acetone. Polished up the areas i didnt sand (the face and letters and stars), it *kind of worked. Would have worked better if i sandblasted it but i dont have a sandblaster, and if i had done a better job polishing the polished areas but the idea was there.

THEN i did my first attempt at artificial toning bc my teenager made some hard boiled eggs and i decided to snag one and try artificial toning this coin. And i wanted to get that halo effect, so i put the coin between two paper muffin cups in the tupperware with the eggs and it worked pretty good on the obverse! The reverse is a bit more chaotic but whatever still fun.

This coin is just for me to play with so i thought i would share my experiment with yall!