u/PawnshopGeologist

Ran a batch of five sterling rings today, four built with Uraninite showing tight pyrite veining and one Gummite, all cut and set by me and all showing real UV response from secondary material tracking along fracture pathways, nothing added or enhanced, just the rock doing its thing; four were commission pieces for folks who’ve been waiting and the last one is a size 10 with an 8 × 10 mm oval cab reading ~566 CPS at contact on the Radiacode, fully backed, sealed, and stable as worn.

Grabbed a literal garbage bin of rocks at a garage sale for ten bucks. No plan, just digging through it, and this chunk caught my eye right away. Looked like petrified wood. Layered, fibrous, blocky fracture. Checked everything with the Radiacode when I got home, and this one was reading a little hot. Nothing crazy, but enough to get interesting.

Hit it with UV and it started throwing green lightning through the fracture zones. That sealed it. Slabbed it open and it cleaned up nice. Base is microcrystalline silica, classic replacement texture, but the veins are loaded. Druzy pockets, darker mineralization, and the fluorescence tracks perfectly along those pathways. Not random at all, it’s literally fluid movement frozen in place.

Sitting around ~50 cps at contact, so slightly spicy but localized. Scope shows botryoidal silica, tiny quartz growth, and some dendritic junk cutting through it. Whole thing is a multi-stage system locked into what used to be wood. I’m probably going to do a run pendants and just chase the lightning 😄

Cut one of these yesterday and one this morning from two different slabs, and I kept the cuts similar just to see what the material would do. Both are double-sided domed and finished through the full progression, then sealed with Renaissance wax. No dyes, no stabilization, just letting the layers show themselves. Even with similar earring shapes, the banding shifts how they read depending on orientation and dome, which is what makes this stuff so fun to work. The set in the first photo never even made it to inventory, my wife claimed it immediately, which pretty much answered which one hit hardest 😆

Head Mousekeeper at Smelter City Brewing.

Didn’t acknowledge me once.

Still runs the place.

10/10 employee.

Yeah I did it again 😆 another slab of Fordite and this one is stupid good. Old automotive paint from spray booths, layer after layer baked and sanded until it turns into this weird man-made “agate.” Not a rock, not a mineral, still cuts like one. The patterning on this is way tighter than most, just dense chaotic flow the whole way through with almost no dead zones.

You can see the full paint stack on the edge too, multiple colors, multiple eras, this thing sat in a booth for a long time before I got it. I already cut a few test pieces and yeah… it’s exactly what it looks like. Clean, consistent, straight up production material.