I had the opportunity to go out to the Owyhee Desert with a fellow rock enthusiast to visit the Pink Lady mine where they periodically mine a variety of Graveyard Point plume agate. This is an especially nice material with excellent color and intense plumes. I got to watch them dig in search of an agate vein and bring rough material out of the ground.
The process involves removing vast amounts of overburden to expose the vein and then hand digging with chisels and hammers to bring out some spectacular specimens many of which have botryoidal crystal formations and other exotic and rare configurations that demand top dollar from specimen collectors. For my purposes, material with as few fractures as possible and excellent color are the goal.
With the help of Steve, the mine’s co-owner, I procured two samples which had the potential to make some excellent pens.
Here are two the two samples cleaned up and then cut to show the internal color and pattern. They both looked excellent but one showed signs of fracturing that could likely be a problem. Such is it with rocks – you never know what you will find inside.
Sure enough one disintegrated when cut on the slab saw.
I got three pen blanks out of the material with the potential for six pens.
Unfortunately one of the blanks disintegrated during the drilling process.
Got the drilled blanks glued and squared.
The next step was to mount the blank on the lapidary lathe for the rough forming process. This takes the square blank to round just slightly larger than the finished diameter.
The barrel can then be mounted on the finishing lathe for final shaping and polishing. The final step is to ream the blank so that it can be assembled with a slip fit, rather than a press fit that would be used with plastic or wood pens.
And after assembly we have our finished Pink Lady Plume Agate pen ready for market.
