About a year ago I joined the local Gem and Mineral Society. It has been a great experience. I was needing something to do and a way to make a few friends. The field trips have been fun, and I have found a lot of rocks. No meteorites yet but hoping to do some serious hunting in the fall again when it cools off. The rocks I find go mostly into the tumblers and they look pretty in bowls scattered about the house.
One of the activities the club does is a parking lot yard sale to raise money for the local senior center where we hold our gem club meetings. That was in mid-June. They all know I work with meteorites, and I have spoken on meteorite hunting to the club. So they asked if I would bring a display of meteorites to have for the public to enjoy when they come inside to get cool and buy the raffle tickets for our two upcoming raffles of mineral treasures and restaurant gift certificates. There was a great fossil display by another gentleman in the club. They created a lot of interest. I spent two days telling the meteorite story and talking about some of the special meteorites I had on display. Everyone enjoyed the “Jailhouse Rock” story of Beaver, Oklahoma a meteorite used to hold the door of the jail in the town until it was recognized as a space rock. And Valera “The Cow Killer” who would not love the story of a cow murdered by a cosmic attacker while grazing and minding its own business. I included some lunar and Martian meteorites in the display, I was asked the “how do you know they are from Mars and the Moon” question nearly every time I handed those Riker boxes to someone to hold. I have those answers worked out pretty well by now. What was hard science to explain years ago is a bit easier now.
I had never done a sit and visit with meteorites for the public before. I worked at outdoor fairs and astronomy functions selling meteorites and tektites but never just sat quietly and chatted with people who came by my displays of space rocks. Most of the people visited the fossil display first. I guess because it was closest to the raffle ticket sign up table. Eventually they arrived at my tables. I had two display cases filed with meteorites and some larger specimens on the tables. I brought a very large piece of Muong Nong Layered Tektite too. Everyone got a kick out of how much lighter to lift the tektite was. Hardly anyone knew anything about tektites, but most people knew that meteorites are pieces of material from outer space. One of the families sat down and were just fascinated to hear everything. The treasurer of the club took a picture of me and the family and joked that I was holding meteorite class. It was fun.
They asked me to speak on Meteor Crater for the July meeting of the club and well how can I turn that down its my favorite place on the planet almost. I have put together a 44 slide PowerPoint presentation and find myself rehearsing it even though it is nearly a month away. It is a big topic, and I could talk forever about the crater, but I have to try and keep it around an hour total. It starts with some slides about the actual impact and the crater formation. A few slides about the geology and statistics of Meteor Crater and then it is a plunge into the history and the three decades of work by D. M. Barringer. There is a good throughout section about the drilling on the south rim and probably a shameless plug for my book “Drilling for Meteorites”. The talk ends with a brief few slides about the Crater as it is today and photos with links to our in-depth website pages about our hikes there.
It’s the July 4th holiday as I write this, and I have another display case out at the Independence Day Festival at the town up the road. The club has three booth spaces. One for selling rock specimens, slices, geodes, and such. Most of the material was cut and prepared at the club workshop by club members. Another booth is for the spinning wheel where people pay $1 or $5 and get the specimen or jewelry piece that the wheel ends up on. That’s great fun for kids and grownups alike. The last of our tents is an information booth. That’s where my display will be for the three day event. It is a much smaller and less elaborate display than I had at the Senior Center Yard Sale event. Since I will not be sitting there, and it is in the information tent, I made it more educational. It has samples of meteorites with labels for the types, and some information about how meteorites are studied in labs to classify them before they become official.
Being in the Gem and Mineral Society created a need in my lab for a bigger piece of equipment to lap and polish the larger rocks I collect on the field trips. I have for a long time needed a larger flat lap to do the beautiful cut Muong Nong halves that I polish to water wet finishes. They have been very difficult to do with the smaller lap and I have often had to grind them on a thick glass sheet with abrasive grit. So I investigated 12-inch laps and was not happy about the price of $3000 or more for just the machine without the diamond disks. So I did what I always do and made my own machine. It has been my habit the last few years to no longer give away secrets and tricks. But this one is easy. I bought a 14-inch electric potter’s wheel that I wanted anyway for my ceramics. I got six 12-inch sturdy hard fiberboard bats for pottery work. I ordered a big piece of 3 mm thick hard felt and 12-inch diamond lapping discs for 80, 320, 600, and 2000 grit. I put sections of heavy duty Velcro on the aluminum potter’s wheel at the 12-inch marking groove. I stuck matching Velcro on the edges of the backs of the fiberboard bats. I sprayed adhesive on the front of the bats and backs of the diamond laps and stuck them together perfectly aligned. I attached the thick hard felt to a bat the same way and trimmed it smooth to the bat’s edge. That’s it, other than making a water container with a flexible hose and valve that would stand above the lapping discs and drip water while I was grinding and polishing. I made a wonderful fantastically effective 12-inch lapping machine for about $500 in one day. It works so well I wish I had made it years ago. But I am not sure there were inexpensive electric potter’s wheels back then. I have used it a huge amount already. I quickly made ten large pieces of Muong Nong with spectacular polished faces, and it was easy work now. Here are pictures of the machine. Sorry it is in constant use, so it was not very clean for the shot. Oh I did make a very strong table for it to stand on at a height that I was comfortable with. But it could sit on any table a person had who made one of these machines.
Here is an image of one of the big Muong Nong polished faces.
Summer is going strong, and it is getting hotter every day. We had our first brush fire yesterday and it was pretty near. The county ordered evacuations for three tracks of land just east of the house. But still a mile away. We had a power outage too. So all normal for central California in the summer. The air conditioning in my lab is working perfect so I spend a lot of time out there working on meteorites. But it is nice to get together with my new friends at the club workshop and work on rocks there too. But there is no AC, and it is a small room full of big saws and combination grinders, laps, and belt sander/polisher equipment. It gets frightfully hot in there. But it is worth it. I have found since my wife passed that it is important to meet people and make friends and get out of the house and do things. But right now it is too hot to hike in the desert. I am already looking forward to Fall and doing some metal detecting and meteorite hunting. I have trained two of my new friends on my metal detector. They got very interested after my talk to the club and have made magnet sticks and are getting their own detectors. Some one-day and weekend trips with them are in my future. But that will be later. It is 100° F today at only 10:30 in the morning. It is off to the cool lab now I have meteorites to prepare. Till next issue, enjoy your summer.
