My other hobby

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

Besides Knifemaking, I'm into a few other things. I'm really into rock collecting and cutting stones (lapidary). I actually got into knifemaking because of this, I saw some knives with stone handles (redrummmd's, he is a member here) and wanted to make some; I re-handled some pocket knives and now I'm addicted to knifemaking.

Left to right:
1. Stones I have cut, a lot of these were from rough I found myself.
2. Ethiopian Welo Opal I cut for a charity auction for an animal shelter
3. The same opal, the color is hard to capture but it has just about every color in the rainbow.
4. Australian Black Jade guitar pick I made for my father in law
5. These are some of the same cabs but I thought you would enjoy the Knives, both are made from Jasper, the bottom is Desert Scene Jasper (my first handle ever) and the other is Sanchez Jasper from Moab, Utah. The Red Sanchez Jasper one wasn't finished in the photo, it was my first intarsia with copper and jasper.

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

And then the collecting...

These were taken outside of Creede Colorado.

Left to Right:
1. Collecting Agate, you can see me and my wife (barely) in the top right corner, it takes all day to go up and down the hill.
2. The same place around the turn of the century
3. The stuff we found, Sowbelly Agate. It is an amethystine lace agate with around 30 ounces/ton silver content. The little black spots are almost pure silver.

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

Here is another place I love to go to.

1. waterfall where I find rocks
2. The purple rock is what I'm looking for, it is called Royalite and is a rare platinum ore that makes nice stones for jewelry. I took this photo before I picked it up, I think it is kind of fun to see where I got it from.
3. Here it is in cut form. The semi'faceted piece is another stone I collect at another location. It is flourite and is a component of the Royalite. It is from the Aspen mine in Silverton, CO and they used it as a flux in making steel.
4. This boring looking rock actually is more interesting than it first appears. I took the photo only a few feet from where I found the Royalite. The greyish vein is quartz with Tellerium Gold in it, it is an unusual form of gold "locked" in with tellerium which it makes it appear as a blackish ice when it is in the quartz. It is a very rare form of gold. Funny enough I'm not exactly downstream from the original source, this washed down from an 1870's era tailings pile that is full of this very hard to process gold.

 

[L6steel]

You live in an amazing place Daniel and have a grand hobby!!!
Thanks for posting the pix of your finds!!
It must be a blast to go out to a beautiful place like Creede or the waterfall and find prizes like that!!!
Have you ever worked with silicon?

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

You live in an amazing place Daniel and have a grand hobby!!!
Thanks for posting the pix of your finds!!
It must be a blast to go out to a beautiful place like Creede or the waterfall and find prizes like that!!!
Have you ever worked with silicon?

I'm all about silicates... quartz, agate, jasper, etcetera but I've never cut any silicon. I'm interested because I've never heard about anyone cutting pure silicon. Would it be something like waterglass?

I use a silicon extender (belt dressing ) for my diamond final polishing pastes.

If you mean the othert kind... no, I prefer all natural.


I love going to Creede, it is a really cool place with some of the craziest old mining structures I've ever seen. The waterfall is just right down the road from me outside of Durango, CO.

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

These are from a trip to the Sunnyside Mine in Silverton, CO. This mine supplied most of the gold for the Denver Mint and was open from 1878-1994. I go there to collect Rhodonite (pink stone in the very first photo) rhodochrosite, and pyrite. A couple years back I found a 200# piece of chalcopyrite there, aka "fools gold"! There are over 100 miles of tunnels at this claim alone. Back in the 1880's up until the depression it was mined literally around the clock by a crew of 400 men. In the 1880's they made $4 per week and had to pay $1 a week for room and board. According to my sources that is the equivalent of $200-300 a day, not too bad. In the dead of winter when the whiskey got down to one barrel they sold it for $100 a shot, that is in 1880"s money not the equivalent!

1. This sign is no joke, a few big slides cover up the whole road each season.
2. View up from the sign, on the other side of the road is a 500 foot drop.
3. This is what it looks like now, up until a few years ago there was a whole town up here. This picture is taken from the original main shaft.
4. This is where they loaded up the ore carts on a tram that went several miles downhill to the mill. At the time this was the most state of the art tram system in the world! The workers would ride in the ore carts to the mill and walk to town on Saturday nights to go gamble and go to the brothels then ride the carts back up that night!
5. This is the remains of Lake Emma. The lake was here until 1978 when it drained into a shaft placed a little too close to the bottom of the lake! Luckily it happened on a Sunday and no one was hurt. The mine did spit out a couple of trains in scrap metal form, it was a major disaster.

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

So the last photos were taken about 50 miles north and these were taken 50 miles south, talk about varying terrain.

This is out in the desert near Farmington, NM. You can collect jasper, petrified wood, common opal, sea fossils, hematite (iron ore) and loads of other cool stuff.

Left to Right:

1. Hematite "bomb" at the bottom of the photo. It is really called a concretion and would be hollow in the middle.
2. typical terrain, do you see the "face" in the rock at the middle left?
3. cool spot
4. southern view
5. There are all kinds of fun jaspers and agates in this photo plus one thing you can't take!