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This is a bitter sweet moment for the season. When it starts getting below freezing and the rain turns chunky, I put the slab saw away for the winter and focus on inside projects. One lesson I learned last year was to cut the messiest rock last because that will be the best time to change the oil in the saw. This is kind of a pain, so I don't want to do this more than I need to, even though I'm a master at it of course.
In any case, if you've ever cut Noreena Jasper, you may have shared a similar experience with me and realized that it makes your saw look like a blood bath straight out of the latest Freddy Krueger movie. Ouch... is it just me or is that rock bleeding...? The good news is that it makes some pretty sweet cabs, so follow along as I do that!
Here's the blood bath in action. Hard to tell if that's a rock or part of my arm:
When I was done, it looked something like this. The problem is that every rock I cut next will also throw all of that red mud/oil around and yuck.
This was a good chance to clean the saw out and get it all ready for winter. Maybe I'll make a post on that later but I'll need to slab some more Noreena to make that happen.
Here's the good news. I got some pretty sweet looking slabs out of this.
Yummy
I got to work cabbing it up... here's the goal. This is a pretty thick chunk.
Rough shaping complete
First cut to make the dome
220 shaping complete.
280 grit
600 grit
1200 grit. It's starting to take a shine but you may notice that it's not as shiny as other rocks after 1200.
3000 grit. Of course the picture is out of focus but you get the point.
A lot of people seem to have trouble getting Noreena to really shine. What I've found works best is to us a leather disc with some polish on it. That seems to really transform it from good to great.
And the finished shine
As I mentioned, this slab was pretty thick so I'm going to do something insane later on. Stay tuned for the next episode!
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