This will be the 58th Annual show and sale for our club. This year we will also host the South Central Federation of Mineral Society’s Annual Convention. Lubbock Memorial Civic center. More info:

http://lubbockgemandmineral.org/event-information/

Very nice!

Awesome write up, thanks for sharing!

Thank you Michael.
I used Epoxy 330, but I will get some Loctite 325 for future use, can't argue with numbers like that.

Thank you!

It’s been a while since I made my first set of scales, so I decided to try it again, this time with a 6-1/2” inch skinner knife. There is not a lot of rocks to choose from if making something from local rock in my part of Texas, but on a relative’s lake cabin at Oak Creek, a few hours south of here, there is chert laying all over the place.





I slabed some up;



Outlined my knife;



Trim saw work;



Cut, grind and polish, and here is my skinner. Blade is 3”, handle is 3- ½”;









Thanks for looking!

Case in point, this ring was made for one of my daughters, who saw it and said "nice Dad, but too big and clunky, can you make it smaller?"

Not sure if you can see the difference, but out came the Fordom and some grinding bits and a few more hours in the shop...





She was right, I got in a hurry and should have spent more time on it. Gotta please the customer, right?

Thanks for the compliment John, we do miss having you at our show.

By the way the wheels I picked up from you at the Tucson show work perfectly, thanks! I put them on my old Lortone Exact Span hoping they would still spin true and sure enough they work great!

Yes it can. Once fired, it is .999 silver and is worked just like a fabricated piece.
Alternatively, a fine silver finding or bezel can be placed and fired with the piece, since it fires at 1650 degrees, below the melting point of the fine silver finding.

Thanks, I did enjoy working on it.
Mark, you are correct about the consistency of the clay and also about using a mold. There are lots of molds and texture sheets you can buy to speed the process along.
In fact, when I first started messing with PMC, I was used to the lost wax casting method, and carved the first few pendants in wax, then molded them with sculpey mold maker and made PMC copys...

Hey Daniel, small world huh? Welcome to the club.

Well, I don't see many designs in this section, so I'll add one I did this last weekend. This is a ring I made with PMC+.



I formed the ring and let it dry, then shaped it with a file



As you can see, kind of rough still, I forgot to take another picture before I fired it.



After firing and cleaning it up

Hello all! I've been off the forum for about 6 months, just never seemed to have time to stop by. Decided I needed to reset my priority's and catch up with some reading and posting. Glad to be back 

dickb, that is exactly what I have above my kiln/solder bench.