Huckleberry Garnets Dig Idaho

hey this is shane and zach we're here today at the fossil beds out in north idaho and we are going to be digging up some beautiful garnets that we'll show you in a moment these are brought in from some local mines and sorted all you got to do is screen through them and you can find a pounds worth you buy them by the pound and it should prove to be a pretty great day we want to thank everyone for tuning in and encourage you to stop by radicalrocks.com and joining up with all our social media and everything but for now we're going for the garnet some of them actually possibly could have four stars on them uh four pointed rays so ready to go yeah all right let's have your hand and then this is what they're found like rough and they come out of the site okay so this garnet is found in its original placement it is not alluvial flow i dig this out of the matrix that the garnet grows in okay so when i take these here and i'll pressure wash them and then i run them through muratic acid and then i end up with the stones like this that i sort through and some i use for just collection pieces and others i break down and fasten them into nice beautiful stones right very nice okay so that's what we're gonna be looking for today 12 sides and then all the edges of it beveled where it was starting to grow to 24. oh wow oh i broke it oh cool oh you broke it that's the matrix i'm going to let them dig this yeah the matrix that they come in yeah from the bottom no rocks are so easy to break don't take rocks for granted unless they're granite possibly oh yeah see there rub it off and there's the face there we go very nice oh it cutted one i just saw it right here i kind of um right there let's see what that is [Music] let's see what you got oh there's one oh that's a good one babe yeah you got a good one here no oh so there's one yep [Music] i'll put oh yeah look at those ones that cara found out okay this one's a good one too there we go finding them like crazy how you doing over there zach you find anything i'm trying have you found one uh i have to be honest my answer though oh come on i'm trying i'm trying we need some individualized attention here we're here all right we've all done landon what do you got there garnet yeah you did pretty good huh all right willow wow where'd you get that big giant one um a guy told us um he asked us our birthday months and i won because i was the closest to january so i got wow that's monster i can't wait to shine those up let's see the other ones you got um wow you did pretty good huh yeah all right zach man what do you got i got a couple of good ones i had kenneth that's his name helped me out these two i found with his help and then i found this one by myself was like wait a minute this looks familiar yeah that's a nice one yeah this one cool this is a nice one he said this one's good and what do you got sweetie so did you enjoy digging garnets yes yeah they match there's a motorcycle place nearby you might notice them they match your beautiful red hair thank you you're welcome all right so we're back in the workshop we've got these garnets that have been pulled out of their natural matrix and now they're needing some processing you can take a look at these we've shown them to you before but they're pretty rough so what we're going to do is we are going to clean these i was told to pressure treat them and then hit them with the muratic acid so we're going to see how that goes all right all right so we'll take a few of these and we'll toss some foam in here water gets very dirty very quick toothbrush right here so we can see they're looking a little a little better there a little garnety so some of it's coming off you can see it on my hands coming off pretty good so we'll work these with the brush for a while all right so i've been soaking them for about an hour and um this one has some nice red color in it but i noticed that it does seem to chip apart around these hacky edges you can see some beautiful purple red color but the more i clean it see like that edge right there the more i clean it the more they fall apart at least some of them and then here's one that i ground which you know it doesn't have the reddest of red color in it barely any red it's more black um it's just not a very good one um all these are kind of looking about the same and looking like most of them are that one has some good crystallization in it right there this big one here that um was given to my daughter by the guy that ran the place i could see this fracture so that thing is cracked right in half and i've already cleaned and cleaned on it it looks like you know it looks like there's really no nice garnet in there maybe there is deeper but definitely with that crack going all the way around here and all the way around here this thing is going to crack in half maybe there's a good chunk of garnet in there somewhere i don't know i'll keep looking i'm sure there might be some more bigger pieces in here that will polish up but they're more like a mineral specimen but one of them you know just crumbles to pieces like this this one's these are pieces from this one that just keep crumbling apart but uh some of them are looking like they're still garnet in there um there's some fractures in there though so we'll put them in the muratic acid here after a little bit more cleaning but not too sure how many these are actually going to be garnets all right so we've got some safety gloves here safety glasses we've got a bowl here we'll take some moratic acid here lid's been put on by he-man all right so pour a little bit in here it's got a smell to it probably want to do this outdoors or in a ventilated area camp back on here a little bit okay i'll just uh drop one in there see what happens it's supposed to take a while not really seeing a reaction of any kind so that's good i'll throw in a couple of them i'll just throw them all in there put them all in there and see what happens so i'll let them sit in there for about a half hour or so and see what happens they've been soaking for a little while i thought we'd uh take one out and see what it looks like um i'm going to use these chopsticks here and drop well drop it in the water here we're still clean it off it seems but it's looking better looking better for sure so yeah you can start to see more of the uh garnet color coming out i can see the red in there pretty good there's pretty much red in fact it looks like there's a streak through there but um oh there you can see some real good garnet color right there i'll let them soak for a while longer here's one that i just took over to the sander and tried to knock off some of it now i've seen them where there's a lot of this brown still shows up in them and they look really cool i've just posted a picture of one but this has not been shaped or anything like that but definitely that would make a nice cabochon for a pretty big toothbrust and ring if you wanted to knock someone's tooth out you just mount that in a big heavy silver ring and boom teeth will fall right out but uh needs a little more work so we'll just keep working on it and see what happens and try to get a decent finished decent finished project all right they've been soaking since sunday and i did rinse them one other time and put new uh moratic acid in it's now tuesday um early evening and some of them they're looking better this one's still got a ways to go you can tell most these still got a ways to go but some of these are starting to show some purple on them kind of hard to see in that light but this is the one it's got a lot of purple in it you can probably see that now this one is crumbly unfortunately you can see that piece right there just broke off these pieces are breaking off so here's one that i i ground on and hopefully you can see through that a little bit it is cleaning up it's a deep dark purple um they call these huckleberry garnets is what they're calling them two here they need more time but there's some red and purple in there they're i'm gonna let them soak until the weekend here's the big one this is the one the guy gave my dollar it's got a huge crack in it goes all the way through here seeing a little bit of red coming out so maybe another couple days this will start to clean up and show some more red but uh it is starting to clean up some of these you know i still got hope that uh might be able to facet something out of those or make a cabochon some of these are supposed to have stars in them four to 12 stars four stars are supposed to be more common six i've been soaking these garnets in muratic acid right here for two weeks full two weeks i go out here before i started i cleaned them very thoroughly with water and a brush over and over again and i do that every couple days i come out here and i rinse these and change out the muriatic acid quite often i've gone through almost more than half of this gallon all of the garnets that you saw in the beginning about half of them would just turn into this these are the duds they just crumble apart into dirt especially when they're wet but there you go see broke that right in half okay so these were the cubes um i'm not the expert on mining these so i could only go by what i was told by the owner and pretty much half of them have turned into just nothing there is a few chips that come out of garnets and i'll show you right here actually probably easier for me to see like this but so you can see there's some beautiful garnet chips in here i don't know they're pretty small i don't know what i could do with those but a lot of these garnets that are in there just crumble apart into pieces so i'm going to show you what i've got left the great big one i don't think it's really a garnet it is garnetized never dropped any of these but you can see there's cracks all through them there's highlights of garnets on them that you can see that are really pretty um but it's definitely not a garnet so i don't see any use in bringing this down more because it's just going to start to crumble apart because there's no real garnet in there you know some of them did reduce down to a little garnet chip i guess that could be faceted i don't know that it would be worth it it's pretty small but you could do something with that looks pretty good a lot of these though again there's bits of garnet in there but the more i take it down the more it just crumbles apart so it doesn't seem worth it here's one too you know it looked like it might be a garnet it was a nice cube here's several of them it's got a good piece on it that could possibly turn into something that could be faceted i don't know whoops kind of in the shadow there sorry okay so there's some stuff in here this one looked really good as far as when it was coming down but you can see there's a ton of cracks in it and um actually these are pretty clean with water i don't even need these rubber gloves anymore but uh these were probably this was probably my best one out of the whole bunch right here this one and even it has a lot of cracks and is falling apart he's just seen it fall apart right there in front of my hand so maybe there's gym grade garnets there that are found but um it's not like every one it's not like every other one we bought a pound and a half honestly if i would have known i was going to get these results um i wouldn't have bought a pound and a half i mean even if i would have known the chance of getting you know one good one uh out of that bunch see this one's got pretty nice this one's pretty nice i'm not really sure the you know the real value of these rough justifies 60 dollars for a pound and a half or a pound and a quarter whatever i bought but i mean i've got a few i'm gonna try to work with them eventually but um this is it this is everything i got right here all those other pieces i showed you and these are that's it that's the best of the best right there that one which is not great um that one it's not great this one's falling apart that you can't do nothing with that really um a little disappointed i thought i was going to find a few grindable ones i thought that you know when these were going to get all cleaned off that there was going to be some that look like the ones that i showed you in the beginning of the video that the owner showed me i'm sure they're in there i'm not accusing him of lying or anything but this batch i got you know that was this is really this is probably the best piece in there right here that one and yeah definitely no stars or anything like that i mean he was talking about four stars five stars i don't know if i just got a bad batch or what but this is what i got guys i want to thank you for tuning in to the show go to radicalrocks.com scroll down to the bottom and check out our podcast get involved with our social media and help keep rock hounding alive that's it guys remember rockhounds don't die they petrify

Channel: Radical Rocks

Views: 6,127

Keywords: How to find Idaho garnets, How to dig garnets, All about garnets, Idaho Garnett, Huckleberry garnets, How to clean garnets, Garnets, Where to find garnets, Where to dig garnets

Id: 4DiLD371JXA

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021