Opal is my favorite stone, and I wanted to go to the same area to mine, but a lot of places were closed because of the pandemic 😭 Edit: I’m so excited to see what the opal in glass looks like in person! I’m glad I was able to purchase a piece. Thanks for putting them up for sale!
this is so great!!! Thank you for supporting Sibelle too! They are very unique pieces... almost as unique as the opals. Also, make sure to go back to the Virgin Valley when you get a chance because the experience is worth it... very "off the grid" and relaxing and the opal hunting is amazing. I'd start with bank digging at Royal Peacock Mine and surface mining at Bonanza.
you can put lab or synthetic opal in glass lampwork my late friend Shannon Hill who was a glass work artist use to do it all the time in his work i still have one of the pendants with opal that he made
Your facebook link doesn't work. I am wondering if its possible to reinforce selenite gypsum crystals? I won't say publicly where they are from, but they are the size of dinner plates. The thing is, they have fracture planes that they perfectly cleave on. Any ideas for techniques to reinforce them?
"In pretty sure this has never been done before" ROFL i stick opals on every single pipe i make. The flame worker you saw was absolutely ignortant to any and all things glass....you cannot encase real opal in any type of glass. You are RIGHT the COE isnt that far off of boro..which is COE 33. but the water content is way way way to high. What chunks and stuff yiu did get to incase will end up stressing and shattering those pieces before they even ship out. The only opals that can be incased are Gilson opals...or lab made silicon based opals.
If you love opal, you should check out fire agate. Its different, but it can have an amazing play of color. It's much less known and far more rare. Wish more people knew about it. I love opal, but I have to say that I like fire agate just as much. Great channel. Subscribed
dent tech! I agree with you about fire agate being beautiful. But I have polisted both and there is one huge difference in the two. Opal is soft and fire agate I worked which is the exact opposite!! It was so hard to work on my polisher! I knew a guy who threw his fire agate in a tumbler because it's too hard to work on his polisher. I also think the agate becomes darker with age but that is from my own experience which is very limited!
Why not try putting the opal into a cold annealing oven, then bring it up close to the glass working temperatures before trying to weld it into the glass?
That would destroy the stacked silicate spheres that make the color. plus. Its not glass. its silicate thats been layered for millions of years. its not a process of heating nor does it have properties of glass
so, why did you heat the opals as rapidly as you guys did? Instead of thermal shocking the opals (wich have a LOW resistance to thermal shock) you might have had better results slowly heating the glas, you dident even try.
Congrats on buying a share of the mine. I remember that video and you looked so much in your element mining the gemstone. I'll have to remember, if ever I travel to Nevada, to go visit an Opal mine. I've never been to a gemstone mine before.
Someone found an opalized tree trunk a few years ago worth $500,000!! One share gives you access to all of the mine. You keep what you mine and pay out to the mine a percentage of your findings to off set the cost of the operation of the mine (diesel for the bulldozers, etc)
Huh. So even if you just want to keep it for collecting you would still have to pay for how much they evaluate it to be worth every time you find something? bummer.
All the smaller opals you find are split 50/50 to make it short. Non gem is all yours. High quality & low quality was split. two piles made by you or them & the other gets to pick. Museum pieces the mine kept to sell and would give you half the money at that point. EVERYTHING you find, you can buy your half back from the mine at wholesale ie cheaper than wholesale as a miner.Swordfish Mining if you want to dig cheaper on your on prospect. Yes there are precious outside mines.
Huh... the epoxy trick... wonder if that would work with my brittle Barites. They crack with any immediate temperature change. My youngest boy broke my best specimen but i have one more that is cracked.
So cool to learn how this is done. Great channel. Glad I subscribed. Been spending most of my Saturday going through this channel and discovering some great stuff. Like and share this channel, people.
Very, very different to what we are used to here in Australia. Most of what you are finding there would be thrown away over here. If you truely want to see opals you have to visit down under. We have second to none. Just saying.
Have you come to look in the gift shops personally? Seen what people get each day? Here it is hands on for the tourists to dig themselves. Not that most find black opal, it is rare. Every Opal mining district around the world is different. I've had a Sedawie dumping jars on my coffee table before, without preparation of going to the safe first for the dry or best specimens, but it was what it was. No worse than some buyers in Tuscon. If you knew ahead what they wanted, Just saying
@@ResortDog Okay. Point taken. You really need to look at what they are pulling out of the different opal grounds over here in Aus. White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge, Andamooka, Lambina, Cobber Peda just to mention a few places. We are the top opal producer in the entire world and nothing comes near the beauty of our gems. Some people make it but many others dont. It's a game of chance otherwise everybody would be doing it. It isn't much different to our gold deposits which have made modern day miners and detectors rich with their finds. Just saying.
@@garyhughes4326 No glory taken from you. I'm an Opalholic and I see what they are pulling out on the shows I get to see. Kinda busy mining & babbling to watch much TV other than videos uploaded. Tin Tin Bar! I love it when the big ones show up after being hidden in museums etc. Im kinda guilty for trying to goad people into showing off the hidden treasures, but its hard LOL. There was a several kilo one found in Rainbow Ridge 3 years ago that would stun the world, IF he wanted it to be known he has it. Someday it will come out, we hope. I'll tell ya if the flight was not so long, I'be be down visiting relatives and falling out sideways to the fields, and sapphires agates LOL. My brother & his new wife are coming down there this year. Since he got me into opals 4 decades ago as Opals Black & White selling Australian cabs & carvings. They might swing thru. Probly not for long & go spend time with the cousins on NZ too.
I know it’s way more fun to put the opal in glass this way, more artistic, and you can make the glass to fit to gem, not the other way around. But the average person out there that doesn’t have access to that kind of equipment and expertise: Craft stores and any place that sells jewelry making equipment have great selections of little vials, double-sided clear lockets, tiny jars with tiny corks you can wear around your neck, etc. many of these are designed to hold small chips of rocks or gems, or even sand. So if you’re broke like me, but this captured your imagination, there are lots of ways you can replicate that ship in a bottle look with any tiny bit of rock or gem. Really you can do this with anything that will fit. Of course, they *sell* a million little things that will fit into those lockets, but it’s a way to hold onto tiny natural stuff. Dried plants or flowers, seeds, sand, tiny shells from the beach, you get the idea.
I did this with a giant fresnel spot lens powered by the sun with both opal and petrified wood 💯 after they go beyond white and stop popping that end up as clear glass themselves
I’m a simple man. I see Nick Uhas posts a video and I click the notification to open it immediately. Nick if you see this comment can you tell me who did that Deck The Halls dance remix on your Christmas video with the tinsel gun?
I love that you have notifications in place, honestly super appreciate it! I'll have to dig up that song, but we got it from JinglePunks.com they are all royalty-free songs... the best source for sure
I believe virgin valley is young opal. Very hard to cab. It’s still desirable to dig and sell as specimens. I am a beginner in opal cabbing but it seems the beast opal for cabbing is Australian, hydrophane welo is good too but can crack. Brazilian is hard to get and expensive but the hardest of all the opals.
He is as talented as mark rober he should at least have 6 million followers and 3-4 million views per vedio RU-vid algorithm is a peice of shit not suggesting these type of entertainment videos
