What's inside these two rocks when etched? Looking for crystals by dissolving calcite in simple table vinegar for two weeks. I had to refresh the vinegar multiple times in this experiment.
I always have pretty bright shiny little creek stones in my pockets, purse laundry, falling out and under my hubby's feet lol. And buckets of big stones, fossils, holy stones and quartz boulders. I'm always looking down and if not that then looking at what others have thrown away I found big flat screen TV, cellphones and working coffee pot in box with instructions in the garbage today so many people have no idea of the precious metals they are throwing away. I gotta say my husband isn't liking the addition of stepping on loose screws from my scrapping as well as pointy pebbles. He always looks at my pretty rocks and trash treasures with out to much head shaking tho so I feel pretty lucky. Great video!
This is something I have never heard of or seen really, even though I used to collect and tumble rocks when I was a kid. Admittedly it was a phase that didn't last long, but seeing what kind of beauty can lay inside certain stones and revealed with mere vinegar is astounding! I'm glad I clicked on the sidebar, it rarely lets me down. Time to binge! And while I am out tomorow, I'll start keeping my eyes out for rocks with potential and get some rotgut vinegar!
Thank you for sharing. I am etching with my daughters and it's a great experience to teach them, tied in with e-commerce. Patience and determination. Your videos inspire me to take time out to appreciate life. What's before you every day that you choose to see or not see. 🙂
I wish I had the love for rocks and minerals years ago like I do now. Not just those but just about anything found in the wilderness. I'm so frigging crazy for the hunt that I found myself hunting around in the parking lot of a 24 hr walmart store. I found a big 14 ct. Hoop earring that had been run over many times. It paid for most of my food that day. I have rocks that I fished out of a lime rock quarry in Central Florida. I use vinegar to dissolve The Lime Rock to find fossils inside. Vinegar is a great thing.
The best time to plant a tree is years ago or today....I have also look at rock in crazy locations. Last weekend, I checked out limestone landscaping rocks while visiting a hospital. There were some nice little vugs with calcite and fluorite crystals and some fossils. It would have been bad form to start hacking away at them. LOL
Bernie Cat Yes! I sat down on the bank of the Suwannee River in Florida one time. I looked to my left and they were some black rocks in the mud. I just started flicking it one with my finger not thinking anything and I pulled out a beautiful black Arrowhead.
Collecting rocks at a rock concert. Love it. Also, I bet one could find some interesting dropped rock or crystal after a good music festival. LOL I had to say it before someone else....
This is the coolest thing I've seen! I am dissolving sand in vinegar right now to make a mineral slurry for my garden. As the vinegar evaporates it gets stronger. I'm going to try this! Bravo for innovating with a low tech cheap process and for sharing.
Good to know to use vinegar to disolve rocks. Those are nice finds. I used to be interested in geology and collect when I was young, I think that interest is coming back.
Awesome. I finally got to see what my rocks look like. Thanks for the cleaning tip I appreciate you. I have the coolest big rocks that I dug up out of the Navada desert by myself. God bless you and your rocks are beautiful.
I have been an overly enthusiastic geoscience lover since i was a child, i love seeing stuff like this! So thank you for sharing, it turned out WAY TOOOO FREAKIN COOL! :) ... Could you share the rough location of your finds? And never stop making videos like this lol
Wow! Thanks for sharing! I just found a rock on a river bank this weekend that appears to be limestone with calcite cross cutting and I'm going to try this!
ohhhh thank you!! I've been prospecting around my area and i have several rocks with beautiful clear or black or green or blue minerals but didn't know what to do. So all i did was try to clean beat i could with water and brush. this is much better thank you thank you!
For sure it is an option. If the minerals are solid, you can also consider slicing and polishing. I will show that soon in a video as soon as I put a new blade on my tile saw.
tess99991 crap you gotta excuse me. I literally just learned where to go for notifications . Dang. Ill skim through the videos. I watch so many documentaries, i get caught up and away with them i lose time and forget my prospecting videos, lll pay more attention from now on lthough lol & thanks for responding and the videos
When I drove for Pony Express years ago, they used to put vinegar in water tanks of the vans that were used for cleaning the window. it cleaned the windows great but it didn't take long ( 2 days to be exact ) for all the drivers to start complaining about the overwhelming smell of vinegar. so they finally stopped adding it !
Loved the look of the last rock, never thought of using vinegar I have tried lemons that have sat for a week and then used their juice it dissolves and cleans the way I want to as I like the looks of my rocks from when I pick them up. lol
You can sometimes find glacial vinegar in stores, much higher acidity and still cheap and relatively safe. Cool project. Also freeze distiling can easily up your acidity as well.
@@jessewilson6668 it's correctly called "fractional freezing" but commonly known as freeze distilling. It will raise the acidity of vinegar by removing some of the water through freezing. The acidic vinegar has a lower freezing temperature than water. This link explains the very easy process. homesteady.com/12283339/how-to-perform-freeze-distillation
@meMiner As Chip said “You have a really cool voice” Have you ever considered doing voices for audio books, commercials, dubbed movies, educational videos etc? You have the kind of voice people instinctively trust. Nice video, thanks!
@@meMiner Well meMiner thanks that you love my name. Funny when I was in grade school the boys would tease me about my name. Yes it was a same you never told her. What state do you live in?
Nice video! Looks like Chalcopyrite, pyrite and baryte in the calcite vein. Weird that there is no galena in there as calcite usually picks that up. Othee specimen looked like molybdenite and epidote (odd combination) have you done a scratch test with your fingernail on the black stuff?
You know, there's programs you can get that let you import a series of pictures of an object, to generate a 3D model of it. It'd be fascinating to see an animated 3D model of the rocks dissolving like that.
I love the way the 2nd one looks. Have you ever thought about getting together with another RU-vid channel (or maybe you could do it yourself) that works with resins? I bet the 2nd one would look even more amazing if you could figure out a way to fill the negative space inside of it with a colored transparent resin.
I have worked with resins before, but not on rocks. It is an interesting thought to turn the rock into a craft. For sure, there would be some negative comments on a video as some people hate when anything is added to a natural rock. LOL
tess99991 Yeah I figured there would. Was hoping that by only adding resin to the negative space inside, while leaving all the outer surface of the rock natural would be a good middle ground between both sides...
I’ve just come back from holiday in Cornwall with a rock or two - the best is a it’s a creamy coloured rock looks like a cloud with pale green inside with rusty veins. I love it, I can just sit looking at it and seeing so many shapes and patterns, it’s incredibly beautiful.
That is the coolest thing I have ever seen ! I wished I had known about this years ago ! I love rocks and collect them from everywhere. What kind of rocks were those ? Can any type of rock do ? I'm getting out my bucket and vinegar now !! Thank You !
There are a number of minerals affected by different kinds of acid and others that are not. The key is to remove what you don't want and keep what you do want (so pick the correct acid). Vinegar works really good for etching calcite and many times there are nice crystals hidden within calcite that remain unaffected. If you google search "mineral solubility table", you can see what acid to use for different minerals.
Thanks for the upload am an opal miner here at Lightning Ridge NSW Australia but I do a lot of traveling and am always picking up rocks never thought of using vinegar
Ever thought of using a stronger solution of vinegar? For weed killing purposes, they sell a 20% solution. Common household vinegar is usually only about 5 %. It would be interesting to see what that increased solution would do.
It would be a good idea, but more expensive. If speed is needed, muriatic is another alternative. I will be getting out for more rock and hopefully some interesting ones later in Oct. More to play with...
Interesting thought. I'm not familiar with muriatic acid. I 'm afraid it might be too strong and will harm the soil. I live in South Texas where the typical new house lawns are merely sod over 'builders soil' ie poor quality dirt, rocks and the trash the builder has buried. I've tried adding truckloads of compost on top of my lawn with little success. I guess the expensive and labor intensive method is to till truckloads of organic matter into the lawn. I'm trying to bore holes at random thru out the yard, filling them with organic matter-coffee grounds are a favorite as they tend to discourage Texas fire ants.
The best compost is dead leaves. People here throw them out in their garbage. As for muriatic, it is as effective as RoundUp, so not a good idea if you want to keep your plants.
i. CaCO3 + HCl ---> Ca2+ 2Cl- + HCO3- So calcite + hydrochloric acid (or many other types of acid) gives calcium ions and bicarbonate ions. Ca forms an insoluble ion complex woth Chlorine and other common acid anions.
Bow Toome It should definitely work with muriatic if you are trying to dissolve calcite, or powdered dolomite. We geologists actually carry a small bottle of HCl in the field to conduct tests on minerals. One of the characteristic traits of calcite is that it dissolves and effervesces on contact with muriatic acid. You're either trying to dissolve dolomite, which is CaMg(CO3)2 and only dissolves properly once powdered, or you are using dilute acid instead of conc. Or what you're trying to dissolve may look like calcite when it really is not, e.g. microcrystalline anorthite.
Can you use Muriatic acid to clean flourite crystals or does it harm them? I have my first specimen of purple flourite that I found, but it seems there's some calcite mixed in with iron oxide, and I'd like to remove that!
The stones turned out great!!! I love doing this too, one of my favorite pastimes. Loved your belly dancer reference being a belly dancer! I always think that too when the jewels come out lol
I was a coal miner and I wish I had hung onto a lot of the finds I had. We would hit veins of pyrite had several cubes of it thrown away a few crystals fossils galore. I've seen petrified forests in the top
The rock needs to contain minerals that are affected by the acid plus minerals which are not. Very common is dolomite or calcite, which will readily etch in vinegar or muriatic acid (but not quartz). It is fun to try.
Omg!! I love how the rocks turned out! I have so many beautiful rocks. I'm afraid to even try this out lol. But I'm going give it a go. I'm from Massachusetts I have a few that I always thought could be more. I'm glad I found this video
It is easier to sacrifice a rock to the acid bath if you have plenty. It feels horrible if you only have one and destroy it. On the other hand, sometimes etching yields such success on an ugly rock that it is is all worth it. Also, it is just fun to see what is inside. Good luck with your project.
So I have created a rock club at my high school and I so want to try this with them! Any idea where I can go to find calcium rich specimens like this around San Diego?
Good for you starting a club! I have not rockhounded in your area. There should be spots to collect as calcite is common. Otherwise, maybe someone else reading this can comment.
Thanks for the info. Many years ago whilst holidaying in Wales. I was beach combing and found a large (about a kilo in weight) quarts rock. This has a sliver of pyrite showing on one side. The rock has for the last 30yrs or so been in the back garden somewhere. So now I will hunt and find this and copy your methods. See what it holds. If anything I will definitely post. Cheers.
Omg i love pyrite n I think if i dissolved a rock and it turned into pyrite that would make my day even year lol..but there are rocks right down the road by this railroad n river that look just like your rocks. When i was little i would think they were remarkable but everyone told me they were just rocks . now i believe in healing benefits of crystals so i wonder if i try to dissolve any of those rocks would they have anything in them. I live in Alabama.
tess99991 ok thank you. I've watched more of your videos and i realized that. Lol..so I'm going to go try to look. I remember seeing what looked like pyrite and green pieces on some of them so I'll see. Thank you
instead in believing in the power of stones etc. try HE who created those stones. I mean HE is that powerful to make the things you love HE still loves you more. try HIM or HIS beloved SON our Lord and Saviour JESUS CHRIST, you will be amazed.
