Nancy Twinkie goes Shopping for Prospector’s Supplies

It finally came to pass that Nancy Twinkie became so hooked on gold prospecting she decided that she should own her own prospecting gear.  So on one Saturday morning when it was raining off we went to a rock shop that carried the kind of gear she wanted.  It was quite a drive to the rock shop since the nearest one to where we lived in Connecticut was about forty-five miles away on the other side of the Connecticut River in East Hampton.  Although Connecticut isn’t exactly rock hounding country there are enough to support a few rock shops; this one is the largest in the state. 

While I was talking to the owner Nancy was poking around in the store for what she wanted, and they had enough of fixings to satisfy her wants.  The first thing she bought was a gold panning kit that included two pans one was 14 inches in diameter and the other was 10 inches.  The kit also had a 14 inch classifier along with a pair of tweezers, a small magnifying glass, and a snuffer bottle for snuffing up small flakes of gold from a goldpan.  There were even a couple of plastic vials to hold the gold.

Then she bought a folding shovel like the kind you use in the army to dig a foxhole.  Although many people would call this a folding shovel I learned the hard way that it is also known in certain quarters as a “hip spoon.”

Nancy went whole hog that day, and bought some other gear for rock hounding.  This collection included a 22 ounce Estwing rock pick, a four pound Estwing cracking hammer, a 1 inch chisel about a foot long, and a bull point of the same length. 

After collecting this gear we stopped at one of those Big Box stores and bought a pair of work boots and a zipper overnight case to carry all this gear in.  The goldpans didn’t fit, so she also bought a backpack.  That finished her collection, so with that we spent the rest of the day rock hounding. 

This is the part of Connecticut where there are several large pegmatite mines many of which have some really rare minerals, so we went to the Strickland Quarry for collecting.  (At the time Strickland was open for collecting, but has since morphed into a golf course, and is closed to collectors.)

After parking the truck we noticed there was a large boulder composed mostly of cleavelandite just on the edge of the parking area.  From the looks of that boulder it probably weighed more then two tons.  By examining the boulder I could see the blades of cleavelandite sticking out in all directions.  Knowing this was one of the signs that there might be pockets inside the boulder we decided to see what was inside and went to work on the boulder with my 8 pound sledge.   

It didn’t take long to find out that the sledge hammer wasn’t going to work so I went back to the truck for a single jack stone drill and a striking hammer.  This was some mining equipment I had inherited from my great grandfather along with some ¾ inch feather wedges. 

A single jack drill it pretty easy to use, and you can drill a hole with one in a hurry by hitting its upper end with a four pound hammer. Each time you strike the drill you have to rotate the drilling steel a quarter turn so that every time the cutting edge of the drill is cutting into a new part of the stone.  We had to make four holes into the rock that were about six inches deep to hold the feather wedges.  It probably took agout 15 minutes to drill the holes and set the feather wedges.  After the wedges were set and tapped into place the boulder was split in half in less then a half hour from when we started drilling. 

Feather wedges can still be bought at mason supply stores, but old fashioned stone drills are no longer sold.  However you can make your own from a star drill by grinding off two of the flutes, or by grinding a radius on the cutting edge of a cold chisel.

Once we were inside the boulder there were many interesting specimens as the pegmatite was an LCT type.  In some of the cavities we found nice specimens of columbite,  but the best specimen was a nice crystal of blue beryl.  Most of the specimen was badly flawed, but there were some areas that were faceting grade that would probably have made gems weighing more then 10 carets.  That stone is still in Nancy’s private collection!