Obsidian from Mount Tailor

I found some obsidian rocks that my Dad told me came from a family trip he went on as a kid to Mount Tailor, New Mexico. I never really expected to do anything with these stones but 'when life gives you lemons' or in my case, when life gives you a wet saw, might as well try cutting it open.

I also "roughed out" a few other cabs(fire agates and some beautiful slate).

On my first try turning a stone into a cabochon I didn't have anything to hold onto, but on this test, Yvette had mentioned that at her lapidary workshop they attached stones to nails. I didn't have the required doping wax either, so I used 2 ton epoxy as a substitute. Which worked beautifully, and then I just used a razor blade to cut the epoxy off.

But before I did that, I needed to roughly dome the stone.

For this I used the cutting edge of the wet saw, which I would not recommend, and quickly rotated the stone just to give the stone a rough profile.

I then took the stone over to my Opa's old wet stone to smooth out any jagged edges. 

Not bad right? The wet stone really did a great job smoothing out the surface. Unfortunately I will be stuck with this rough finish until I talk more to my friend Aaron De lanty who has more experience with lapidary than myself.