The Richardson Strike
The Richardson Strike: 3,000 Miles, The Wrong Cut, and The Rainbow Flash
The Gamble in the Dirt
It was the middle of a 3,000-mile, 9-day camping trip out of Spokane, and it was 95 degrees in the Oregon sun. We were grinding out the miles, bouncing up and down the backroads while tracking mineral deposits on a free hunting app, when we stumbled right into Richardson's Rock Ranch.
We pulled over, and it was a lapidary goldmine. Pallets, gaylords, and buckets full of raw rock everywhere. We were standing in front of a pallet holding a thousand pounds of raw, unbroken Labradorite when we got the local advice: "The blues are weak right now. Don't look for blue."
Janyce doesn't listen to "don't."
She spent an hour baking in the sun, turning over raw boulders until she finally found it—a 3-pound chunk hiding a tiny, stubborn tease of blue-green flash. Finding the stone was only the first half of the gamble. The real work was waiting for us back home.
Back in Spokane, our homemade slab saw was already sitting in the backyard waiting for the haul. We had built the chassis out of a repurposed BBQ stand after the brutal Yakima and Spencer runs. The cooling system was a garden hose clamped tight into a vise, and we kept constant pressure on the blade using heavy iron Gold's Gym plates as a counterweight. But this Oregon material was a completely different test. That homemade rig screamed from 5:30 PM to 10:00 PM every single weeknight, and from 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM on the weekends.
We lost 25% of that 3-pound rock just learning how the angles worked, but every mistake became a permanent lesson. We don't cut standard, commercial ovals. We cut strictly to chase the flash. Once Bob breaks the shape out of the rough, Janyce takes over on the wheels, pushing the stone through a brutal, 9-step polishing process until she hits her signature glass-like finish. The flash you see today exists because we refused to give up on a gamble in the dirt.
The Fire Obsidian Fracture & The Freeform Revolution
While Janyce was baking in the Oregon sun hunting for Labradorite, Bob was on the verge of heatstroke. Spotting a garden hose on the property, he turned it on to get a drink and cool down. Right there, he noticed a massive pile of black and red rock. Digging through it, two distinct patterns of volcanic glass emerged: long, striped flames and tight, rolling swirls. At the time, we didn't even know the true fire hiding inside them.
Back at the shop, cutting it took a massive toll. Standard volcanic glass is supposed to be soft. But when Bob scratch-tested this specific Oregon material on the bench, a Mohs 7 pick barely left a mark. It was heavily silicified, tough as nails, but still shattered like windowpane. Bob had to calculate the exact spring resistance of the saw's chassis just to cut it. Standard agate takes 7.5 lbs of counterweight to net 5 lbs of true downward cutting force. Bob rigged this strange obsidian with 5 lbs of weight, netting exactly 2.5 lbs of effective downward pressure.
Even with the math perfectly dialed in, the sheer brittleness of the stone fractured it under the blade. To make matters worse, we cut the long-flame chunks at the wrong angle, trapping the fiery iridescence strictly on the thin edges of the stone, ruining the face.
Bob was incredibly upset that he had ruined the flash. But Janyce took the stone from him, walked over to the 3000-grit wheel, polished it up, and brought it back. She looked at him and said, "Here is what we will do, honey. We can make them into freeforms, so the sides become the front."
That was the exact moment our Freeform Revolution locked into place. Every piece of Fire Obsidian in our shop is a survivor of that learning curve.
The Africa Compromise
While Bob was nursing his heatstroke by the hose, we spotted a clean pile of imported African Botswana Agate sitting in the Oregon dirt. The reality of running a lapidary shop out of your house is simple: we are probably never going to make it to Africa in this lifetime. So, we decided to bring a piece of Africa back to the backyard in Spokane.
Botswana Agate is famous for its tight, high-contrast white banding. But Bob didn't want what everyone else wanted. He started digging deep into the pile with one strict rule: absolutely no white showing. He was hunting specifically for an anomaly—a piece he suspected was solid caramel all the way through the core.
When we finally got it to the saw and slabbed it, the rock surprised us. The center was almost solid white, but the edges were layered with incredible, crisp bands of clear and rich caramel. We found out later that the variation Bob cherry-picked is actually incredibly rare, and getting that pure color was a heavy fight on the saw.
Caramel Botswana Agate Collection
THE SHOP FLOOR REALITY
"When a standard cut fails, you don't throw away good fire—you pivot to the Freeform Rebellion."
KEEP EXPLORING THE LORE
The Yakima River Strike | The Spencer Opal Haul | The Frankenstein Lapidary Line