 Hello, and welcome to the Rugged Rockhounds. Today, we're going to do something a little different. We are going to go ahead and try to clean off a few specimens of those limonite cubes, the sumo saftopyrite that I found in those episodes about two weeks ago. Right here, I've got a couple that have not been cleaned off yet. Take a quick look at that. You can still see a lot of the stuff on them. Take a look at the other one. What I found out after looking at this stuff closely, is the white stuff I thought was on it, isn't calcite or anything like that, is it is actually just the clay that the cubes are forming in. It is actually forming in a layer of clay, basically called shell, and it's pretty hard stuff. So, to get clay off, acid isn't going to work. So putting in this in a bath of muradic acid or something like that is not going to do the job. So, looks like we're going to have to try and just blow the stuff off using a pressure washer. So that's the first thing we're going to try. We're going to go ahead and try a pressure washer and see how that goes. Okay. So, already looking a lot better. Quite a bit of the stuff has been knocked off. Not looking too bad. Now obviously the pressure washer is not going to work on smaller pieces. This is about as small as they can get. Any smaller and it will just push them around everywhere. So for a pressure washer you definitely need larger specimens. But we knocked a fair amount off. But as you can see, there's still stuff on it. And the pressure washer isn't going to take some of that stuff off just because it's super hard. So we need another way to get that stuff off. Now this is normally used in pottery and this can help to kind of scrape things off. Another tool I like to use is a little screwdriver. In this case, I'm using a precision screwdriver. Anything that's got a small wedge shape to it to kind of help pry the stuff off. So we'll give that a try on this. All right, so we got this big block still had it nice to come off. So let's try this one. Honestly, this one's better for tiny things that are stuck in cracks for these bigger ones. I like to use the screwdriver. It's a better wedge. And there you go. Look at that. Knocked the whole thing off. That's exactly what I wanted. All right, let's keep trying over here. Get some more of this off. Gotta be careful when you're doing it. You don't want to apply too much pressure in a direction where you're going to damage or break the cubes. So you just have to work your way around it and be really careful. And as you can see, this can be very tedious and take quite a while. So yeah, get ready to sit down for a while and slowly carve it all off. Let's try this one a little bit. See how it does. It seems to do a pretty good job getting that off right there. Okay, so that's how I use those little precision tools to help pry loose some of that hardened clay shell basically. Now that's as far as I've gotten so far with how to get the stuff off and using those different techniques. This is where I've gotten so far with some of my larger ones. So we have this one right here. As you can see, this bottom part right here has got some really hard stuff that isn't quite wanting to come off. So I'm still going to work on that, but looking pretty nice a lot of these. This is the big one my friend found on day two. It's coming pretty good. Like you can see, there's still a little bit that just doesn't want to come off. And there's my big one from that dig and and the top of it's looking pretty good. I've gotten most of the stuff off there. It's just down here this stuff that doesn't really want to come off. It's a lot of work. After trying all of these different techniques, I also would like to get an ultrasonic bath. I think an ultrasonic bath would do a really good job of helping to get a lot of these clay particles off. So when I get around to that, I'll give that a try and let you know how it did. If it manages, hopefully, to knock a lot of the stuff off of any of these ones to make them better, then I'll show you how it came out and we'll have to take a look. That's all for today. I hope you enjoyed this little demonstration of how to get clay off of basically any mineral that's not too soft. A few different techniques I've been using to just help try and clean some of those off. Hopefully they'll work for you as well. If it's something other than clay, then we'll probably have to try a few other techniques. I'll probably make a video in the future using hydrochloric acid and what to use that on and how that works. But until then, I hope you had a great time.