bumblebee

Good to see agates getting some love. I don't have any yellow agates either. They aren't great looking in the examples I have seen. They lack pop and contrast, so I think they stopped bothering to dye them because the results were unsatisfactory compared to the banded agate colors in red, blue, green, black, etc. After yellow, gray with white bullseyes is my rarest color. Gray/white is the natural color of a lot of agate deposits. You can easily find solid gray agates without bullseyes, but I have only found one gray agate with white bullseyes that is faceted. I find more blue than green for some reason, though bullseyes of either color are very scarce in hand-faceted ones, and shooters even rarer. I read somewhere they struggled with consistent results with blue dyes, which reflects my blue agates. Many are very dark or have varying shades of blue in them. Then there are agates that are sort of chocolatey and creamy, orange with white, then black and white ones (often called onyx), then the famous carnelian red agates with white bullseyes. Below those are the cheaper grades lacking bullseyes or having very faint bullseyes, usually carnelian colors, but sometimes shades of gray. You can still buy some high quality dyed agates made today that look as good as the better vintage ones to the point you might think they are vintage but for the lack of facets. This seller on Etsy has the best ones I know about: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1515876781/banded-agate-sphere-blue-sagb

It seems the Score! thread has veered into deep mibology debate...maybe ya'll could start a new topic in the general forum to focus the energy there. 😎

He's being a rebel hanging out with the non-glass tough old guys. 😀

About 12 years ago my neighbor in California, who was not a collector, got a flea market lot similar to this size for $75 and went on to sell individually for about $5k, including a Blue Galaxy. Most were individually in bags so obviously belonged to a real collector but the sellers obviously didn't know, and neither did my neighbor until he started listing them and saw the bids flying.

This seller is obviously new to marbles. His batting average is very poor, but I sort of admire his tenacity and imagination.

Steph, you could drop a few of your common marbles in a little cardboard box and sign the top and offer a limited number of them here, assuming you have commons left. I can't be the only MC old timer who would pay to cherish a little memento to help us remember the Marble Queen and her contributions to the hobby. Edit: Al would prefer you make a fantasy bag of course. 😃

That's a real agate mineral marble. The half-moon marks are hits called moons. Looks like there might be a deeper internal fracture too. The German-made ones will have small flat faceted areas all over the surface which can be hard to see with the naked eye sometimes, but under very bright light the faceting can be seen, but a loupe may be required. If it's later then it would be ground by machine and not show any facets.

This is the real question: where is he and why isn't he online? He has much to offer and we miss his contributions.

This was my best one I sold recently for only $90. It had a bunch of clear glass so in hand the depth was exceptional, and had orange UV glass to boot:

If you search for something like royal aventurine our board will show post results for either word, which you probably did not want. If you want to search for both, there will be a link under your search that contains AND in it, so you just click that to see posts that contain the words royal and aventurine in them. There are other links too which will help you narrow the results. Finally, if you click on the magnifier icon in the search area, you will be taken to the advanced search page where you can fine tune your searches. Further discussion: I can change the board's default behavior to search BOTH instead of EITHER, but I would need member feedback to decide whether to change that behavior. I assume if I do that, the link logic above will allow you to search for either.

Sorry ya'll, but I just have too much going on this season to participate. Had fun the couple of times I did in the past though. I am in the Christmas spirit, however, and have been wanting to downsize my marble collection. My hope was I could identify a new but eager collector and give them a smokin' deal on a vintage marble starter kit. If anyone knows someone who would be truly blessed by common but minty vintage mibs, let me know. I know how it stinks to be constantly outbid by the deep pockets out there, so I'd like to game the system and get a new collector a head start.

On a 0.89" Pelt. IMG_9894.mov

Absolutely Pelt Golden Rebel. I have marbles from multiple makers with that pattern...believe it's just something that happens once in a while when certain glass patterns form a sort of mirror as the gob folds over onto the rollers. I was lucky to find a Golden Rebel in the wild, although it was pretty darn small. I eventually sold it for $400 to pay a utility bill. 🤔

I'm selling a killer Atmosphere over at National Marbles Buy & Sell on Facebook. Ends Monday the 9th at 8 PM PST. You have to be a FaceBook and member of that group to bid though. Current bid is $70: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19t8iGvYjR/? EDIT: Sold for ~$90. As usual, I think my marbles are worth more than others do. 😂

Robert always has amazing marbles, and I suppose I'm not surprised that this sold almost immediately for $2,500 in Randy Conway's KillerMarbles FaceBook group.

Well that changes everything, especially for Bill. Good news!

Some Vitro hybrid cats in that original lot that was found a few years ago. Many were of more pastel colors.

We retired the Buy & Sell forum, but feel free to share public marble auctions or sale listings from other sites here. No posting photos of your marbles and asking people to message you, please. Feel free to share noteworthy marble-related auctions or listings from eBay, FaceBook groups, or other auction sites here.

Always a good assumption, similar to that NLR box that had an entire row of Blue Galaxies.

These finds always get my imagination whirling...you know somewhere out there in some forgot warehouse there's a stack of even better original boxes (probably quite water damaged) waiting to be found.

Yeah, it could have been on the street, the antique store--even Costco, which is scary crowded here. I think somebody who needed it got it. I got those over 15+ years of hunting in the wild, eBay, trades, etc.

I am in the daily habit of carrying an agate in my front-left pants pocket. I choose a different one every day. Today I wore a pair of jeans with a small hole in the front pocket. I thought the hole was too small to worry about, so decided I would carry a lucky agate in it, this time a fine "owl eye" shooter from one of the best agate lots I ever scored on eBay. Alas, somewhere in Kalispell, Montana today, that hole got a little bigger and the agate dropped down my pant leg and rolled away without me feeling or hearing a thing. I hope the person who finds it joins the hobby and makes it their lucky agate.

Planning to at least put the big facts. So much is speculation that I'm not sure many will care to hear everything. Nicknames Aggies Realers Manufacture Types of Damage Moons A hertzian cone crack (the "moon" in a marble) forms due to intense contact stress when the agate marble strikes a hard surface. The impact creates a circular or cone-shaped fracture pattern beneath the surface, which appears as a white or cloudy crescent or circle when viewed through the translucent agate. This type of stress fracture is named after Heinrich Hertz, who first described the mechanical principles behind it. Sugaring Rough spots Handmade agates begin with a worker chipping them into a rough sphere using a hammer. Sometimes the grinder, when faceting the surface of the marble, misses a small area of the original rough marble. These flaws are more common on the finer agates. It seems like cheaper, more flawed agates were fairly common. Dyed Banded Agates Color Rarity Carnelian red Black Brown Blue I find many more blue agates than green agates, although classic style blue agates with vivid white bullseyes are rare in my experience. Green Green agates in larger shooter size seem very rare. I just don't find them or see them, and when I do, it usually turns out that they are not faceted. That being said, they do appear in smaller sizes. Grey Grey is the natural color of untreated agate. I have only found one true bullseye shooter agate that is natural grey with true white bullseyes. On the other hand, solid grey agates Yellow A very rare color, likely because it would not be attractive due to the lack of contrast between the yellow and any bullseyes which would be white.

https://www.mcculloughraiguel.com/obituaries/David-Junior-Mccullough?obId=33371156

Thought the same, and how lucky we are that folk were so litigious because we get these great depositions with raw history!