Hello All, new with questions :), Learning to Prospect Options

[Chachi]

First off, this site is awesome and I love the Colorado miners that are willing to share great info on how to prospect, clean and ID stuff. CP and family keep up the "how to" threads they are awesome.

My family and I are completely new to this and we are spearheaded by my daughters love of rocks, obsession with prospectors, and her huge collection of random rocks that she picks up. We are also very luck that a person at my work is willing to show us the ropes on how to be a rock hound. We have been on one trip and we are obsessed, I guess I will be doing alot less fishing :), not that I was good in the first place.

We currently are trying to clean up the minerals we found and had a few questions/observations. I will have the after pictures up and hopefully can get some help with ID'ing them.

Observations:
1. Sonic Scrubber (amazon)....awesome.
2. The textile gun (pace brand I think) awesome and dangerous.
3. Just starting on the Iron out so not sure on that yet.
4. Completely surprised how much the kids like cleaning the rocks, but I guess part of the fun is seeing how cool they look after clean up with a bonus of making a mess.

Questions
1. when scrubbing using dish soap there is a bunch of orange bubbles, assuming this is iron/rust, Do I just keep scrubbing till there are no more orange bubbles, is that a good gauge or should I stop and put in iron out for a few days then scrub?
2. When Cleaning Geothite, is it normal to scrub (gently of course) a lot to get it clean especially the rust out of it? I feel like I am hurting the mineral but it still looks awesome. When is the geothite actually clean?
3. Using the textile gun to clean minerals, do you want to leave the microcline attached or not, I seem to knock of it off, is it better to have a mineral with it on there or cleaned off?

thanks guys and I am excited to be a part of the fun.

chachi

[Chachi]

Iron out helped remove/loosen the Yellow stuff that formed when using IO with tap water....and a lot of the textile gun.

Here are the pictures of the ones that I think are clean....let me know if I need to send through for another round.

Since I have no collection to speak of I am going to keep 2 of the geothite, the big one and the one with the close up pictures....the smaller on has 3 different large Chrystal formations. 2 of the Amazonites and what ever the tan thing is....I think it is Microline chrystals? if such thing exists.

Thanks for your help

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[MikeS]

Iron out helped remove/loosen the Yellow stuff that formed when using IO with tap water....and a lot of the textile gun.

Here are the pictures of the ones that I think are clean....let me know if I need to send through for another round.

Since I have no collection to speak of I am going to keep 2 of the geothite, the big one and the one with the close up pictures....the smaller on has 3 different large Chrystal formations. 2 of the Amazonites and what ever the tan thing is....I think it is Microline chrystals? if such thing exists.

Thanks for your help

Nice finds Chachi!

I would keep all of those specimens. Nice Goethite sprays and the Amazonite has nice vivid color.
The tan thing is Microcline crystals. "Amazonite" is just a blue/green variety of Microcline.
Most Microcline crystals can turn white when the stain is fully removed. It looks like your piece is about there. Most of my Microcline crystals are still pink with stain or tan/pink with impurities. You may be able to get most the red/pink out of the Amazonite too with a prolonged acid bath which can either show more blue color or turn white.

Thanks for sharing pics with us!