u/no_longer_on_fire

I've got 3 different sets of specimens being worked on alternately. Here's a batch fresh out of the ultrasonic before getting another scrub and back in acid or in pile to do scribe work on.

Also notable is I found a few more snail shells. One is a great example of a steinkern that's also hollow. Pretty wild to think about the conditions that formed in.

Let me know if you see any pieces clearly not from this locale that I've flagrantly misidentified.

Would love to see other prepped specimens with this level of gem. Is there a good place to find pics? I'm kinda just YOLOing it and hoping I'm not taking away anything important or beautiful.

So I've been working through about 400lbs of pet wood from a dumped collection of rough from an estate.

I was neutralizing waste that came off when I decided to pan it out to see if there were any interesting chips.

These agatized shell casts started coming out. Got me super excited as I had never heard of it before.

Are there other areas that have gastropod fossils in the matrix? Other cool fossils?

I believe these to be Elima Tenera.

Also some pics of pieces being worked on just to keep a bit more topical.

Cleaned and scrubbed up this part of a dumped vintage paleotourist collection. Still have 2x-3x the material to pick through or in process of cleaning or treatment.

Now to get a good assessment of what's actually in this haul. The quality of spacing means it's worth some effort to figure out how to process it/ what to do with each piece. Seems to be a crazy amount of gem wood. I have acid cleaned a few of the pieces to really nice results too. Any recommendations or examples would be appreciated.

If anyone recognizes something from outside eden valley, please point it out. I'm new to this world. Also anything particularly rare or unique as well.

It's a lifetime collection to go through that's been sitting in a garden several decades.

Have access to friends with large slabbing saws.

I'm probably going to go through and experiment with some, but ultimately will only be keeping a few specimen pieces from each locale. Probably dump the rest at a rock or mineral show or through consignment.

Cheers!

Found a bunch of cheap motion control parts. Thinking of a large format polar printer ~400mm round table and 1100mm height.

My background is in mine engineering with a lot of hands on mech/elec hobbies. Specialized in automation and instrumentation to retrofit industrial equipment/control systems. Built and repaired a bunch of printers. Heavy into marlin FW and custom builds but Klipper looks like a much better choice here.

Main purpose is for replicating large bones, skulls, molds for concrete, composites, larger greenhouse/garden things. So loss in resolution and stepping as things get close to rotation is less of an issue. Most of these types of models lend themselves well to vase mode printing on the simple stuff. Maybe some light press and sheet metal hammer forming dies for car stuff. Might also like the option to mount a spindle and be able to drill out bolt patterns and similar or use a laser via CNC.

I've got some nice salvaged slip rings with an 11 bit absolute encoder that can do 15A through two pairs each. I also have access to enough machine tools to make a decent rotary bed. Heated wouldn't be an issue. Have some really nice surplus 250mm thrust ball bearings from some type of industrial gearbox reducer that look like they'd do quite nice for this application

One thing I was pondering is bed alignment and flatness and how to hold enough tolerance to build successfully without bed height issues. This will also be exacerbated by the large build volume.

Two ways to compensate in my mind:

-one would be to probe in polar coordinates and apply similar to a correction mesh based on probing. I plan to implement this regardless as it'll help reliability

-second would be with a beefy enough frame and rotary table and steel disc I could attach a rotary tool to the gantry with a grinding wheel and square the build plate that way to minimize any misalignment. It seems like that would get me as close to level as possible once assembled. I don't have access to a lathe that can face a 300-400mm bed.

Thoughts on those approaches?

The other one is high volume hot ends. I'm really considering a crusher for my various iterations and prototyping done in cheap petG. Being able to recycle it would be nice since I can end up throwing out 20-30kg of various printed parts a year that would otherwise be useful. Probably a screw type extruder. I've mucked around with small injection molding machines in the past and some of the hobby level precious plastics stuff to recycle hdpe. I was thinking a variable pitch screw, but everything available on the cheap aftermarket look pretty flimsy and the expensive ones don't give a lot of insight as to how they're built. Has anybody repurposed desktop injection molding parts? I was thinking of crushing to a size where it can fill a small hopper on the hot end via pneumatic transport from a larger recycle bin. Any thoughts or experience on a practicality level as to how these pellet style extruder perform and how reliable they are in actual production usage?

Starting to look up some historical builds. Anything really obvious I should be considering from a design perspective?

TL;DR straight to point questions, history, then my rambling supposition from mount stupid on the dunning-kruger below that. Ammonite is from different project in the works. please ignore.

1. Are which pieces obviously not from the large bone? I will set aside for later. Any obvious IDs would be appreciated. I've outlined what I find are questionable in the outlined pictures at end.

2. Anything diagnostic for a better ID on the large bone now that limb ends have found a few more pieces abs features are slightly clearer?

3. Are we able to approximately count/split pieces into stuff to set aside, would you mind marking anything to help save me puzzle time that can be confidently ID'd as different and not just a hunch.

Context:

Vintage paleotourist collection that got dumped on family farm when he died. Large bone is believed to be a femur. Claimed anecdotally to be from a T rex in Hell Creek or Lance creek summer expedition. He also spent time and many trips in SW Saskatchewan and AB badlands, as well as multiple confirmed trips to Utah and Arizona.

Previous tentative but very low certainty IDs had leaned towards ceratopsian origin mostly by size and level of likelihood as far as what's commonly found and would be in a private collection.

History:

Got a chance to sort latest rock pile pull from 50s-70s paleo/geo tourist teacher. A lifetime of collection that got dumped into a rock pile on their family farm. Mostly badlands/hell creek/montana/Wyoming/dakotas and then a special interest in pet wood and minor in agates/jasper lapidary. Not sure how much of the lapidary stuff was self-collected. About 2 yards of material left to sort through.

Paraloid is mixing up to get brushed on. CA to fit extremely tight chips as I slowly pick out the deceptive fossil palm chips and other look alike minerals. This is everything that I am confident is related to bone fossils or surrounding matrix.

My observations:

- There appears to be a large femur with relatively intact ends. There is a significant quantity of bone fragments that appear to roughly match various sections that are identifiable.

-There are a number of bone fragments that have different mineralization and structure/dimensions, likely from different areas and suspect a few are more modern bone.

- obviously different textures or spare parts are outlined in last pics.