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I wasnt going to start this crab till Febuary but was sick and tired of trying to finish up some of B-Grade crabs and started this today. I had some really high hopes for this crab. I get started removing rock and finally got down to crab, and,,,,,,, DANG!!! Ran into the ventral side! DANG!!! Went into the house and made me a wiskey and coke and sat back down to think about this. Thought to myself, "ok, I might as well do a ventral side". A bit scary since ive never really done this side before and realized that Im gunna have to attack it in a steep bowl style of prep. Gunna be real interesting. Just hope I can do a good job? I dont know this side of a crab so im going to take it slow. My fingers are crossed. RB

I started this one today. Went deep to try and find the carapace and BAM!!! Hit the dang carapace!!! I hate that but it does happen. Here are pics of different stages of prep so far. got a ways to go but after that monster big concretion from New Zealand, its nice to see progress so soon!! RB

Ive been off and on working on some very sticky crabs these last few days. I don't like working on them but they are great for what I call 'gas crabs'. You can still get good crabs from sticky concretions, but they do take more concentration and more time. Only bad thing is,,, if it turns out to be a very bad crab then you've just waisted 3, 4 hours or more. I did just that the other day. Took about 4 hours to get the carapace exsposed and find the claw and legs on the left side, then found nothing on the right side but 'crab bits'. Finding crab bits is almost always a very bad thing! So I simply picked up another 'sticky' crab and went to town. Here is what ive done so far on this one. No telling wether or not I will finish it, that is up to the crab. RB

Here is a crab I got from John Spina. This poor crab has almost no leg to speak of but has some very nice 'leoperd spots' on the arms. Im going to build a bunch of legs on this one. I also used a special 1 inch cube made by Ray-Aero Grower for scale. Thanks so much Ray. I feel I need to somehow reciprocate. That was just super duper nice of you. This is going to take some time cause im now back to working on the house and im gunna be gone for a week or so going to Washinton to go get me some more crab concretions. Could be 3 or 4 weeks, maybe more? RB

I didn't want to drag this on, so I finished this up first before I posted it. I traded for this concretion last summer and actually had it traded again to another fellow. Once I realized it had some major problems I decided to go ahead and prep it out and not trade it. The worst kind of trade is when one or both party's are not happy. When I first took a look at this crab I figured it was a perty good crab. Then I sliced off some rock with my water saw and took another look at it and realized it had some rather bad placement for the claws and also would take a ton of glue to get it back together. The legs has some bad preservation and the arms too, but that's mother nature. One of the good things is that it has 5 tippy tips! Just no claws! This crab was a very tuff crab to prep and took about 40 hours to finish it up! It does have some slight disarticulation and is missing a couple of pieces too. In these first two pictures I was worried and wondering if it had any leg on the right side. I knew it had lots of leg on the left side only cause I had to glue back on a big piece of rock that also had some leg in it.