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What is worth prepping


Malcolmt

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I am often asked by people  "Is this worth prepping?" The answer often is that it all depends. There is no guarantee that an unprepped specimen will be complete or that it will even prep out nicely. Some specimens are just to thin skinned or flakey or there really is little actual fossil there (mostly cast). It is my experience that prepping most common fossils will not increase the value of a specimen by as much as the prep will cost. If an average eldredgeops from New York costs about $20 to $50 to have prepped, depending on mostly the size, is it really worth prepping it when you can buy one for say $35 to $50 that is already prepped. A lot of the people I prep for it is the "first" of a species or the first prone trilobite that they ever found. So it is the associated value to them that makes the fossil worth prepping. I recently prepped a ceraurus for a US customer that was the first ceraurus he/she had found and was in their opinion the best trilobite they had ever found. Here is a picture of how it looked unprepped as I received it. 

 

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It was obvious to me that there was a missing left genal spine and that the pygidial spines would likely not be complete. I relayed this information to the owner along with a preparation cost estimate of $60 to $100 US depending on how the bug responded to preparation and what if any repairs were needed. So the question is would I have paid that amount to have a bug prepped that would not be museum quality pristine when it was completed. For me the answer is likely not because I have quite a few pristine ceraurus already and although this one looked to be large and highly inflated it probably would not end up with a place in my display cabinet. So for me the answer was not that hard to come to. Equally for the owner of this bug it was an easy decision as it was in their opinion likely the best specimen if not the only specimen they were likely ever to find themselves as this one had taken countless years of collecting to find.

 

Here is the bug about an hour into prepping. Very little scribe work was done as there was very little bulk matrix. All prep work is done under an Olympus zoom scope at 10 to 20x magnification. The initial air abrasion was done on a Comco MB1000 at 50 to 60 PSI using 40 micron dolomite with a .025 nozzle. 

 

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An interesting and unexpected surprise was to find the hypostome still attached to the bug.. Given this knowledge in advance I would likely have prepped this for myself if it was mine as I do not have a ceraurus with hypostome intact. 

 

 

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Now here is the almost completed bug. Final prep was done with a .015 nozzle at 30 PSI with 40 micron dolomite. A few small minor repairs can be seen in white which still need to be colour matched to the fossil .  These were not burn throughs from over abrasion but actual defects in the fossil that I felt repairing would enhance the final aesthetics of the specimen. Remember this is going into a collection of an older amateur collecting enthusiast that has not found a lot of trilobites in their life. 

 

 5b2800f8768b6_Ceraurus1.thumb.jpg.c08947947587d2206745b2cbe82596c5.jpg

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Note how highly inflated the specimen is

 

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By the way that is the pygidial spines from another ceraurus in front of the lip of the big bug.

 

Now I am probably breaking a Peppers secret society rule by disclosing the cost for the prep. There is very little information on the internet regarding actual costs for having a fossil prepared. We seem to be like magicians not wanting to disclose our trade secrets. People are often surprised by how much it actually costs to get a fossil prepped. By the time you take electricity, supplies and wear and tear on the equipment  (not to mention the original investment in the equipment)  Preparators are lucky to get a minimum wage. My hats off to those who eke out a living this way.  So what did it actually cost.......  $80 US plus shipping ....... What s the bug worth.... well priceless to the owner. So here's the question.... would you have paid to have this bug prepped knowing what the costs was going to be..

 

Now gotta get back to matching the colour on those white spots.... Hate doing that worst part of the whole prep

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Nice write up and prep work! I'm sure the owner of this bug will be very happy with the end result.

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One can only hope... but if they dont want it they can leave it with me...lol

 

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Nice work!  Can I ask what material you are using for the repair work.  I think I remember reading a post you wrote a while ago about your repair process, but could not find it when I searched for it last night.  Your prep posts are invaluable, thanks for taking the time to share them! 

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No, not museum material but still really pretty.  Good enough for my cabinet.  Great prep!

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I've actually seen museum pieces that weren't this nice. Outstanding prep work.

 

 

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Great prep job!  Well worth the price for a self-collected fossil in my opinion, especially if you don't have the option of going out and finding a better one.

 

Don

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You do nice work Malcolmt.   For myself, I would not pay but thats only cause I would do it myself.   Or try to. 

 

RB

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RJB... yes but you also have the ability to do the prep... for some people it is just out of the question because they just don't have the proper tools or experience. I always tell people start to learn on simple common fossils and don't move on to the rarer and more tough to prep stuff until you can do the simple ones in your sleep. Far too easy to destroy a rare or delicate fossil because you are using the wrong abrasive or too much PSI or your scribe when you should be abrading or vice versa. 

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I would certainly pay that for my first Ceraurus. However, it would be nice to have an idea of how likely it is to be complete. I tend to pre-prep things up to the point where I think I have something good, but (hopefully) before I screw up something really nice. The more I practice prepping, the more I appreciate the abilities of an experienced, skilled prepper.

I have what may be a very nice Gabriceraurus that I found a few months ago. It is turning out to be a really difficult prep, with calcite coatings gluing small bits of other shell material on the trilobite. I have considered sending it to a professional. The problem is, I can't tell if the pygidium is present and buried or missing. The matrix gets progressively harder as you go deeper. It would be fairly expensive "exploratory surgery" to find out that nothing is down there. Maybe I should try to x-ray it. 

"Don't force it, just use a bigger hammer"

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An xray will generally not show you anything as there is little difference in the density of the matrix and the exo skeleton of the trilobite. I have seen some xrays of pritized bugs that are good but then there is a big density difference.

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23 minutes ago, Malcolmt said:

An xray will generally not show you anything as there is little difference in the density of the matrix and the exo skeleton of the trilobite. I have seen some xrays of pritized bugs that are good but then there is a big density difference.

 

That's what I assumed. Someone needs to come up with a high rez ultrasound that can resolve fossils in hard matrix. 

"Don't force it, just use a bigger hammer"

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/18/2018 at 2:22 PM, Malcolmt said:

Now I am probably breaking a Peppers secret society rule by disclosing the cost for the prep.

You are officially excommunicated from the mysterious order of fossil preppers. :D Great thread. I also get asked often if a fossil is worth prepping. My response is similar to yours... it is if the owner feels like it is worth it. Value is definitely in the eye of the beholder and I have prepped a bunch of fossils for people that I wouldn't do for myself just because they wanted it.

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$80 is dirt cheap for what you did.  Now whether the fossil was worth it is another question, but I would vote yes.  In the IT industry I’m used to billing $60 to $150 or more per hour for technicians whose skill level comparatively speaking is less than yours.  But I guess you wouldn’t have many customers at those kinds of rates.  If a business’s computers are down they are willing to pay exorbitant rates to get them back on line.  You probably don’t get many people calling you up saying, “my business is shut down and I need you to prep this trilobite as quickly as possible to get it back up and running.”   :shrug:

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1 hour ago, Ptychodus04 said:

You are officially excommunicated from the mysterious order of fossil preppers. :D Great thread. I also get asked often if a fossil is worth prepping. My response is similar to yours... it is if the owner feels like it is worth it. Value is definitely in the eye of the beholder and I have prepped a bunch of fossils for people that I wouldn't do for myself just because they wanted it.

I agree 

 

But I will disagree with the x-ray comments made above.  Paciphacops mentioned that he has some sort of trilobite that might be worth x-raying.  Yes, I say.  It is often easy enough to talk the local hospital into doing an x-ray of a rock for free.  They get top turn their machines WAY up, which they never do on actual patients.  Different fossils in different matrices x-ray differently.  Give it a try.   

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I did not think that an ordinary xray was likely to show anything unless it was a pyritized fossil. The pictures I have seen published recently on trilobites were all done using synchotron radiation or high energy / HD CT scanners. I know there was a number of papers using this technique on phacopid eye structure. Regardless up here in Canada it is pretty much impossible to get a hospital to xray a fossil unless you are a university researcher. In Canada we have far fewer privately owned facilities than you do in the States.

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If an X-ray ever seems necessary for a sample, I would suggest approaching a Non Destructive Testing lab rather than a hospital.  They have no qualms about what material they test, and they can use whatever power is necessary for the material being x-rayed.  

https://www.labtesting.com/services/nondestructive-testing/x-ray-inspection/ 

(this is just a random example of a lab..not a recommendation)

Everything is generated through your own will power ~ Ray Bradbury
 

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