He stands about four feet tall and is three feet wide.  Big John is a 24″ rock slabbing saw.  He acquired his name from our daughter, who helped us move him into his home in the rock shop, weighing several hundred pounds.

Powered by a large electric motor, Big John was built about the middle of the last century and is a work horse of our shop, cutting rock into slabs or slices. The rock is clamped into a vise, that rides slowly along a gear driven track, into the path of the saw blade:  a steel blade, impregnated with diamonds, that grinds away at the rock, bathed in a cutting oil.

“You actually made that?” people often exclaim.  Yes we do and Big John  is a big part of that process.

This coming weekend we will be showing at the Oxnard Salsa Festival, just north of Los Angeles.  120,000 people find this event popular each year.  We are looking forward to it.

The slag is jet black, the silicate rich remains of the furnace used the extract the copper from the host rock.  This molten material was cast aside and grew to this mound, taller than a house.

The men of Rosalie would hold community dances on this slag pile, almost perfectly flat – it made a good dance floor.  Life in the desert, a hundred years ago.

You can see this mound from the I-15, in the desert – if you know where to look.

A century ago, in the Mojave desert, men dug out these living quarters under layers of caliche – conglomerates of rock and sand.  They were copper miners.  America needed copper for wire. Electricity was becoming popular.

The site of these dwellings is just a few minutes drive from I-15, a site called Rosalie. Sherry and I visited this site recently, between shows.