I decided to get caught up on yard work and mulching and cleaned up some of my fluorite I recently found at the Eureka Mine near Marion, Kentucky, the past few weeks as well. I dipped them into muriatic acid to clean off the massive amounts of calcite that we found them in this year, and burned the calcite crusts and druse coverings off, as you can see in the following images….I do this outside on a fairly windy day so there is no danger of fumes and I place the tray up high so no pets or kids can get to it either, plus I always stay right nearby….

here are some images of the main cluster I wanted to clean off…

and…

…and here it is, cooking in the acid in the tray…

..and up close in one corner of the tray…

..and here you can see the progress I`m making with it…

..it actually burned it off quite quickly, I was impressed with it cause I wasnt standing there very long before I was pulling it out and turning it around and putting it back in…

..and here is is drying off….

..and here are several others that I was able to clean off as well…

..and one showing calcite holding the crystals together more or less….so I`m going to leave it as is…

this one started off looking like this with calcite on it and palm sized….

..and then during the cleaning process, the acid ate so much calcite off, the piece literally disintegrated on me to wind up like this….

…I`ll be doing some more cleaning this weekend and will post more results then…