The studio
One bench, one hillside at a time
Enduring Wood is small on purpose. Everything sold here was picked up by hand within a short drive of Parker, Colorado, and finished in a garage workshop about ten minutes from where it was found.
How this started
It started the way it usually does around here — walking a wash after a hard rain and noticing that one of the rocks had grain in it. Then noticing that a lot of them did.
The ground around Parker sits on the Dawson Arkose, a soft, crumbly sandstone that erodes quickly and leaves behind everything harder than itself. Petrified wood is much harder than itself. Give a hillside a wet spring and it will hand you pieces of a Cretaceous forest.
A cheap rotary tumbler turned into a better one, then into a saw, then into a bench with torches on it. What did not change is where the material comes from: found on foot, one piece at a time, on ground we have permission to be on.
What we will not do
No dye and no stabilizer. Some petrified wood on the market is dyed to punch up the reds, or resin-stabilized to make crumbly material hold together. Both are legitimate techniques and both are usually undisclosed. We do neither — if a piece is not solid enough to survive a four-week tumble on its own, it goes back in the yard.
No bulk buying. Nothing here was bought by the pallet at a show and relabeled. If we did not walk it up, it is not on this site.
No mystery sourcing. Ask about any piece and we will tell you which drainage it came out of and roughly when.
In the workshop
What actually happens to a stone
Weeks 1–2 · Shaping
Coarse silicon carbide grit knocks the sharp edges off and reveals whether the piece is solid all the way through. A surprising number crack here, which is the point — better in the barrel than on someone's ear.
Week 3 · Smoothing
Medium grit and then pre-polish take out the scratches from the previous stage. Skipping or shortening this step is the single most common reason tumbled stones come out cloudy.
Week 4 · Polish
Cerium oxide with plastic pellets as a cushion. This is where agatized material starts to look wet, and where you find out which pieces are showpieces.
After · The bench
Stones destined for jewelry get sawn, ground to a cabochon on diamond wheels, sanded through five grades and polished on leather before any metal is touched.
Commissions
We are happy to work from a stone you found yourself — plenty of people in Douglas County have a piece on a shelf that deserves better. Send a photo with something for scale and we will tell you honestly whether it will take a polish.
Turnaround for a commission is usually three to five weeks, longer if we need to go find material in a particular color.