Silver (wires) on Acanthite

Item Description

A fine quality, showy, dramatic and sculptural cabinet sized display specimen covered with gorgeous and thick nests of brightly burnished, curled and curved Silver wires set on a knobby matrix of solid, crudely crystallized Acanthite from a discovery at the Imiter Mine in Morocco from the early 2000s. The Silver wires in the multitude of nests are a marvel to behold, especially up close as they are beautiful under magnification. As you can see, the former dealer label has a $3,500 price (from about 15 years ago), which might have been a little high back in the day, but not unheard of for such a rich and beautiful piece when they came out around 2004. Since very little has been available in the last decade or so from Imiter, this price is now probably just below fair market value for the size and quality of the piece, and I could it see it at retail of $4,000+. What makes the piece so impressive to me is that aside from the beautiful wires, it is also rich silver ore! Hefty at 546 grams or 1.2 pounds. Better in person, and certainly worth adding to any suite of Silvers or minerals of Morocco.
From the collection of Armon McPherson, a retired physicist, now living in New Mexico. Armon received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1985, and worked at the laser laboratory at the University of Illinois at Circle Center. In the summer of 1997, Armon moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he worked at the Advanced Photon Source, then the world’s largest synchrotron facility dedicated as an x-ray source. In 2001, he was asked to join a team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque to conduct laser research for DARPA. Finally, staying within Sandia, he transferred to the Z Facility, the world’s most powerful x-ray facility. He retired in the spring of 2017. Armon's introduction to mineral collecting came in the 1980s during graduate school when he attended his first mineral show. He took up the hobby of faceting gems, and focused his early collection on gem crystals, and later transitioned into collecting non-gem species. We are proud to offer specimens from his worldwide mineral collection here for you.