People and Their Hobbies

Greenstone Jewellery
Mr Haines is a man of many parts. As well as his antique firearms hobby, he has another - the making of beautiful jewellery from greenstone. He secured his greenstone from the West Coast in huge boulders and breaks them down to manageable proportions with a mud saw of his own design (bottom left). For this he uses two pieces of a cross cut saw, but not the teeth of the saw. The cross cut, sawing away patiently, cuts through the greenstone at the rate of an inch every 8 hours. The friction of the steel blade and the mixture of water and grit does the cutting. The smaller pieces are then cut even smaller on a diamond-tooth saw. After being cut to size, the pieces are designed and polished on a machine which Mr Haines also designed and made. The finished greenstone is then set into mountings. In his home Mr Haines has a display case full of examples of his work. He displayed some of them for us at left. In this collection, also, are specimens of jasper, agate and rodenite, as well as greenstone.

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Mrs Margaret Haines shows a small off-cut of greenstone alongside two blocks of greenstone that have been broken down by the mud saw

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Found around the Kaikoura coast were these fossilised shell and crab, both in the heart of rocks (their age has been estimated at between 25 and 30 million years).