Hey all, figured I’d do a brief intro before posting some photos for identification help.

I’m Chris from Tennessee, and I make marbles for the regional marble game known as “Rolley Hole”. Marbles are made from what the locals call “flint” though this term sure does confuse me. I’m no geologist, so when people start arguing here about flint vs chert vs chalcedony, etc my head does spin a bit. So I’m looking for a little help there…

So far I have made around 40 marbles from the local material around Livingston, Byrdstown, and Kingston Tennessee. I’m an oddball and find some unusual stuff that you don’t see players really using since they can’t find it, so my marbles are very different than the white material that’s most commonly used, but the hardest to find.

For this game we have to play with stone marbles since glass marbles are too hard and brittle, so they’ll break. A good marble is often a heirloom piece and can last a lifetime, though some guys here shoot with enough force that they’ll wear out. So material is pretty important.

There’s a marble form called “the marble connection” where there’s a ton of Rolley Hole resources for everything from gameplay to marble making.

To explain the process simply, we cut nodules using tile saws or lapidary saws (if you have the money) into 1” cubes. We then share these cubes into a rough sphere and spin these in cups made from old grinding wheels, bricks, diamond dressing sticks, etc by using a rubber wheel. Originally the process involved chipping a piece of material into a sphere and placing it in a hole in a stream, then letting it spin for months to years, but starting in the 1940s Bud Garrett (good guy to look up) started using electric washing machine motors for his marble making machine. Then you get into belt drive grinders powered by these motors, guys using pickup trucks to spin marbles, and then the refined craft it is today.

Really I can talk about it for ages but anyways, that’s what’s up.

Every year a national tournament is held at Standing Stone State park where this craft and game can be seen in action, and there’s a lot of info online for anyone wanting to jump into that rabbit hole.

Seems I can only add one photo which is unfortunate. I have many many photos to share.

Welcome to the RHL Rolley-Hole-Man! I hadn't heard of this game until you're introduction, so I'm glad you came. Is there a specific standards standards such as weight and dimension that the marbles have to be in order to qualify for play?  Yes, as IDLassie said, if you want to post multiple pictures you just need to click on the down pointing triangle next to Attachments.  Each time you click that it will add another slot for you to add another picture. Can't wait to see more Rolley Hole related pictures.

Scott LaBorde wrote on Oct 30^th, 2023 at 8:29am:



Apologies for the late reply. I thought I had notifications set up here but seem to have not done this or something. I did try clicking multiple photos and the forum was just not having it. I will add a link to the thread where I have a ton of photos posted.

To answer your questions, it's complicated in a sense and simple in another. There are no real "rules" in a sense, but more of this social honor system like you don't play with steel ball bearings or things like that. There is not, to the extent of my knowledge, a set weight for a marble. All these marbles are made from the same/similar material and have to be durable, and with what we look for in stones like how a laser can light them up for example, keeps the material pretty consistent and so the weight stays consistent.

There is one outlier to this that I'll mention. Since now days there's the internet and easier travel, material from other places does come in. One of the local marble makers made marbles for our marble kids here and he had some made from a black metallic material. He didn't know what it was, but kids being kids they all got at least 1 of these (leaving none for us adults to really look at). I held one, and it must have weighed twice as much as our "flint" marbles.

So fast forward a bit. During the children's Rolley Hole tournament I saw a player playing with one of these marbles. When their marble was hit, it went nowhere. When they hit an opponent, the opponent's marble went flying off. I brought it to the attention of my boss but nothing became of it.

On the flip side of that, if an adult had tried that there's no telling how the marble would have held up, plus the players have an honor system so it probably wouldn't have been tried.

Here is a link to the marble forum post with some good photos:

https://marbleconnection.com/topic/36265-making-rolley-hole-marbles-this-year/#c
omment-310740

Third photo from the bottom there is a reddish brown marble that is a poor marble for play, but was made from a material I found on a farm in east TN. There's all sorts of this odd banded material out there but it is oddly soft and my blade slices through it quickly compared to the proper material. When grinding on it, it often chips off in some unfortunate ways, so you have to start with a large cube and hope it works out to the sphere phase, then spin that sphere. This works quickly compared to a normal marble, taking less than an hour to shape it compared to 2-3 hours of a quartz marble.

Originally I was thinking this material was Tennessee Paint Rock Agate or something along those lines, but was told I was in the "wrong area" for this by a retired geologist in Oak Ridge. These pieces were found in the city of Kingston in Roane County. On the flip side of that, I have never seen these odd white nodules anywhere else.

If anyone has marble questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Anywhere I go I have the bad habit of talking and talking about Rolley Hole so I'm trying to hold back a bit.

JoeM wrote on Nov 6^th, 2023 at 9:26pm:


Lots to go over on my part for sure. I do highly recommend getting into making marbles, but it can be an addiction and obsession for many. I'll have to start a thread in the lapidary creations section at some point, though for a while I'm out of making marbles while I build my own setup.

If you search the forum using the search tool you should come across some Rolley Hole threads, or using Google they should come up. On that forum the primary thing there is indeed glass marbles and glass marble collecting (which I know nothing about).   It's easy for my threads to get buried with all the talk of glass there. On that forum I'm more of an oddball than anything since most people on there don't play marbles and are more there for nostalgia and collecting I think. The folks on there are very supporting though so it helps keeps it going, With glass vs stone, we only use stone for Rolley Hole and glass marbles are reserved for other games. Glass is too hard and brittle for play and some players will purposfully break glass marbles (as target marbles) to show they can do it.

I do have some uncut and partially cut pieces I can post, but I'm wondering how hard it would be for the folks on here to really see these pieces well. When I take a photo, a lot of detail sure gets lost. Many pieces have intricate patterns almost like lace doilies the old folks used to have on furniture.

On the varieties of quartz and grades of quality, I never have thought of it this way and that actually helps a whole lot. I started just calling it all "some form of quartz" when park visitors ask me about particular materials. I do like thinking of different grades of materials which helps me understand some of the more odd marbles I have laying around here.

To answer your question about the marble in pic 1, it  is not the brown marble in pic 10. It is however the marble in pic 2. It is a grey material that was in a very grey nodule. That was a small piece I found in a stream around here and was told from the start it wouldn't be a good marble as the players don't like anything grey. No one here plays with a grey marble because they are supposedly too brittle and hard.

The marble in pic 6 is the one that got me wondering about what material it is and the one I was thinking was some sort of paint rock Agate. The original piece was very layred and it was mostly layers of quartz with some brown sandy layers in-between I had to work around. 

Thinking now to my cubes I have now, I don't have much more for the grey stuff but did start finding material a laser really lights up (but it makes a greyish marble). I was told that if a laser really lights it up, it's a higher quality material and the laser will light it up regardless of color. That is how the very brown marbles and butterscotch marble are.

On the brown/butterscotch, those marbles all came from the same piece and I still have some that I haven't shaped yet. What was odd is one end made a couple white marbles, then as I got further in, it darkened.

Anyways I'll have to make a master thread of all this to keep up. Currently I'm occupied with so many projects plus moving that I do get sidetracked with it all. Kinda a chaotic period but no matter what, my mind always goes back to marbles. 

Okay, I don't know if this will be much help or not but here are some Tennessee/Kentucky chert nodules for examples of color and texture variety.
This first nodule is what I was thinking about for the “grey” rock you were talking about that was too 'brittle' to use. I've always heard it called Tennessee Hornstone. It's “classified” as a Chert. In the first picture I have a nodule of real English Flint from the chalk cliffs of Dover sitting next to it for comparison. The Hornstone has a weathered chalky rind and the English Flint was formed in chalk. That makes a big difference to geologists.
If we take a closer look at the fresh break where I knocked a flake off the side you can see how fine grained and glassy the material is. And in the little flake barely hanging on you can see that if the rock is cut thin enough, it's translucent. So according to geologist it's a Chert, but since it was used prehistorically to make spearpoints and tools, it's a Flint. And if you showed a piece that has been worked thin enough and polished to someone it would probably look like an Agate.
The same rock can have many different appearances.

And here are some Chert Nodules to get into Brown color. This rock has less fractures and is much more opaque than the grey hornstone. Even though Chert can be translucent, this looks like a Chert. Opaque like a Jasper instead of translucent like an Agate.
The little white flecks are inclusions in the rock and not just surface scratches. They would be a good clue for identification. This rock is very solid and hard. Would take a good polish and probably make good marbles.

Now those are the kind of nodules I often find, but discard. Kinda a bit different than what I'm looking for but I do often pick those up due to their shape. When I start to see the round shapes in them I always toss them.

What I keep is more clear and more quartz looking in this area, and a laser has to pass through and light up the whole nodule, at least from what I can see in the daylight. Sometimes it's handy to chip a piece from each end and shine the laser, and when I can see the laser through the whole nodule, it goes into the bag. All my nodules are stored at my parents so I don't have them at the moment.

On a somewhat related topic, I have been working on my marble making setup and was able to make a marble in around 30 minutes. I did have to stop and so some adjustments and modifications of the setup so it took really like 3 hours, but total marble time was pretty short. I did take some extra time to polish the marble which isn't needed for gameplay. Some players like a slick marble so it can fly from the hand a bit smoother, while others like a gritty marble because they say they have more control.

I used a 60 gritt diamond wheel to really cut quick, then used a rubber wheel to spin the marble in a cup made from a diamond dressing stick. I'll have to make another thread for all this still, but here's the video.

https://youtu.be/eTIyra7E6pQ