Post by chistaya on Aug 7, 2017 9:42:29 GMT -5
As a good newbie, I checked whether this had been covered before, but I either did the wrong searches, or I've bumbled into the forum with a question nobody has been weird enough to ask before.
I'm a hobbyist jewelry maker and I like buying bunches of cheap strings of stone beads online. Occasionally, I'll get a strand where a bead I'll want to save has a problem (false-start drill hole, gash from bad cutting, surface chip, etc.). I'll fill the blip with a hard-curing adhesive, then I'll hand sand the spot down, but I have problems recovering something vaguely close to the original finish in the surrounding area, even considering how modest my expectations are.
For softer stones and duller finishes, sanding until smooth and buffing with a bit of beeswax yields a decent repair, but I've not having any luck with harder, shinier stones. Right now, I have four sets of patients in my bead hospital: some red jasper top-drilled nuggets, a pair of flat, teardrop-shaped rutilated quartz beads, some tawny brown/olive green mystery rounds that I'm guessing are from the serpentine family (from the feel of sanding, I'm estimating a Mohs of 5-ish), and some unknown dark-green flat ovals with peachy inclusions/veins that might be a jasper (look a little like green marble--more veiny than grainy--but way harder, Mohs of at least 6).
No matter how careful I am, the repaired areas are dwarfed by the matte area created from sanding the fill back down. Does anyone have ideas for improvements? Keep hand working with my 12000 sandpaper pads? Use some sort of buffing compound with denim? Toss them a group at a time in a rock tumbler with polishing and cushioning media and hope they shine up before they fracture? Spray them with clear Krylon? Please don't say, "Throw them out and buy better beads next time." I can't even thin seedlings when I garden, and I'm just making costume jewelry for my own amusement, not trying to get on the art fair circuit, and now it's the principle of the darn thing.
Thanks for your expertise...
P.S. I'm not selling the jewelry I make or otherwise defrauding anyone by trying to pass off C grade stones as higher quality, so it's not an ethical issue.
I'm a hobbyist jewelry maker and I like buying bunches of cheap strings of stone beads online. Occasionally, I'll get a strand where a bead I'll want to save has a problem (false-start drill hole, gash from bad cutting, surface chip, etc.). I'll fill the blip with a hard-curing adhesive, then I'll hand sand the spot down, but I have problems recovering something vaguely close to the original finish in the surrounding area, even considering how modest my expectations are.
For softer stones and duller finishes, sanding until smooth and buffing with a bit of beeswax yields a decent repair, but I've not having any luck with harder, shinier stones. Right now, I have four sets of patients in my bead hospital: some red jasper top-drilled nuggets, a pair of flat, teardrop-shaped rutilated quartz beads, some tawny brown/olive green mystery rounds that I'm guessing are from the serpentine family (from the feel of sanding, I'm estimating a Mohs of 5-ish), and some unknown dark-green flat ovals with peachy inclusions/veins that might be a jasper (look a little like green marble--more veiny than grainy--but way harder, Mohs of at least 6).
No matter how careful I am, the repaired areas are dwarfed by the matte area created from sanding the fill back down. Does anyone have ideas for improvements? Keep hand working with my 12000 sandpaper pads? Use some sort of buffing compound with denim? Toss them a group at a time in a rock tumbler with polishing and cushioning media and hope they shine up before they fracture? Spray them with clear Krylon? Please don't say, "Throw them out and buy better beads next time." I can't even thin seedlings when I garden, and I'm just making costume jewelry for my own amusement, not trying to get on the art fair circuit, and now it's the principle of the darn thing.
Thanks for your expertise...
P.S. I'm not selling the jewelry I make or otherwise defrauding anyone by trying to pass off C grade stones as higher quality, so it's not an ethical issue.