Help.. I need some veteran advise.

The only real scratches I see are from the 80 grit, so go to the next wheel otherwise you are wasting your time.

A lesson most of us learn the hard way. The toughest thing for me is seeing the scratches. Drying and inspecting, rubbing a pencil. Sometimes I need to get to the polish to see them. It is frustrating. When working with softer jaspers they are more forgiving. 80 grit scratches unless really deep can be fixed with the 280 or 600 soft. Porcelain jaspers and agates can't.

Thank you for the tip and suggestion.

You're getting a lot of great tips. That is a tough little piece to work with. It has the softer dark sections that undercut, meaning it will grind easier than the agate and wear away faster and the small particles of that matrix, the soft darker host rock, can contaminate the agate causing scratches. You could try grinding on the 220 wheel but stay in one direction on the stone either lengthwise or widthwise, and then move to the next wheel, 280 and grind in the opposite direction. That way you will see which scratches get removed. I hope that makes sense.

Drying needs to be an extent that the precipitate from grinding is dry and shows up in the scratches.

This is a high dome Montana (almost 10mm) that I completed today. Despite careful inspection, I needed to go back to my worn 80

6 times.

I worked on this Blue Mountain at the same time as the Montana. I still had to repeat steps but it didn't put up as much of fight.