Is hoping for perfect too much?

[mention]rockinronda [/mention] loving your attitude and updates. Excited to see your progress!

That's not saying much, is it?  

JK, my friend!

Ronda’s rockin the double barrel!👍👍 Congrats and fun updates!
I’ll fess up I broke down and also ordered a Lortone from the Rock Shed. Just came yesterday. Just a single though. After last weeks news I started to worry.🤓

I didn’t get an answer to above question so I just tumbled it all again. I think my slurry is a bit watery in the first barrel, so I added a bit less this time. Also, even tho there was variation of size in the citrine only barrel, I don’t think there was enough variation so I split the rocks up equally between both barrels, like Rob (Michigan Rocks guy, jugglerguy in here) does, just didn’t weigh with a scale lol. Then cause of loss of volumn I added some more Hogg Mine stuff and then added small pebbles to fill the gaps. We‘ll see in a week if I adjusted correctly 🤷‍♀️

Looking good.  Really like the clear stuff.   When you say you had a lot of unspent grit, can you feel the grit in the slurry?   

It was absolutely the grit! Good grit finally got here. Set me back bout 2 weeks I guess. A week with no progress and a week with no grit. No noticeable change but I will be sure to post pics when there is something pretty to see ✨

I spent about my first 3 years in frustration with materials like that that are widely sold--various forms of crystal quartz.  Much of it is processed to size in a pendulum rock mill or pendulum rock crusher.  If you study how these work, you will see why most of it is fractured like all get out.  

I've had better luck at rock shops picking through pieces and getting some of the larger pieces that are less fractured, not that that's very easy to do with for instance rose quartz.  The bulk sellers of this material on eBay, Amazon, etc. at very low prices seem to have the worst fractured of it.

You can do the Opticon trt before processing the rock, though it consumes more Opticon resin that way.  But it prevents grit from getting in the fractures and also some fractures will "optically disappear".  If you don't do it that early, maybe do it after rough grind before going to next step such as 220 to see how it might play out.  No matter if had done before, I ALWAYS Opticon before polish and this improves results a tremendous amount, not just a little.

This material is difficult to take to perfection.  I have bowls of it at home and it drives me nuts.  I do tend to tumble it only with itself and some filler.  I'm also noticed at times that one large rock of something, such as a pre-rounded lemon-size rock, in say a 12lb barrel helps all the pieces like you have process.  But, that one large rock must be rounded w/o any rough spots, dents, etc. to potentially damage and hang on the crystal quartz.  That one large rock can even be an agate or jasper etc.  I know this seems to go against CW...

A lot of mass gets ground away in my opinion before anything approaching perfection can be obtained.  And sometimes there is no getting past fractures that seem to go on forever.

The citrine and rose quartz looks exceptional. Very nice and clear rose quartz. I use lots of media when tumbling rose quartz and it takes a long time. Are you going to use ceramic media? Thanks for sharing.