Is It Common To Really Dislike A Batch?

*S* First off, sounds like you need a bit more patience. No reason to open up a batch in coarse grind at all till it's turned 7-8 days and then, for most quartz gems, you'll just rinse, recharge with grit, and set her to rolling again. Most quartz gems don't look like much until after at least three or four weeks in coarse with weekly recharges. Maybe less if you start with river rounded pebbles or beach stones where some shaping has been done by nature. As far as the color of your slurry goes, silicon carbide grit breaks down to a gray slurry but if there's lots of iron, hematite or manganese in the rocks, you're mixing in red or black oxides when you grind. Thus the different colors. Poppy jasper for instance, often contains lots of hematite ( an iron compound) so the slurry may be any shade of red or brown. Just take your time in coarse and go for nice rounded smooth shapes before moving stones on, make sure you tumble stones of similar hardness, and you'll nail down good batches all the time....Mel

I've had to run some rocks for a month in coarse (with weekly recharges) before I was satisfied that they were ready for the next stage. I've got a number of rocks set aside to trim/grind before I tumble them again.

Yes, patience is the key.

And as Mel said, the slurry color changes depending on the rock. I was trimming some basalt matrix off of some Thomsonites and the mud coming off the Dremel was red (even though the basalt was black). Again, as Mel said, there was iron in it.

As far as disliking rocks, I've had some that I haven't liked even after they were polished. I also go geocaching and the ugly rocks frequently end up in caches for kids to find.

Chuck

Hey, did I hear geocaching? I was wondering how many other RTH'ers were also cachers. My son has picked up polished rocks out of caches lots of times and he loves them. Now that we are into tumbling ourselves, we are planning on putting a cache out there that is nothing but polished rocks. Let others take what they want and we'll just keep filling it up. We are also planning on using some polished rocks (not just the ugly ones) as trade items.

Back on topic: I have some plain rocks (I wouldn't say ugly, just not pretty, so plain) in my batches right now, I'm just curious as to how they will look when they come out. It also depends on what you are going to do with them. If you are going to make jewelry, then you probably want them all to be breathtaking. If you are going to fill a jar for display, then why not have a couple plain ones mixed in to make the others look that much better?

Steve

Here is what I do to keep my paitence (or lack thereof in some cases) in check...

I usually leave a coarse batch in the tumbler for 7-10 days, sometimes longer depending on my schedule. When it is time to recharge the grit, I inspect the rocks one by one, and I remove the ones I'm satisfied with, and replace them with new raw material. This way, I'm constantly removing and adding a portion of the material to the tumbler. I run my rotory pretty much 24-7.

I have a constant supply of new material, however. I have literally buckets full of rocks waiting to be tumbled. I collect rocks pretty much year round. I work for the DOT, so I'm outdoors a lot, and much of my work places me in areas that have good material to collect. Most days I come home with a pocket full of agates, quartz, whatever.... I could stop collecting tomorrow, and it would still probably take me a few years to tumble all the rocks I currently have on hand...

The only "drawback" to this is the fact that I'm constantly mixing different materials in the tumbler. But in all honesty, I haven't frequently run into problems doing this. There are notable exceptions to this...if I have a batch of very soft or easily damaged material, I tumble them seperately. I do however try to polish like materials together for the most part, when I remove material from the coarse grind I try to seperate them into batches of simialr material. But I have found as long as the all the material is somewhat similar in hardness, I can usually polish them together with no problem.

As for pitted/fractured material, that tends to be a judgement call. With some of them you can only grind them down so far, the pits or fractures will never be completely removed. As long as there are no jagged or sharp edges on the material, and I can clean the pits and fractures out to prevent carryover, I have no problem with putting them in the next stage if I'm happy with the basic shape.

Mike

I used to have a Premium Member only cache called the "Concrete Quarry Geode Cache".
(I made it PMO to keep it from being raided by unscrupulous freebie users)

It was a rather evil hide as the co-ords would put you right in the middle of a pit quarry partly filled with crushed concrete bits and the cache was tucked under one of the small slab fragments amidst a zillion possible hidey holes.

A few people with good GPSr's and/or good luck found it within 10 min but most needed half an hour or more of turning over rubble before stumbling onto it.
One poor couple spent two hours on two attempts before finding it but hey, that's how she goes sometimes when yer a prospectin'. ;D

The booty made it worth the hunt though, a 4"x8" Lock&Lock stuffed with all kinds of cool rocks and minerals, all packaged and labelled with BG info on each specimen including a generous quantity of nice quality loose tumbled stones in a ziploc with a note "Pick your favorite and keep it, I'll make more!"

Honestly, I thought it would get "muggled" inside of a year but ultimately it's demise was met by heavy equipment that actually came to clear out the rubble after almost 8yrs that I can remember it being there. One day I was in the area & went to check on it and there was NOTHING and I mean NOTHING left in the quarry!! D'oh!

I archived the listing and have yet to make a replacement somewhere else. I'm thinking of calling my next one "Rock-In The Cache Box"
I'll just make it an all members listing, keep it stocked with polished rocks and imply a rock/mineral trading theme in the description and see what happens...

Okay .... dumb question .....

I have/had already started a batch/baggy of rocks that I felt would not even make it through the first grit and some raggedy partial polished stones.

Are these the caching/box mixes you are talking about?

They are OK rocks, but I would/will not use them ....

Again ..... my humble thanks
Julie