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Post by puppie96 on Mar 15, 2004 1:29:52 GMT -5
Hey Michigan Rocks -- I still haven't figured out how to put pix up here, but my rubies look a lot like yours. I've got them in various stages including a batch that I've tried to polish several times. As time has gone on, transparent, glassy pieces that shine immediately have popped up in the tumbles, but they are rare and usually small. The best of mine look better than yours, more color, more a look of transparence/translucence. The problem is, I still haven't figured out how to get a glossy surface. Some are iridescent and have some gloss, but for the most part they are frosted on the outside and you can see that if you could just get the frost off, they would be beautiful. But how. I'm going to check out the links mentioned, too. Thanks.
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MichiganRocks
starting to spend too much on rocks
"I wasn't born to follow."
Member since April 2007
Posts: 154
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Post by MichiganRocks on Mar 15, 2004 4:41:57 GMT -5
I have mine back in for more rough grinding now. I plan to run them for 5 days, recharge and run for 5 more days. This will give me a total of 40 days in rough grind. If they aren't ready for the next stage by then, I'll have to table them again for a while to free up the tumbler. I'm holding off buying anything for polish, in case I can discover any new information. I have been searching extensively as well and the more I search and the more I read the more confusing it gets! I'm thinking right now that I'll go with my original plan and buy 20 grams of 100,000 mesh diamond powder. I will make a slurry myself that will hopefully be sticky enough to coat all of the rocks and let them tumble that way for a while. Depending on what happens, I can then add more liquid to see what that does. I don't plan on using water though, not unless I just need to thin the slurry. As long as I stay with a water based liquid I can still dilute the slurry in order to separate the diamonds back out later so that I don't lose them. I have thought about polishing dry, but no one out there talks about that at all. Thought maybe mixing the diamond with something like cornmeal and then running dry might work. Of course I wouldn't be able to reclaim the diamond that way. At the rate that my 9 pounds is shrinking, I'll probably be able to just polish them by hand one by one just as quickly!
Ron
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Post by puppie96 on Mar 15, 2004 5:47:20 GMT -5
I don't know, Ron. I've thought about all of this, too. Aren't you using exclusively barrels? I've been doing mine back and forth between vibe and barrels. I'm not sure diamond would work in a barrel and it would chew the heck out of the rubber, don't you think? There would be such a tiny amount of diamond and I'm not sure it would stick to the stones. Did you notice the premixed diamond sprays and the stuff in tubes?
I know what you mean about tying up the barrels with this stuff. I have just gone on hiatus, like last week I realized I had 3 barrels and the vibe all going on rubies and sapphires. This stuff could make you crazy.
My mother in law died in December and now her house is on the market. We went over there today kind of to say good by, and I noticed in the back yard under the porch, kind of as fill, was all this ROCK! Specifically, it was beautiful ocean or river tumbled rock, oval and round perfect shapes with smooth surfaces in shades of orange, red, yellow, and white, some banded. I'd never seen this before and where it came from is a mystery, but evidently it wasn't there originally. She liked to travel and the ocean, but this would have been more rock than you'd bring back on a trip! So I collected as much of this as I could carry, figured that my Christmas gift to the inlaws this year will be sacks of tumbled back yard rock from their Mom's house. I was so excited, I said those sapphires could sit around and rot for now, and put a barrelfull of the backyard rock in prepolish. I bet that and a final polish will be perfect. Can't wait to see. Finally something with almost instant gratification, unlike those .... rubies!
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