Questions about making beads

I would drill first for two reasons. It is fairly certain that you will have some breakage when drilling so break it before you tumble so you do not waste the space and time on something then break it. When you drill there is also a good chance that there will be a little breakage when the drill exits the stone but the tumble should clean that up.

Drilling little pieces is a pain in the butt so what I would do is lay out a slab and drill all the holes before you cut the slab. Then you can make all your cuts and presto you have beads. Just lay it out so that the saw cut leaves the same material as the thickness of the slab if you want them square. If you want them odd sizes just drill a bunch of holes and cut somewhere between them. If you use a cap brick (the one that goes on top with no holes) it makes the drilling much easier. Put the brick in a tub, lay the slab on the brick then add water until it just covers the slab. Drill away. I have pics and a tut on here if you need a better idea than my explanation. I am not a beader so I do not know what is the best size holes. I drill big holes for making rings.
Jim

I just took another look at the tut and it is a bit outdated. I just took a bunch of new pics for a friend but I have not resized and put them on here. Your email is hidden so I could not send the pics there. It is much easier by email so if you do not want your email known to all you can pm your email to me and I will send the series of pics.

Here is the old set up that I do not use any more. I have found a much easier way with the brick.

forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/index.cgi?a....ad=50851&page=1
Jim

I filled my drilled holes with hard soap in the last batch but I will use the wax method next time. For the most part, making "beads" is not going to be economic unless you start with very unusual or very expensive material because there is a glut of cheap strands of beads out there. Stop by Michaels and check the display so you don't waste your time putting hours of work into a material that others will think you bought for pennies a bead. I have not actually made what I consider "beads" at all, just pendants:



Still learning myself so don't chuckle too hard at my efforts! At least no one will mistake them for mass production. :-)

Since you're looking local rock, it isn't a problem and it sounds like a great project. The main issue is the hardness of the local rock and the difficulty of getting a good polish on it. Hope you will post photos of the results. However, for the record, it does suck all the joy out of the work you put into something once someone asks you questions like, "Oh, did you get the beads at Michael's [or insert cheap Chinese junk seller of your choice]?" No woman wears jewelry because they don't care what other people think. Making beads and pendants is extremely time intensive so it's something to watch out for, so the time isn't lost because the person refuses to wear the project. We don't have to learn everything from our own hard experience if others will share the mistakes they made ahead of us. :-)

peach, we are finding some nice rocks at the local sand pits. They have been deposited by river, so they can be from anywhere along the drainage system. I got my small tile saw in the mail today (I have a habit of dropping hobbies quickly, so I stay cheap to start and work up), and I can already tell some rock is much harder than others when cutting. We are finding a lot of variety of what I believe are jaspers, petrified wood, and agates. It's all various forms of chalcedony, and seems to polish up well so far.

My wife and her friend are really into "quirky jewelry". She loves stuff made out of wood. She was at an art festival two weeks ago, and told me she saw some stuff made from rocks, and asked if we could make things like it, so I figured we could try.

Here's an excellent place for bead making tools. Well, all kinds of tools for that matter.
sphereproducts.com/beadmaking-diamonddrills.htm Scroll down.
They do a lot of the west coast shows so we shop with them regularly. We have both bead vices and the 10mm bead adaptor. with the bead adaptor you can use a core drill to make a bead, place it in the adaptor and drill it perfectly centered. that way you drill halfway through from both sides, so no "blow out" from the drill exiting.

Lee