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Post by Jugglerguy on Sept 20, 2016 10:44:31 GMT -5
I actually hand-finished a piece of fluorite with automotive sandpaper, and it came out pretty nice. You can probably finish those off wet sanding, but make sure you wear a mask. Fluorite dust...BAAAAAD. I did that with a Petoskey stone. I finished it with 800 grit wet sand paper and then used aluminum oxide on denim. It came out great with no power equipment at all.
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bunnybunnybun
starting to shine!
Discovering my cooking is like tumbling. Both result in inedible rocks
Member since September 2016
Posts: 42
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Post by bunnybunnybun on Sept 20, 2016 15:15:47 GMT -5
I actually hand-finished a piece of fluorite with automotive sandpaper, and it came out pretty nice. You can probably finish those off wet sanding, but make sure you wear a mask. Fluorite dust...BAAAAAD. That's an interesting idea. About how much of the sandpaper should I put into the tumbler with it?
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richardh
spending too much on rocks
Member since June 2016
Posts: 391
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Post by richardh on Sept 20, 2016 16:02:36 GMT -5
My guess is that the sandpaper wasn't in a tumbler but instead the stones were just sanded with increasingly fine grit sandpaper.
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bunnybunnybun
starting to shine!
Discovering my cooking is like tumbling. Both result in inedible rocks
Member since September 2016
Posts: 42
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Post by bunnybunnybun on Sept 20, 2016 16:07:16 GMT -5
Oh now that just sounds silly
Though if that were the case, if you want to manually buff them so they are extra shiny and glossy, rub them down for a minute or two with silk
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huskeric
spending too much on rocks
Member since May 2016
Posts: 353
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Post by huskeric on Sept 20, 2016 16:52:20 GMT -5
I actually hand-finished a piece of fluorite with automotive sandpaper, and it came out pretty nice. You can probably finish those off wet sanding, but make sure you wear a mask. Fluorite dust...BAAAAAD. That's an interesting idea. About how much of the sandpaper should I put into the tumbler with it? This would be wet sanding with the sandpaper, the way you would sand the paint on a vehicle. You could buff it with silk, but this would be for earlier in the process. I actually used 80-grit paper and sanded a chunk of fluorite down with a random orbit sander, and it came out pretty decent. It was in really rough shape when I got it, so there was only so much I could do. Then I worked up to finer and finer grits of sandpaper and just did it by hand. Once you get through the different grits, then you could finish it with silk, as you mention below. I only mentioned this because if you do this, you don't have the pieces of Fluorite banging into each other in a tumbler, and hopefully you don't get any more inclusions than you started with. If you google "hand polishing fluorite" you will see some tutorials, but it's pretty straightforward. It's much more labor-intensive than tumbling, but there's much more instant gratification, because you can polish out a stone completely in under an hour if it's in decent shape to start with. Good luck!
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