Post by surreality on Jun 23, 2018 7:58:05 GMT -5
I've not seen this mentioned, and certainly haven't had it happen before, since I almost never used my old rotary before using the new one and the vibes.
One of the three barrels, when I opened it up, was very frothy. (The other two aren't.) It's a thick, heavy foam. The grit didn't seem to break down as much in that barrel, and the stones are much more rough than in the other two on all of their surfaces. While I forget the model number, it's the big ol' Lortone with 3 12lb barrels. (We have buckets and buckets and buckets of stuff to plow through, and since the first stage in rotary takes so much longer than stuff in the vibe, it seemed like the best option for one to more or less keep pace with the other.)
Three potential issues seem possible at a clueless newbie glance:
* When we dragged the larger rotary out of the closet, it had never been used. One of the three barrels was slightly wonky -- and this is the one that was foamy. Its boot gasket is bowed inward somewhat, and its lid seems like it's partly inflated rather than flat. I plan to replace it in a month, but had been cautioned against running the machine with just two barrels of three, and I figured this might just be a cosmetic issue and it might still work fine. It did keep a perfect seal, didn't leak, etc. But this could be the issue, and I may have just been really lucky that it didn't explode.
* Irony of ironies, the Florida beach stones (the pieces that made me take the leap back into things again) that were in that barrel were ground down much further than expected. I realized later this is because the crystal in them isn't the quartz I'm used to in the fossil coral we find up here, but calcite. The matrix material is apparently much softer, too. Now, everything in this barrel is more rough anyway, but this is rougher even compared to the rest. I'm wondering if this is breaking down faster and creating gas or more 'foamy sludge'? If there was sand in the matrix -- entirely possible -- I can see this breaking down being the reason for the rougher surface over all.
* I think my husband may have oiled the Florida stones along with some of the shells (you use silicone oil on them), so that could potentially be the issue, too, and it mixing in with the rest caused the foam. I'm not certain he did this, but it's possible. (On some silicone oiled stones I'd done from there that aren't suited to tumbling, it absorbs in so deeply you can't tell they've been oiled after a day or two, and you have to keep repeating the process for a few weeks until they're saturated. There's a few pieces of coral that are completely replaced with the calcite that look like honeycombs, with the holes running all the way through, for instance. No way that's ever going in a tumbler!)
Me being me, I put the 'iffy' things in the 'iffy' barrel, figuring if something was going to go horribly wrong, it'd minimize any losses. The barrel did hold, and nothing's ruined, but the results were very observably different on everything in that barrel. As in, by the time I got to the second, my mind was blown by how much smoother everything was and how much more it resembled every example I'd seen before. If the barrel isn't the likely culprit here, not having to spend a pile of cash for a replacement this coming month would be lovely.
Worst case, I replace the barrel as planned, and I can pull those two big Florida chunks out of the lot and resin-coat the buggers or something if they're the likely problem children -- I'm pulling them already simply because they've ground down so much compared to the much harder materials they're in with. I'm just not sure if they should go into a batch of softer things if I ever accumulate enough of those to run one, or scrub 'em out and coat them with something. If a toothbrush scrub starts sending off sand from the matrix, I'd not want to put them in with anything else, especially something soft.
One of the three barrels, when I opened it up, was very frothy. (The other two aren't.) It's a thick, heavy foam. The grit didn't seem to break down as much in that barrel, and the stones are much more rough than in the other two on all of their surfaces. While I forget the model number, it's the big ol' Lortone with 3 12lb barrels. (We have buckets and buckets and buckets of stuff to plow through, and since the first stage in rotary takes so much longer than stuff in the vibe, it seemed like the best option for one to more or less keep pace with the other.)
Three potential issues seem possible at a clueless newbie glance:
* When we dragged the larger rotary out of the closet, it had never been used. One of the three barrels was slightly wonky -- and this is the one that was foamy. Its boot gasket is bowed inward somewhat, and its lid seems like it's partly inflated rather than flat. I plan to replace it in a month, but had been cautioned against running the machine with just two barrels of three, and I figured this might just be a cosmetic issue and it might still work fine. It did keep a perfect seal, didn't leak, etc. But this could be the issue, and I may have just been really lucky that it didn't explode.
* Irony of ironies, the Florida beach stones (the pieces that made me take the leap back into things again) that were in that barrel were ground down much further than expected. I realized later this is because the crystal in them isn't the quartz I'm used to in the fossil coral we find up here, but calcite. The matrix material is apparently much softer, too. Now, everything in this barrel is more rough anyway, but this is rougher even compared to the rest. I'm wondering if this is breaking down faster and creating gas or more 'foamy sludge'? If there was sand in the matrix -- entirely possible -- I can see this breaking down being the reason for the rougher surface over all.
* I think my husband may have oiled the Florida stones along with some of the shells (you use silicone oil on them), so that could potentially be the issue, too, and it mixing in with the rest caused the foam. I'm not certain he did this, but it's possible. (On some silicone oiled stones I'd done from there that aren't suited to tumbling, it absorbs in so deeply you can't tell they've been oiled after a day or two, and you have to keep repeating the process for a few weeks until they're saturated. There's a few pieces of coral that are completely replaced with the calcite that look like honeycombs, with the holes running all the way through, for instance. No way that's ever going in a tumbler!)
Me being me, I put the 'iffy' things in the 'iffy' barrel, figuring if something was going to go horribly wrong, it'd minimize any losses. The barrel did hold, and nothing's ruined, but the results were very observably different on everything in that barrel. As in, by the time I got to the second, my mind was blown by how much smoother everything was and how much more it resembled every example I'd seen before. If the barrel isn't the likely culprit here, not having to spend a pile of cash for a replacement this coming month would be lovely.
Worst case, I replace the barrel as planned, and I can pull those two big Florida chunks out of the lot and resin-coat the buggers or something if they're the likely problem children -- I'm pulling them already simply because they've ground down so much compared to the much harder materials they're in with. I'm just not sure if they should go into a batch of softer things if I ever accumulate enough of those to run one, or scrub 'em out and coat them with something. If a toothbrush scrub starts sending off sand from the matrix, I'd not want to put them in with anything else, especially something soft.