Greetings Scotty, I can help with your cabochons it appears as if you have not spent long enough on the last hard wheel whatever it is.
For me it's Fixed1200 soft, F600 soft, sintered F60 cuts like F80 Hard, sintered F220 cuts like F280 hard, F3000 soft, expando soft belts with
F14,000 and F50,000.
I have a Hans Lapidary 150mm (6 inch) grinder and polisher see my videos in my signature below.
My formula skip F60 unless working on hard Chalcedony (Basalt based Fortified Agate) you will need to spend at least 15 minute primary preforming,
For Quartz based Agates skip this grit as it is too coarse, spend at least 15 minutes on F280 Hard preforming, then about 12 minutes on F600 soft,
your stone should be dull all over, switch to F1200 and work the stone for 1 minute, dry the stone and you should see the polish forming,
if no shine there are two things that my be wrong, 1: Diamond is the wrong polish or 2: You have not spent long enough preforming, back to
F1200 for another 9 minutes, move on to F3K for a minimum of 5 minutes.
Do not just look at the stone, but feel the stone for imperfection both dry and wet and always keep rounding off sharp edges as they are a
weak point that a crack can occur and later develops in to a split and if unlucky breaks in two!
The format under proboards V4, I am using () curly bracket so you can see how format works, but please change them to [] square brackets to
do the function, I created "
How to use the forum" under my previous but same username.
(url=big picture.jpg)(img)thumb nail picture.jpg(/img)(/url)
(url=http://forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/user/10785)(u)Scottygm(/u)(/url)
Scottygm,
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Sorry I had to copy your images in order to make thumb nails I can delete them if requested, however I claim no Copyright upon your images,
plus the images are kept in a private folder that only I have access unless I give the absolute web-address to the image as I have already
done above.
The blue colored rocks are probally Lapis Lazuli, you may be interest in the
American Agates and Jaspers index found here on RTH Forums and you may be able id your stones yourself.
Move mouse pointer over Images and
underlined text click to open the larger image in a new tab, hold [Shift] key and Left click to open
in a new window!