Rock Grinder

Hi, welcome to the forum. The Delta unit in the amazon link is not going to do the job because for one rocks should be ground wet and those machines are not suitable for wet. Secondly I think they spin way too fast - you'd be tossing rocks and grinding your fingers off on that thing.

My recommendation would be on your budget look for a used lapidary grinder - check Craigslist and FB Marketplace every day - I see them all the time. If you can come up with a two wheel unit and put a diamond wheel grinding on one side and a expando SiC belts wheel on the other there is quite a bit you could do with it.

That’s only useful for dipping a screwdriver or chisel or whatever you’re grinding to cool it. It does nothing to control dust/sparks from the actual grinding.

I would check the for sale section of this very forum. Go back several months as well. Some stuff never sells.

Robin, (hummingbirdstones), Vince (hummingbirdstones2)? Didn't your friend in Prescott Valley have an older Lortone wet grinder that he was parting with?

It was one like this: Only it was reasonably priced (unlike this one):

www.ebay.com/itm/LAPIDARY-RINGLEADER-CABOCHON-GRINDING-MACHINE/254731777543?hash=item3b4f327607:g:S0AAAOSw5xZfXQiO

I empathize with people wanting to do things cheaper at first than they can later. I must suggest do not try this, you'll die and all that good stuff. There is probably risk of electric shock. I used a quality "ground fault interrupt" short circuit breaker unit with the following and it never tripped, buzzed, or arced. Years ago I created a wet grinder out of a dry grinder (that amazingly works to this day) and I made cabs on it, that I posted here, until finally getting a cab machine used for $300. I set up a drizzle of fluid -- using water soluble oil lube like for glass cutting or metal cutting. This helped not destroy the bearings with instant rust. I also drizzled oil in the bearings from time to time, and years and years later I still; use it (albeit noisy) for sharpening steel. I created a lot of cabs on it. Yes a couple went flying against the floor:



It worked best for the relatively flatter kind of cabs without big rounded domes unless you wanted to sand and polish all night long by hand later, which was already a requirement here, with the limitations of 2 hard, coarse wheels. I did buy finer, silicon carbide wheels, with the existing aluminum oxide stock ones degrading immediately. I cut preforms with a tile saw. Below are a few I cut on that Ryboi:







I expected it to immediately rust out. Surprised everyone and a few others copied the idea. It's definitely a temporary "better than nothing" arrangement I used. Ryobi owes me nothing.

I later got my second favorite kind, the rubber drum and sanding belt kind of cabber, vs. diamond wheels, for $300. They're great in a way (I love how you can mush the cab into the rubber spinning drum a bit for smoothing domes) but silicon carbide belts take a while to grind away material, and diamond belts are pricey and go bad. Amazing when they're new, tho, preferabe to me over hard diamond Genie wheels etc., but more costly over time (cheaper up front, esp. with a used machine to start with)



...and so anyway then I was able to do more domed work with that cab machine: