gatorflash1
spending too much on rocks
Active in Delaware Mineralogical Society, Cabchon Grinding and Polishing, 2 Thumlers B's and a UV-18
Member since October 2018
Posts: 375
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Post by gatorflash1 on Dec 28, 2020 10:06:23 GMT -5
The sample rocks that came with my Dr. Cool tumbler were very similar to the ones you got with the NG tumbler. The tumblers are actually identical and just rebranded. There were a couple of rockes I threw out right aay, but I tumbled everything else. I got some pretty good results considering I had never done this before. I would recommend doing a 12-hour borax and water only run in between the pre-polish and polish steps. It helps making sure that the rocks and barrel are completely clean going into your polishing step. Good Luck! Thanks for the tip, I have just ordered 1kg of borax now and will use it to clean rocks before final polish. I have seen videos on YouTube where some people actually add borax together with the grit, and do so not only at the Polish stage, but with the rougher grit stages also. So the borax tumbles with the rocks for the same legnth as the grits, and also with the polish. The videos I watched the results seem to be quite good with this method. If you have any photos from that first batch of rocks you tumbled, post them up if you can as I would like to see them. How long did you tumble each stage? Hi - it seems you are working hard to make everything work when tumbling rocks. That is the first step to success, never give up and never feel stupid or inadequate about tumbling, or anything else. I use the small Dawn. borax, water, rocks, and media mix between each tumbling step, even after I have washed and tried to clean the rocks and tumbler barrel well. I figure a quick bath is cheap insurance and may removes any little particles of old grit, slurry etc. that I might have missed, and it doesn't take more than a couple of hours max, and cleanup is a breeze.
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alistair
off to a rocking start
Member since October 2020
Posts: 23
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Post by alistair on Jan 5, 2021 9:49:45 GMT -5
Hi - it seems you are working hard to make everything work when tumbling rocks. That is the first step to success, never give up and never feel stupid or inadequate about tumbling, or anything else. I use the small Dawn. borax, water, rocks, and media mix between each tumbling step, even after I have washed and tried to clean the rocks and tumbler barrel well. I figure a quick bath is cheap insurance and may removes any little particles of old grit, slurry etc. that I might have missed, and it doesn't take more than a couple of hours max, and cleanup is a breeze. Thanks, i have tried to be as meticulous as possible. The results are now in, i can say i have had partial success, and partial failure. I will post some photos up now.
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alistair
off to a rocking start
Member since October 2020
Posts: 23
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Post by alistair on Jan 5, 2021 10:02:35 GMT -5
So the tumble is now finished, here is the steps taken, and below some photo's: 80 grit = 3 weeks 220 grit = 1 week 400 grit = 1 week - borax run to clean rocks = 8 hours cerium oxide polish = 1 week Ivory Soap to burnish = 12 hours Start (a few of these rocks had 2 weeks prior tumble time) Polished rocks And the rocks that came out terrible after polishing stage are the indigo gabro and labrodorite. Indigo Gabro photo's below. All in all, i think we have had reasonable success here. Most of the rocks are smooth with a nice polished finish to them. I have no idea what went wrong with the labrodorite and indigo gabro, i will start a new thread on this soon as i want to try and understand what the issue was. What i have learned is, for certain types of rock, to finish up with them well rounded, they have to be rounded going in at the start. The polychrome jasper, dalmation jasper, agate, red jasper were never going to round in the tumbler, the edges smoothed out but they all held their original shape so to speak. Next tumble will be around August time, once we are back home from our summer holiday in Scotland, where we will aim to collect nice, well rounded, attractive stones from the beaches there.
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Prov
starting to spend too much on rocks
Member since March 2020
Posts: 116
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Post by Prov on Jan 5, 2021 10:56:41 GMT -5
Actually, they will round out, they just need more time. The takeaway is that you'll need to run a dedicated load of jaspers/Agates to do so, without everything else being ready sooner.
You may need to run them for a month or more in stage 1 in order to round them more. Without going back and reading too much, I believe you have a 3 lb tumbler? If so, the action is less aggressive, which means you'll just need more time.
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