Adventures in Yellow Aventurine
Nov 30, 2020 23:11:45 GMT -5
pizzano, stewdogg, and 1 more like this
Post by Prov on Nov 30, 2020 23:11:45 GMT -5
Finished getting my yellow aventurine through the polish stage this evening. Changed them over to burnish for about 2 hours before I got off work.
Preliminary results are kind of disappointing. The pieces that polished up well are pretty good, but something went wrong in the way I handled my polish stage, to where the rocks chattered on each other a lot, and I got a lot of frosted edges that weren't there prior to that stage.
When I checked on them this morning they were pretty much stationary. I added some water, and checked on them again a little later, and they were moving, albeit slowly.
This actually happened during stage 2, but since we were going to have family over, I pulled them and turned off the tumbler, did a full cleanout.
I'm wondering a few things:
Mayhaps I didn't have enough filler material. I added ceramic media starting in stage 3 as padding, but would more have helped?
This load was a bit larger than my amethyst load, I'm wondering if I overloaded the barrel.
As I mentioned with the amethyst in my last load, I'm experimenting with sugar as a slurry additive. Maybe I added too much and slowed the action too far? 500 AO was fine, but my 220 SiC was iffy on it's first go around.
I inspected my lot-O and noticed the dowel it's sitting on is cracked all the way through - Would this be a significant factor?
My Stage 4 recipe was 1/2 tsp of AO polish, 2 tbsp of brown sugar - I've been using brown sugar because it's what we've got, and it's seemed fine so far. Would using standard white sugar be a better option?
All in all, kinda disappointed, more disappointed than I thought I'd be. I initially purchased these as a throwaway tumble that I could experiment on. Somewhere along the way I got attached.
Some of these rocks have decent sparkle that aventurine is known for, but a good bit of them aren't particularly interesting. Some of the clearer pieces have some iridescence.
Edit: Follow up question - How far back should I take these if I want to run them again and see if I can fix that edge frosting? Or should I just take my lumps and move on?
Preliminary results are kind of disappointing. The pieces that polished up well are pretty good, but something went wrong in the way I handled my polish stage, to where the rocks chattered on each other a lot, and I got a lot of frosted edges that weren't there prior to that stage.
When I checked on them this morning they were pretty much stationary. I added some water, and checked on them again a little later, and they were moving, albeit slowly.
This actually happened during stage 2, but since we were going to have family over, I pulled them and turned off the tumbler, did a full cleanout.
I'm wondering a few things:
Mayhaps I didn't have enough filler material. I added ceramic media starting in stage 3 as padding, but would more have helped?
This load was a bit larger than my amethyst load, I'm wondering if I overloaded the barrel.
As I mentioned with the amethyst in my last load, I'm experimenting with sugar as a slurry additive. Maybe I added too much and slowed the action too far? 500 AO was fine, but my 220 SiC was iffy on it's first go around.
I inspected my lot-O and noticed the dowel it's sitting on is cracked all the way through - Would this be a significant factor?
My Stage 4 recipe was 1/2 tsp of AO polish, 2 tbsp of brown sugar - I've been using brown sugar because it's what we've got, and it's seemed fine so far. Would using standard white sugar be a better option?
All in all, kinda disappointed, more disappointed than I thought I'd be. I initially purchased these as a throwaway tumble that I could experiment on. Somewhere along the way I got attached.
Some of these rocks have decent sparkle that aventurine is known for, but a good bit of them aren't particularly interesting. Some of the clearer pieces have some iridescence.
Edit: Follow up question - How far back should I take these if I want to run them again and see if I can fix that edge frosting? Or should I just take my lumps and move on?