rrod
having dreams about rocks
Member since December 2020
Posts: 72
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Post by rrod on Jul 10, 2021 20:40:16 GMT -5
This looks a lot like what happened when I tried using a thicker guar/water mix and chucking some Al2O3 on top of it; when I opened the barrel it was a gawd-awful thick slime that nothing could move in. Perhaps some kind of polymer thing going on?
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Post by Bob on Jul 30, 2021 13:02:30 GMT -5
Well, the plot thickens--could not resist that. I had not planned on testing the sawdust until after the tumbling contest was over in a couple of weeks. But, two weeks ago, it happened again in a 12lb barrel for the first time in months. What the heck! It even had this strange milky whitish appearance that I remembered from before. It was a load that was half ceramic pieces and the rest was a mix of amethyst, smokey quartz, and obsidian and glass, in 220 grit.
Could the high proportion of ceramic pieces be the cause? Normally I would never have more than 10-15% in a batch. But I rechecked a thread and it was in Dec that EricD urged me to stop using plastic pellets to cushion material like that and to switch to ceramics instead. I posted to him on Jan 21, that I had done two batches that way and results were looking good and I thanked him for his idea. Then, in February this problem started and I began this thread on Mar 8. Could this potentially be the explanation, bizarre though the possibility seems, because I use 50% cushioning approx when tumbling delicate material like this.
Well, I decided to see what happens, so I rinsed this batch just like usual into my rinse containers, knowing that if this was the cause, it would now contaminate some other barrels as the rinse water gets reused in them because it seems that is what happened early this year. Normally, rinse water in a bucket settles so much overnight that I can see a lot of clear on top the next morning when I walk past it on the way to my vehicle. Not this time, it was cloudy and no settling--just like before--in both rinse buckets. And same on next day and same on next day.
Last night my first barrel that used this rinse water completed its first week, a 20lb barrel running 60 grit. When I opened the barrel, it was almost locked up, but not quite. The slurry was definitely too thick. So, something is going on here.
Now I'm wondering if the slurry from a load that is half ceramic pieces getting worn down causes some strange property of the water. Or, if it's the slurry produced from grinding obs or glass that is weird. The ceramic pieces were the normal large porcelain ceramic pieces that I bought from the Rock Shed and look just like the ones I've bought from this or that place in last few years. Some were almost new, some half ground away, some even smaller than that. I just keep using them until they disappear.
Since all of you use ceramic pieces and also work obsidian, it's hard for me to think either or those could be the cause. But what about the glass? There are many different kinds of glass that could have very different chemical properties. This glass, as well as what I was grinding in Jan and Feb, was a real mix. Broken telephone pole insulators, kitchen glass, odds and ends. There was also a few pieces of scientific glass in there that have a bit of a different look to them.
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Post by Bob on Aug 5, 2021 11:35:08 GMT -5
Well, the rinse water has STILL not yet settled and it has continued the contamination into another load of 12lb barrel that was almost locked up with too thick slurry. So, it appears through a very strange series of events and luck that I have discovered the cause. It's rinse water from loads I was tumbling in the winter, and now had started again, that were at least 50% ceramic pieces for cushioning and the loads were obsidian and glass.
I'm obviously going to get rid of this strange rinse water that hasn't settled. Then after everything returns to normal again, I will figure out which is the culprit, the ceramic pieces or the obsidian or the glass.
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Post by Bob on Aug 16, 2021 10:10:09 GMT -5
Just got back from 8 day trip. The rinse water in two 5 gal buckets looked exactly like before I left--none had settled! This was very unexpected after that long of a time. Each time I process a barrel, this rinse water gets used up and diluted with new water too because slurry of course is poured out to dry. I'm going to see how long it takes this weird rinse water to return to normal before I try to narrow down the cause.
Normally, after being gone 8 days, my rinse buckets would be clear water on top for at least 8-10 inches.
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Post by fernwood on Aug 16, 2021 11:30:54 GMT -5
That is very strange. Something in the water is suspending instead of settling. Is the sediment on top or mixed with all the water?
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Post by Bob on Aug 16, 2021 21:41:24 GMT -5
Uniformly brown like milk except pale tan.
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Post by stephan on Aug 17, 2021 0:53:37 GMT -5
Municipal water department answers one question. Any water filter/softener systems in your house? And you don’t live around Detroit, right? No such devices or systems. And I live in Oklahoma and sure glad it's not Flint, Michigan! Is the municipal water river water or well? If it’s well, and you’re in a drought, like us, the could be higher TDS, but you’d be likely to taste that, and to see precipitates if you let a glass of water stand on the counter for a while. Probably not much help, but my two cents (which, if you adjust for inflation since the term was coined [ha ha] in the 1550s, is now worth something like $11,000 ).
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Post by fernwood on Aug 17, 2021 3:57:07 GMT -5
At my old place, whenever it rained a lot the water was a light tan color. Even letting it sit overnight did nothing. The water had a slightly iron taste then. When there was no rain the water was clear, with no iron taste. Dunno if this will help.
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jamesp
Cave Dweller
Member since October 2012
Posts: 36,155
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Post by jamesp on Aug 20, 2021 9:39:02 GMT -5
Soda lime glass makes a slurry that can glue up quickly and sets up like concrete. Must be the lime component. Even sitting the barrel down during step 1 to say check slurry thickness for longer than 5 minutes can cause a concretion in the bottom of the barrel. If using SiC 30 on glass at higher speeds it only takes 3 days for the barrel to get solidified/glued up, so some slurry has to be poured off and water added to thin it every 2 days. Total clean out every 4 to 6 days. To avoid so much work the speed can be reduced to say 30 rpm for a 6" or 8" barrel and use smaller SiC 60 instead of SiC 30. Slows the slurry generation... A power outage also causes concretions from the stoppage that can damage the concreted glass when power comes back on. Other limestone coated cherts and silicifications from near the coast or ancient oceans also concrete quickly. Lime is an issue. Limestone coated petrified coral slurry concreting quickly as it settles in a tub. Not much different than Portland cement. Coral before tumbled. Coated with totally white calcium carbonate ? limestone ?
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Post by Bob on Aug 24, 2021 14:18:13 GMT -5
Now 8 days later, and some gradual new water being mixed in with the rinse water, the water is only now starting to settle a bit again. But not yet back to normal. I have avoided all use of ceramic pieces and back to only using plastic pellets if a load need cushioning.
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Post by Bob on Oct 11, 2021 11:47:45 GMT -5
Wow, took two months for water buckets to return to normal with normal rinse/adding/removing.
FYI for anyone not knowing, my tumbling results increased significantly for the better about 5-6 years ago when I stopped using new clean water for new barrel batches. Though I do still use it for polish batches. So that last thing I do after recharging a barrel for the next week is to dip a plastic bowl into the dirtiest/thickest rinse water I have and pour it into the barrel. My theory--and it's only that--is that the slightly thick dirty water might function from minute one as a little bit of slurry that helps keep the grit all over the rocks. Also have less damage so maybe the first few/dozens/hundreds revolutions in clean clear water provide rather little cushioning.
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Post by Bob on Aug 8, 2022 9:54:48 GMT -5
Well, this is Mon and on Sat morning may have got something unexpected on this topic. By chance, because some of my barrels run for 6 days, most for 7, and some for 10, I had 4-5 barrels all come due yesterday with a tin ox polishing run. Never have I had so much in polish. There was 1 20lb barrel, 1 12lb, and 3 6lb.
All material looked wonderful, except for the 12lb barrel which was mostly glass and and some amethyst. The amethyst was dull, not shiny, which was not surprising because about half the the glass was a disaster, being taken from very smooth and satiny coming out of 1,000 prepolish to cruddy and slightly pitted. Some pieces of glass were not as bad as others, but overall the whole batch was a failure which happens sometimes.
Since I was pouring off a lot of tin ox polish slurry into various containers to settle, I noticed something startling. The pouroff from this one barrel wasn't settling at all--and I mean at all. All the others were settling quickly which is weird about tin ox. 15 mins after a pouroff I can see the clear top starting. 2 hrs later, it's amazing how clear the top while the bottom is firming up. Overnight and it's done. Well, this one weird one looked just like white milk--no clear area at the top at all. Same on Sunday, same this morning except the top is very thin white as if just a tiny bit of separation is finally starting.
So, here we go again. I got out the glass and examined it. I think about half was scientific glass or something special in that way. Some old lab instruments I broke up--I remember some were glass stoppers--a lot I got out of the inside of a laser copier and some other office stuff before throwing it away, etc. Those pieces are all clear, some have a tiny bit of a silvery tinge, and when being prepped in 220, 600, and 1,000, they have a different feel to them than bottle glass. The surface has a bit of more texture.
So, I'm now suspicious that this slurry problem in this thread is the result of this dang scientific glass that has something in it that can screw up the water. I'm going to get rid off all of it, even though many pieces are very pleasing shapes. Since I had been reusing the pouroff water from it, it probably caused that strange lockup of the thick tumbling grit in the beginning of this thread. I had not tumbled any of that glass for many months until a couple of weeks ago.
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Post by thisislandearth on Aug 8, 2022 15:45:31 GMT -5
Well, this is Mon and on Sat morning may have got something unexpected on this topic. By chance, because some of my barrels run for 6 days, most for 7, and some for 10, I had 4-5 barrels all come due yesterday with a tin ox polishing run. Never have I had so much in polish. There was 1 20lb barrel, 1 12lb, and 3 6lb. All material looked wonderful, except for the 12lb barrel which was mostly glass and and some amethyst. The amethyst was dull, not shiny, which was not surprising because about half the the glass was a disaster, being taken from very smooth and satiny coming out of 1,000 prepolish to cruddy and slightly pitted. Some pieces of glass were not as bad as others, but overall the whole batch was a failure which happens sometimes. Since I was pouring off a lot of tin ox polish slurry into various containers to settle, I noticed something startling. The pouroff from this one barrel wasn't settling at all--and I mean at all. All the others were settling quickly which is weird about tin ox. 15 mins after a pouroff I can see the clear top starting. 2 hrs later, it's amazing how clear the top while the bottom is firming up. Overnight and it's done. Well, this one weird one looked just like white milk--no clear area at the top at all. Same on Sunday, same this morning except the top is very thin white as if just a tiny bit of separation is finally starting. So, here we go again. I got out the glass and examined it. I think about half was scientific glass or something special in that way. Some old lab instruments I broke up--I remember some were glass stoppers--a lot I got out of the inside of a laser copier and some other office stuff before throwing it away, etc. Those pieces are all clear, some have a tiny bit of a silvery tinge, and when being prepped in 220, 600, and 1,000, they have a different feel to them than bottle glass. The surface has a bit of more texture. So, I'm now suspicious that this slurry problem in this thread is the result of this dang scientific glass that has something in it that can screw up the water. I'm going to get rid off all of it, even though many pieces are very pleasing shapes. Since I had been reusing the pouroff water from it, it probably caused that strange lockup of the thick tumbling grit in the beginning of this thread. I had not tumbled any of that glass for many months until a couple of weeks ago. Crazy stuff for sure. I'm in the camp it has to do with a unique combination of rocks you are tumbling in the same batch. Perhaps it's very similar to the types hydration chemical reactions that occur to create cement. The chemical composition of the rocks hydrate and solidify and harden. Maybe you have some calcium silicates reacting with silicon dioxide blah blah or i dunno. Just a guess. Maybe ask a chemist :-)
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Post by Bob on Aug 9, 2022 5:53:08 GMT -5
Tues morning, 72 hrs after, and still no settling! The slurry is in a 1 gal plastic ice cream container. Top 1/2" is showing through side as thinning out but there is no clear line of settling as usual, just a gradual transition. Now wondering if this tin polish will recover and will be safe for reuse. Must be something really strange about scientific glass or that glass that was inside laser copier.
Tin ox from other barrels settled so fast, less than 1 day. All has been dried and back in container for reuse.
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Post by Bob on Aug 19, 2022 17:35:29 GMT -5
I just returned from 11 day vacation and was very surprised at what I found. The polish slurry had been left where it was with a piece of paper over the top of the ice cream plastic tub to prevent dust getting in. By looking in the translucent side and also probing with a chopstick, the bottom had finally formed and was about 1/4" thick. That's about the right amount of settled polish I'd say for the polish from a 6lb barrel.
But the water over it, instead of being fully settled and clear, was far from that. Unlike before I left, where it was a general continuum from top of water being milky all the way to pretty white toward bottom, there was a line between settled polish and the water above it. But the water above it, all the way to the top, was all still thin milky and not settled. After 13 days! Normally after a week, the water above the polish would be totally clear and actually usually in less than a week.
So I conclude that something really weird happened due to the scientific glass in the batch. I'm going to dry out that polish and keep it in plastic bag and not use it again until maybe a year from now to test to see if it still polishes okay. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm going to pour off the weird milky water, then pour in some new water and stir it all up in an attempt to "cleanse" the polish of this weird water.
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Post by Bob on Nov 29, 2022 14:13:15 GMT -5
Here's an update. I think it was the glass. For months now, I've not taken any glass into polish, and very little of it has been tumbled at all because it's mostly all done awaiting polish. But, instead of polishing it with obsidian, crystal quartz, and some other things as in the past, I'm not touching it. 50lbs+ of all kinds of material have been polished since August. This slurry issue has not happened again--even after gradually working dried polish from these problem runs gradually back into my polish recycling.
I'm not going to speculate on whether it was one type of glass or another, but this causes me to regard glass with suspicion and to probably only polish glass with glass going forward. Perhaps this should not be surprising. Glass is a man-made material, and no telling how many various chemicals and such might be added to it.
One person, either in the forum here or somewhere else, observed to me that pH problems can arise with anything involving broken glass in a fluid, so perhaps that has an effect. he said one might have to add something else to offset the undesirable aspect. I don't plan on researching that.
Next year I will probably have enough to do one last 12lb barrel of glass, then I will be done, and don't plan on collecting it anymore. Though I would like to process some goldstone and Sieber "agate" and opalite someday.
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