karldubya
starting to shine!
Member since March 2021
Posts: 32
|
Post by karldubya on Jun 10, 2021 13:20:27 GMT -5
Hey All, Over memorial day I went rock collecting along lake michigan. I tried to get a lot of the same stone to make things easy for me. Turns out i think its magnesite. It was very jagged and had broken edges and points. I ran phase 1 and by dumb luck my tumbler stopped working after a little over 24 hours. I pulled the rocks and they were perfectly shaped already. So this stuff is super soft. I realize soft is hard to take a good polish but i'm invested. I lost quite a bit of stone so when I started phase 2 I added about 1/4 barrel of ceramic media and ran it for about 72 hours. After cleaning out i started moving to pre-polish, i removed some of the broken stones that were again jagged or chipped. I was down to just under half a barrel of stone now so i added more ceramic media. its been 72 hours in pre-polish and I opened it up to check on it, i found more chipped and broken pieces ); 2 Questions - Do i need to buy plastic pellets for this? is the ceramic to hard for the stone? I read someone said to used dried corn for the polish stage, has anyone tried this? I feel like it would just rehydrate. Unless they meant don't use water? - How long should I run prepolish and polish stages for this type of stone? I hope for a little bit of shine so I want to let it tumble, but i'm afraid i wont' have any stone left by the time its done. Thanks!
|
|
stefan
Cave Dweller
Member since January 2005
Posts: 14,113
|
Post by stefan on Jun 11, 2021 12:56:10 GMT -5
Hate to break the bad news but this is not going to turn out like you hope. Plastic may help, but corn cob will cause major issues and it used mostly for metal polishing (dry). I think your best chance for a shine is to run each stage for a week at most.
|
|
|
Post by Bob on Jun 11, 2021 16:02:18 GMT -5
This material will not tumble polish , I've tried.
|
|
karldubya
starting to shine!
Member since March 2021
Posts: 32
|
Post by karldubya on Jun 19, 2021 9:06:26 GMT -5
So some of it came out good, some not so good. I’m happy with the outcome though since this batch was tough, I’m not sure they were 100% the same stone but all extremely soft. This batch started full in my 3lb tumbler and finished in my NatGeo with a heck of a lot of ceramic media and in short time.. about 3 weeks total. The one that didn’t do as well kept coming out damaged and new cracks would appear. The cracks and pits seemed to fill with polish? They are white even though I ran in borax for 8 hours. I considered throwing them back in but I’m not sure I’ll ever get a great shine anyway. So I’ll keep my good ones. the shine on the stones in the second picture isn’t done justice by my old iPhone camera. *side note on the amazing transformation. You wouldn’t know from the pics but all of these looked very close to the same when they started. If I ever know I’m going to carry a batch all together start to finish again I’ll do before and afters. But normally for me not every rock come out of stage 1 at the same time.
|
|