Polish in cracks

Hi, I feel your frustration and I know you've been searching for answers on this. I am unquestionably better at managing a forum and making cabochons than I am at tumbling - since I started doing lapidary I've probably tumbled maybe three batches of rocks from rough to finished - but I will try.

First of all, I can help you with Cloudinary if you want to try again and this is exactly how I can help. Change your forum password to something temporary, send me that temporary password via private message. I will log on as you and install a working Cloudinary account for you to use then I will log off. Log back on and change your forum password again and you will have full use of photo uploading. As you figured out early on you'll need to be in "desktop" view on your phone which is awkward but it's all we have at the moment.

I read back through your posts and what stands out at me is it seems like you are trying to go from zero to sixty overnight. The materials that I saw in your posts - calcite, lepidolite, and fluorite are arguably advanced level tumbling materials with difficulty level off the charts. If you are trying to rotary tumble these I wouldn't even know where to start. Just the rock against rock action in the barrel is enough to severely beat up these soft materials and I'm surprised you have anything left after a week. Labradorite is harder but has a whole other set of challenges with cleavage and breakage. and I would also say that it's not a beginner material.

The other material you mentioned in a post Brazilian agate is among the hardest of the solid agate materials and I don't understand how it would be possible that someone could tumble grind it away to "almost gone" and still have cracks in it.

All that being said, rock tumbling is not a "perfection" art form - our members who win contests start with three pounds of rough rocks and they fuss over them constantly, taking some out, letting others run, touching up others on grinding wheels getting rid of recesses that will never come out or will hold on to grit. In the end they painstakingly pick out five of the best rocks for submission for judging. I know you're not entering a contest but my point is it's a process. Nobody just throws six pounds of rocks in a barrel and runs an entire load to perfection without a lot of fiddling, sorting, and restarting etc.

I would say lets get the pictures thing going and then let some of the more experienced tumblers have a more specific look at what's going on with your results.

Hello nursetumbler, as soon as I read, polish in the cracks, I immediately thought, get an ultrasonic cleaner, then further on you did just that. I bought one for the exact same reason and it didn't help either, but it didn't take away the shine at all. Man, if I lived in New Mexico I'd be out there looking for agates all the time, you're lucky to live there. A lot of my rocks have cracks with polish in them, but I have greatly improved over a year of tumbling. Some cracks in the rocks never go away especially with petrified wood. My only advice is to keep doing what you are doing, which is tumble the cracks out of the rocks, and inspect them closely with a jeweler's loupe to find the really small cracks that seem to become large when polish gets in them. I try to get rid of all the cracks and pits before moving on to 220 grit, and it does get frustrating. I hope you get the Cloudinary app working and post some photos. Thanks for sharing.

Doug

I meant that in the best way possible in regards to the difficult materials you have posted about but you clarified that nicely thanks. Still, my best advice (other than let me help you fix the photo uploading issue) would be to just slow down a bit and maybe start with a batch of jaspers which are one of the most forgiving rocks to tumble. Get a few successes under your belt to gain some confidence then start looking at the more challenging materials.

You may have seen me mention that recently in this thread, titled "Borax". I wanted to get away from using Borax because I don't really have anywhere to dump my used water than my lawn (I let the slurry settle in a 5 gallon bucket and use a cup to scoop out the water. After a while I let it dry out completely and dump the "brick" into the trash) and I didn't want Borax to kill the lawn.

That said, I was also talking about a vibratory tumbler, not a rotary. I got the idea from ingawh from this post from a few years ago. She uses hand soap and psyllium powder (That's what Metamucil is) along with the polish. I just finished my first batch myself using this method and it worked great. But, I don't know how well this would help in a rotary tumbler. A vibratory tumbler uses very little water. As in, the stones are wet but there is no standing water at all. So the soap and psyllium make a gel-like doughy slurry. In a rotary, I suspect it would just make a frothy, bubbly mess considering the barrel uses much more water. If you look at the bottom of the Borax post, you'll see a video I posted showing what the slurry looks like.

When I have to polish something that does not fit in the vibratory tumbler, I DO use psyllium in the rotary tumbler as well. BUT, since the process has to run for a week or more, there is time for biological action to build up gas because psyllium is a natural fiber. Therefore, I add a couple teaspoons of bleach to the slurry to kill the bio-action. The psyllium does the same job - thickens the slurry to guard against bruising and chipping AND makes the grit want to stay in the slurry, not the pits of the stones. Spraying the stones with the garden hose nozzle, you can see slurry seem to pop out of pits and crevices because the slurry would rather adhere to itself - stick together - than stick on the rock. I recommend using sugar-free Metamucil, or Costco's Kirkland brand of the same thing, if you want to give psyllium a try. Just put up with the nice orange scent. :-) If you have something like that around the house, you can even use the kind with sugar in it - just use a little bit more. In a six pound barrel, about a teaspoon of the sugar-free kind, (or a couple teaspoons of the kind with sugar) ought to work, but you may have to experiment. And don't forget the teaspoon or two of bleach.
Best wishes.

Just one or the other (sugared OR sugar free). I edited my post above to make it clearer. I prefer the sugar free, and since the sugar takes up a fair amount of space, a smaller amount when using sugar-free works fine. A little bit of bleach is required with either kind.

I have never found that the fiber slowed down the polish. In my experience, what slows down the polish are things like plastic pellets and fabric scraps used to try and buffer the stones - but they also reduce the contact that is critical for the polishing effect. So I prefer hard, well-polished media, in a nice thick slurry. That allows for both the right amount of buffering, while still providing contact firm enough to impart a shine.

Just as an alternative to the psyllium thickener: I have a friend who reuses his polish slurry indefinitely, and it is as thick as pea soup. He does not add a thicker - it's just lots of cheap old tripoli polish and the build up of ground-up rocks from hundreds of polish cycles. He also uses lots of agate/quartz media, and he gets a brilliant shine - including on obsidian. Tripoli is comparatively cheap, and if you reuse it, only replenishing for what has come away on the stones and gotten rinsed off, its ultimately cheap as dirt to do it this way (in terms of what you spent on polish grit, anyway). I don't use the rotary barrels for polishing often enough to keep a vat of used tripoli-based polish around. If you think you will be polishing in the rotary barrel regularly, you could try his method. You should then skip the psyllium (because it will begin to rot and get stinky, or you have to keep adding bleach - no point if you've used enough tripoli). To try this method get yourself a big tub of tripoli and mix up a slurry that is literally about the consistency of pea soup, then pour it over your polish-ready stones and media. My friend tends to fill his barrels high enough to cover the stones. When done, carefully strain the slurry into a clean, new bucket with a lid, ready to reuse on your next polish batch. Just add more tripoli and/or water as needed to maintain the consistency. My friend does this on an industrial scale - he has over rotary tumblers 50 tumblers going at one time, and gets legendary results. You may choose not to fill your barrels and full as he does - he has a massive motor running the whole operation, but an over-full barrel can be hard on a small tumbler motor. I'll post pics of his set up below...

Thank you ingawh. I will have my husband look into it for me.

Hi, no worries and definitely no apology is necessary. I understand that you were getting frustrated with it and I'm glad you are getting solid advice from folks here and innovating and making some progress and feeling a bit better about how it's going.


I posted exact instructions for you to follow that would allow me to install a fully functioning connection to 3rd party photo host Cloudinary.com on your account. I will repost those instructions here.