My sad cab

... but as you can tell he didn’t turn out too great.

ashley The polish is good, the shaping needs a little work and the material has some imperfections but you need to set proper expectations. This is a good job for a newbie. I am assuming you started some time around Jan of this year. Anything done well takes time and experience. What I learned when I experimented with tumbling cabs years ago. I DON'T LIKE THEM as well as a hand finished cab.

First to get a great tumbling job the material must be homogeneous. That means every bite of my Sub sandwich I want the meat, the cheese and all the veggies and the sauce (Mustard) in equal amounts in every bite. A good starter cab material would be like Brazilian Agate because it is a very homogeneous material. Any imperfections in the stone can be enhanced by the tumbler. The tumbler is dumb. If it "sees" a weak area like a vug it keeps grinding the "spot". Where when you are hand grinding you can avoid or remove at the right time or grit (hopefully). The end result of the soft spot is a dip in the polished surface that you may not have gotten if you hand ground the cab. If it happens on the edge then the edge is not straight or uniformly curved etc.

Your chosen equipment will also affect the cab. For most cabs on here they have a 80-85 deg angled shoulder (off horizontal - the back) then the top is a low dome. With only the slightest rounding of the edge to prevent chipping. That is not what you should be doing if you are polishing cabs unless you are taking them down to 220 grit by hand then finishing from there. For tumbling you should start (IMHO) with a traditional cab where you have an curve that produces a completely shoulder like cabs use to be when everyone was grinding with SiC not diamond. see this for shape:


That shape take advantage of the cab and the tumblers best features. Don't tumble in anything coarser that 220 grit due to too much grinding. Check frequently to see how material is progressing until you get under 600 grit.

At the end of the day my first cab was travertine (which is soft) it had some flats and was not perfect. It did have a good polish. It mounted into a mount and I sold it. That's right it was good enough to sell. Yours are too. You let your customers pay for additional training, experience and fun. They don't need to know anything else about it other than it is pretty.

caddywampus can be gniess
that rocks !

Plus I have more
than my fair share of sad
rock hearts

many have even seen them
a few have even received them