Rock polishing / tumbling

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I had a rock tumbler as a young kid. It worked just like it was supposed to and did a great job, but was loud.

When you opened it after a week of tumbling, it just looked like grey gritty mud. Cleaning it for the next batch was not a lot of fun for a kid, and waiting for over a month for the results was also not great. But the results where excellent.

You can try polishing your own local rocks you find, but you will have varying success. The rocks that usually come with the kit can be bought, and are the 8 or so types that generally give the best results.

I think they can be useful as decorations when the stones are polished. Maybe at the bottom of a glass vase or something like that. When I was at Canadian Tire today they were selling boxes of river stones for decoration. Another good place is in and around a fountain driven by a pump.

22

Ok, I was just looking at some of the “roughs” that site has for sale and noticed they have them categorized as “easy”, “intermediate”, and “advanced”. How is it that tumbling some rocks is more advanced than others? When I tried it as a kid there didn’t seem to be much skill involved; it was just a matter just adding rocks, grit, and water to the barrel, let it tumble for a week or so, dump out the resulting slurry and add a finer grit or polish, repeat.

I’m sure I’m just ignorant of the finer points of getting good results from a rock tumbler, particularly from the “difficult” stones, but I have no idea what they are.

23

I got curious and looked up turitella. It’s really beautiful. I’d love to see yours, Darren.