A Complete Guide to Tumbling Rocks—A Reliable Method

hi there my name's Rob and today I'm going to show you how I tumble rocks I've been doing this for like 11 or 12 years now I've had tumblers running in my basement almost continuously during that time the only time I ever turn them off is while like right now they're off because I'm recording a video but if we go out of town for like more than three days I'll turn them off then otherwise I just let them run so I've got quite a bit of experience this is not the method that you'll read about in the tumbler manuals I have learned a lot of things over those years so I've got this kind of dialed in just the way I want it so uh let's start by looking at the Rocks we're going to Tumble I've got four different kinds and they're all agates or Jaspers agates and Jasper tend to be one of the better rocks to Tumble tumble their their hard rocks and they just take a nice shine so that's why I've chosen what I've chosen these first ones are baia agates I hope I pronounced that right because that's got an H in the middle of it I did a video before and I called them Bahia agates and people from Brazil told me that I was wrong so I think it's by IA uh so these are from Brazil and they're really cool little agates I've tumbled these several times before this one's actually a two baguette which I don't think I've seen in a by a year before that'll show up better when we get it all the way tumbled but sometimes they have eyes on them they have a lot of banding on them they're just pretty little rocks so that will be one that'll be going in there these rocks are kind of nodules they're not broken like the other rocks are so these will probably tumble up pretty quick compared to the other rods uh the second type of rock I have is fancy Jasper this is from India I've tumbled this before and it turns out really nice the patterns aren't quite as uh like obvious on these they're more like just different colors there are some some markings on them some have more than one color in the same Rock but you're not going to see banding and stuff on these so and then the next two I have not tumbled before this is from Mexico it's called porcelain Jasper and it's quite a bit bigger than the other ones normally when you can buy rocks you can buy them different sizes these are a little bit not too big you could put one of these on a small tumbler but uh for a small tumbler I wouldn't do a whole load of these I'm going to be using a 12 pound Barrel so these will be fine for this one and actually it's good to have a mix of sizes if you have all big rocks when they when they go together you you're going to get yeah it's kind of hard to show you with these because they're angular but you're gonna have gaps in between them and if you have smaller rocks so getting those gaps and kind of grind a little bit better so it's good to have a mixer size so I'm kind of glad I have some bigger ones so porcelain Jasper from Mexico show you a couple pieces here so hopefully this this turns out turns out good and then the last type we have these out of the way this is zebra Jasper and I've never tumbled this either stripes on it so the the name is kind of obvious the other reason it might be named zebra Jasper is because it's from South Africa so uh there are zebras in Africa I don't know if they're in South Africa but maybe that's part of the name I'm not really sure so uh this looks like cool stuff should tumble well so those are the four rocks that I'll be tumbling and what we're going to do now is load up the barrel so I'm just gonna you know let's lay these out like this and I'm just going to put in a mix of rocks from each one here and I'm going for about three quarters full here foreign I think I can get a few more in there [Applause] I want to get too many big ones in I'm gonna do a little more that looks about right so this isn't rocket science you don't have to be exactly right uh three quarters full is nice because you're filling up the tumbler quite a bit so you're not wasting space and wasting time uh if it's too low the rocks will all just sort of be on the bottom of the barrel I'll use this to demonstrate as it's churning the rocks will all just be down here they'll stay on the bottom they won't move that much if you get it too full then the Rocks don't have much room to move at all so as it's turning the rocks are going to just sort of not move that much so you want somewhere in between there and three quarters seems to be about optimal um all right what's next water so I've got water and what I'm going to do is fill this up to about an inch below the top of the rocks I don't know if this will be enough or not that is not quite enough I will go get more water all right so there's the water and I don't know if you'll be able to see down in there but there look at the top of the rocks and it's down about an inch once again this stuff is not super critical if you go a little bit more a little bit less it's not going to make a big difference all right this is 3570 silicon carbide grit usually I use 46.70 I got this from Kingsley North and they they don't carry 46.70 anymore so I'm using their 3570. by the way the rocks are all from the rock shed those are my two favorite places to shop for Stuff lapidary stuff on the internet there's links in the description if you want to find either of those places so in a 12 pound Barrel I use 12 tablespoons of grit and yes I know I could convert to cups I think it's three quarters of a cup but I don't want to have a bunch of different cup measures around what was that five six I think that was 12. and uh I'm kind of cheap with the grit so if you want to put in a little bit more if you want to put a whole Cup in here that's not going to hurt anything but I usually go A cup per pound that the barrel is rated for so in a three pound Barrel I use did I say a cup I use a tablespoon of uh for each pound so three pound Barrel is three tablespoons a 12 pound Barrel is 12 tablespoons and that'll get you pretty close we're gonna unbutton this up here I'm going to put this on the tumbler and leave it there for a week uh no point in checking in between uh the only time you have to really worry about checking it is if you're doing something like obsidian or glass sometimes those will put off gas and the barrel of Bulge and it could blow the top off it I've never had that happen I've had the barrel bulge I've never had a top come off so if you just check the bottom of the barrel as you're tumbling if you see it starting to bulge out then go ahead and let off a little gas but otherwise I just don't worry about it I'm not going to check this for a week so each this is going to take quite a few weeks to get these tumbled I'm not going to estimate how many but it might be months so each week I'm going to put these in here and then I'm going to come back a week later and just to keep you interested in between I'm going to show pictures of rocks that I've tumbled in the past to kind of get the excitement up to see what these will look like and kind of see some of the stuff I've done before so uh look forward to that and we'll see you next week I have the outer lid of this taken off already and I'm just going to show you how I do this to use the least amount of water possible at least as far as I figured out so far so I put the lid on partially like that so water can come out but not the rocks and pour out as much water as I can [Music] then I move over to the sink rinse this off I usually turn the water on and off as I do this I just take out a few rocks at a time and rinse them so the water that's going into here I'm just going to leave in there it's not going to hurt to have it dirty water and that way I don't have to dump that out and use more water so I'll just keep going through these until they're all rinsed off [Music] you don't want to dump this rock tumbling slurry into your drain it'll clog it up so I have a playlist of Little Rock tumbling tips that I'll put at the end of this video and one of them shows how I dispose of my tumbling slurry the purpose of this first stage is to remove any imperfections in the rocks and to shape the Rocks I'm kind of a tumbling perfectionist I like my rocks completely smooth and no holes no cracks or anything in them so I'm going to grind these until they look the way I like them too you don't have to do it that that perfectly if you want to leave a few cracks or holes some people tell me they think it adds character you can do that and in another week I'll tell you why you got to be careful when you do that you can do it you just got to be careful so anyhow just know that's my my goal is to have these completely smooth so a lot of the books that come with tumblers they'll say that the first stage takes five days or a week or two weeks or something like that for me there's no set time I just tumble them until they're the way I like them these have tumbled for a week and these haven't tumbled at all so I just wanted to see you to see how much they change in that first stage you can see how angular and sharp this is and how these are mostly rounded off now there's still some some holes in there there's like a little pocket right there that won't get shiny so I want to put that back in once again real sharp and angular and much much smoother and more rounded off kind of mellowed out here's the fancy Jasper and the Bahia agates are an exception to that that rule I guess these stay about the same shape they were already rounded they're not angular and sharp like those but it does take kind of the outer crust off of them they look a little bit brighter these are all dry I dried them off so uh and this is kind of rough and this is much smoother so you will see a little bit of a change but not nearly as much as you do in these so I'm going to go through every one of these rocks actually this week I already did I looked at every single Rock I'll show you how I do that in future weeks when they're getting a little closer being done I was pretty sure none of these are going to be done and none of them are done so they're all going back in the barrel and one of the things people ask me a lot is can you reuse the grit in the first stage and the answer is no you can't reuse the grit in any stage except possibly polish I don't reuse it in Polish but you can get away with it there but grit breaks down so over the week what started out is uh what was it 3570 grit it got finer and finer and finer until now it's just going to be kind of smooth in there there's probably a little bit of grittiness left but it's not very effective at this point so we'll need to add more Grid in I still got my water that's been sitting here for a little bit while I set everything up and moved my camera and stuff so it doesn't look quite as dirty as it did but uh that's the same water that I was rinsing off the Rocks so it's not fresh water these are all going back in here's my other ones that I just showed you and we're not at three quarters full anymore it's a little bit less than three quarters full so we'll add in some more fresh rock and these aren't going to hurt anything I know they're angular and sharp and you might think they're going to scratch them up but that's what we're doing in this stage is we're scratching the Rocks up I want it as scratchy as possible in there so shooting for about three quarters full again something like that my water is just about perfect if I set it like that it's maybe a little bit higher than it was last week but it's fine I did have some extra water here in case I needed to add it you can even add dirty water to it that doesn't hurt anything and I'm still going with my 35 70 Grit I'm going to put in 12 tablespoons oh if you're using a smaller Barrel I said you can use uh 46 70 or 35 70. that's better for these bigger barrels and smaller barrels you could use that I I do or you could use something like 80 grit or 60 90 just some sort of silicon carbide grit by the way these smaller the numbers the more coarse it is so 3570 is more of course that's a range of grips from 35 to 70. that's more coarse than 60 90. 60 90 is going to be a little bit more fine so 12 tablespoons and then I always put the lid right back on the grit and make sure it's on there tight because I don't want uh anything contaminating the grit I don't want the grip getting spilled around and getting tracked around the house that wouldn't be good so I'm going to put the lid back on here I'm going to put it back on the tumbler and leave it there for another week and then we'll check in at that time these run for another week and this time I'm going to go through these a lot more carefully and look to see if any are done I don't really expect any to be done but uh this is the point where maybe if I'm lucky there'll be one or two finished uh for this I use my glasses because I'm old and I can't see up close anymore and then this thing uh it's a there's a brand called I think it's called Optimizer this is a really cheap knockoff for like 10 bucks but it it magnifies and so I I inspect every Rock like this if you're young you don't need any of this stuff but if you're old like me it's nice to have all the help you can get so I'll just take each Rock I'll dry it off and we'll just sort of look at it and see if there's any little imperfections I can see like a little little spot right there and they'll just go right back in the barrel this has a great big bad spot right there that'll go back in but I want to pull the camera a little bit closer so you can see what I'm seeing and just see what I'm looking for as I go through these rocks I'm just going to go through each one of these rocks and just look and see if there's any like holes like that or cracks or anything that I'd like to have ground out that doesn't take much inspection because you can see it needs a lot more time in there and going through here I see a little kind of divot through there it's pretty rough over here and a lot of times if they're getting close and it's not super obvious I'll dry them off with a rag and you can see the the imperfections a little better sometimes water just sort of glosses over any bad spots so that one's neat I've left stuff like that before those little bumps kind of battery oil bumps but in this case it's not super colorful or anything so I'll just tumble those out probably you might choose to keep them see that kind of v-shaped crevice there that won't get shiny in later stages because the other rocks will kind of rub like this they don't get down in there a little bit they will and it might it might kind of vary from shiny up here to less and less shiny as it goes down in there but that's one of the reasons I like to take these out it's a big hole right there too I don't know if you can see that so I use my fingers like I said I've got some magnification help to help me seize stuff a little bit better but using your fingers and sort of rubbing across things a lot of times you can feel it quickly and you can see it uh that's got some pretty obvious holes so I'm going to grind this whole rock down to the depth of that hole so it'll get quite a bit smaller you know that's a disadvantage of of tumbling everything out as your rocks are smaller in the end but that's the way I like them so that's the way I do them if you want to do them different that's the neat part about doing them on your own you can do it and however you like so I really find this part this is like this is what I like about this I like the process when people first get started there's a bad spot there yeah this is real bad over here when people first get started all they can think about is the finished product and that's that's they're focused on is getting them done as quickly as possible for me the finished product's nice but I like the finished product obviously I also wouldn't do this but I really enjoy just the process of doing I find it relaxing and you kind of get to know the rocks as you see them week after week after week you know you like you recognize a rock from week to week and go oh there's that one so I don't expect too many of these to be done not probably maybe not even any of them done but uh after two weeks once in a while you get one finished I don't feel any bad spots here this one might be finished it's one of those baia agates that one looks done I don't see any little holes I'm looking at the middle of these eyes sometimes you see bad spots on those uh the quartz isn't rough sometimes the quartz will get more pitted than other parts someone's finished so everything else has been going right back into the barrel and that one's going to get us set aside and when we're ready for stage two all these rocks that get us set aside will go into stage two but we won't do stage two until so we have enough so I'm gonna go through the rest of these I'm going to turn the camera off and show you at the end if there were any more or tell you if there weren't anymore so I'll see in a few minutes I've gone through all of them and here's what I've come up with this one I'm calling done I think that's that porcelain Jasper but I'm not 100 sure I don't see any flaws at all in that one and then I wanted to show you these four just to show you kind of how picky I am there is a little tiny chip right there and that will not come out in the next stage if you can see it in this stage assume that you will still see it again in the next stage don't don't ever count in the next stage take out anything you didn't take out here and this one took my magnifier off I think I need to put it back on there was a problem somewhere and I can't even find it right now oh I think right there yep can you see that little spot right there so I use my fingernail and I can feel it catching on there so that's really small it'll definitely be out be out next time and that'll show up a lot if I leave it in there so back in it goes let's see there's a little bad spot right there that one's a little more obvious but everything else on this one's pretty good I think so I hope there's a little spot right here too right there that won't look great and then oh this one it has I don't know if you can tell it's a little bit porous right there uh and I don't think that'll go away I could probably just move this on and live with the porous thing but I might also just tumble off that whole top part of it I'm going to give it one more week and kind of make a judgment again next week and see what happens so that's what we do uh every week just go through the whole tumbler and look for anything that's done uh and and just keep running that first stage over and over and over and over again so this is going to get more grit a few more rocks just to bring it up to the three quarters level and back on the tumbler goes for another week until I have enough of these to fill up my barrel for the next stage another week has passed and it's time to inspect all the Rocks again so I'm gonna look them all over carefully a little thing right there that I'd like to have tumbled out so that goes back in the barrel right there it's not done there's a thing there so most of these are not going to be done that's that two baguette but there's a spot right there it's pretty rough along there I'm just feeling this see how Jacob that edge is still now remember some of these rocks have been in here this is our third week of tumbling now our three weeks are down so some of these have been in there for three weeks some I just put in last week some I put in after the first week so I've got rocks that have been here in here either two one two or three weeks uh they all haven't been in the same and that's one of the big misunderstandings that people have about tumbling uh in this first stage they think they all get done at the same time they just don't some take a long time and other ones get done fairly quickly it's a little bad spot right there use my little Optimizer thing and see it there but it's right here I can feel it more than see it oh that's a little rough so I would expect that we might get a couple done here not too many okay that one's looking pretty good so when they look like they might be done I dry them off and a lot of times you can see flaws at that point that one I think is ready to to go to the next stage uh you might have heard that it's good to store your rocks wet and I definitely do that between later stages but after this first stage I always have a tub of dry rocks and it doesn't hurt anything I think it's the the later stages when you get finer grit can get into little cracks and things hopefully you don't have any cracks if you don't know like I am but if there are cracks you got to be careful you don't get grit stuck in them oh there's a chip right there so that grit will dry right in there later on and the dry light concrete almost and it just doesn't come out but this coarser grit is going to be going through one more stage of 220 grit in a little while and that's that's still pretty coarse and uh it's going to take care of anything so you don't have to worry about storing them dry after the first stage and that's one of the reasons that I I don't like to I'm trouble talking look in the rocks at the same time it's one of the reasons I don't like to move rocks on with cracks is because it just gives it a place for a grit to get trapped and if it comes out like if it if this grit from this stage which is very coarse was to get stuck in there and come out later on like during the palace stage but one little piece of grit in your polish stage going through and scratching everything up the Polish isn't going to fix that that could ruin your batch so that's one of the big reasons that I like my rock so perfect plus I dislike them perfect so you can see some grit kind of dried in there I think that's what that is so just be aware if if you like your rocks to be a little a little more natural looking you're going to have to be very careful during later stages to really clean those things out actually during all stages even this stage you want to take a toothbrush or something and really scrub out those those little uh holes and cracks and stuff you see that right there so I like I said I didn't expect too much to be getting done this this week but hopefully we get a few and each week should get a little bit better because some of them will be have been in there for quite a while at that point looking at that little white Speck right here and sometimes it's hard to tell if it's part of the rock or if it's protection imperfection yeah I think that could go one more week all right I think I'm going to finish this up so I don't bore you too much finish it up without you and then I'll flip the camera back on when I'm done and tell you what's done little spot right there on that one that one's going back in all right see you in a few minutes I only found two more that were done so these three will go in my done pile and I just wanted to show you this one this is a very small rock anyhow but see that great big crack in there and it goes all the way over to here so from there to there if I tumble that I have to Tumble all the way down to the depth of that crack all the way around the rock so it's not just going to Tumble this side this side is going to wear away this side's going to wear away it's going to weigh away in the front and the back and there won't be anything left to that so one thing I could do is put a chisel on it right on the crack and break it along there and have two smaller rocks since that one's so small those two smaller rocks aren't going to mount to much anyhow so I'm just going to throw this back in the barrel and let it roll but that will just be lost that'll be gone by the end but with a bigger Rock just in case it doesn't happen later I wanted to show you this that I can I can cut them along there sometimes I cut them on my saw sometimes I break them with a chisel and then I have two smaller rocks that turn out nice rather than one big rock that's got a huge crack through it so here's a barrel it's uh it's probably hard to see from this angle but it's down just a little bit so I'm going to throw in a couple more rocks so these are rough rocks and we'll just throw in maybe one of those by IA a couple of these fancy Jaspers one more not too much but the the barrel the rocks and the barrel even though I only took a few out uh they all get a little bit smaller so there's always a little more room for for more rocks in there so I don't like the way space I need to throw another one in and throw one of these in there we go all right so that goes back on the uh on the tumbler we're still in the first stage it'll get more grit in there I use my old water so I didn't waste so much water and we'll see you again next week a little better this week these all got done and they'll go in with the ones that were done from the last couple of weeks these need to go back in for some more tumbling with some more rough Rock of course and this one has a little crack right there it's it goes in there I can feel it and see it and the crack runs down into at least here and probably a little bit farther so I've got a couple options if I just throw this back into the tumbler and keep tumbling it's really thin and it'll be gone before that crack gets out of there I have a rock saw and I could cut it across here but I'm going to assume because you're watching a video on how to tumble rocks that you're probably just tumbling and you probably don't have a saw yet so we'll just skip the saw part and the other option is to break it so I can break it right along here so I'm going to show you how I do that now okay this is My Little Rock breaking setup I have a cutting board I have a piece of plywood on top um I I should probably have a little bigger piece of plywood underneath the idea here is to spread the impact out so I don't crack my concrete floor by banging on it all the time I don't do this that often but I do worry about that a little bit then this is a sandwich box and it goes over top of the rock it's got a hole in the top so I can put a chisel through it and I'm gonna put my chisel my crack is right there so I either use this old screwdriver or the Chisel since this is smaller I'll just use this the box over top I can see through there you got wear safety glasses when you do this and then just tap it with a hammer this shouldn't take much and it broke a lot more than I was hoping but uh that's why it's nicer to use a saw but I was I was hoping that would cut right across there so not perfect but those are going to go back in the tumbler I'm probably going to lose I'm probably going to lose that rock but oh well um got lots of other rocks this time we got all these done and together with those we almost have enough to fill a barrel for the second stage I'd say another week or two and we should have enough uh you might have noticed that I'm using a lot of course grit I run this first stage over and over and over again the other stages are just run once so because of that I buy my grit in bulk and I can get a lot better price that way one place I buy it from sells it in 45 pound packages and the other place uh it sells it in 50 pound packages and I always buy that much when I buy it because the the price is just a lot better so consider doing that uh whatever you do when you order your grit you're probably going to need more for the first stage than anything else even if you don't mind having some imperfections in your rocks you know like that hole if you're willing to leave that there you should still probably run most rocks in the first stage for over a week and do a couple runs these you might get away with one because they started out pretty rounded these were all crushed so they usually take at least two or three weeks I'd say at a minimum even even if you're half happy with something like that being in your finished product so tip for this week is buy more course grit than any other Grit this is it for this week I was hoping a few more would get done after last week going so well but that's all that got finished hopefully we'll get a few more next time uh you may have heard of using plastic pellets or ceramic media in your tumbler and I would recommend that you do not use these in the first stage I tried these a few times when I was first starting and it's really slowed everything down and uh it's it's just a you don't get the grind that you do when you just have rocks in there you might think ceramic media is good to put in there because it gets in between the little nooks and crannies and it is good to have a mix of sizes of rocks in there but if you get too many really small pieces in at the end of a week you'll find there's just a grit left on the bottom that didn't even get used up so too much of this is bad plus it wears them out and you want your grinding to go towards grinding the Rocks here as much as possible and not grinding down your Ceramics so leave the media out of the first stage all you should have in there is rocks water and Grit kind of a disappointing week here only these four are done that one's really cool though I like that one a lot and I'm pretty confident that next week everything's going to be finished up there's some like this this has the tiniest little chip right there I doubt that you'll be able to see it I can feel it if I just just barely feel it this one has a little tiny crack right there that'll be ground out by next week I'm really excited about this porcelain Jasper I've never tumbled this stuff before and I'm just I think it's going to look really cool hope it polishes up as as nice as it looks like it's going to so one more week of this and then we should start with the next step these are all done this week and I'll add them in with the ones that were done from the previous weeks none of these rocks are finished yet these are going to go right back in the barrel my rotary barrels just perpetually tumble in the first stage I rarely do anything else with them as they get done in the rotary barrels they take them over to the vibratory tumbler so this is a barrel for my lotto tumbler which is a vibratory tumbler I'm going to give you instructions for this but if you're using a different vibratory tumbler it's probably going to work a little bit different might take a longer time than this one does but this is the one I'm going to be using these three rocks are not ready in my opinion I like them super smooth and without any kind of flaws but I know some of you like them more natural looking I guess so this one is quite rough on the back here it's got some big indentations a little protrusion coming out there kind of way far from being done in my opinion but I'm going to put it in there so you can see what that looks like that way uh these two are just really cool rocks they're also not done so you get to see them they're close but you get to see them what it looks like when they're not quite there yet but I just mind you see these rocks too because they both look really cool so uh let's take these over to the sink and uh we'll get the lateral Barrel filled up all right here we are at the sink uh this is my lotto Barrel this is a canning funnel which fits in there just perfectly I have this full of water and I have a little piece of PVC pipe down there because there's this knob on the bottom and this keeps it standing upright and tip over put my funnel in there here's the Rocks we're going to be doing you'll hear people say not to let the Rocks dry out between stages it's perfectly fine to let them dry out after the first stage I do it all the time these are completely dry they have been dry no big problem here so these are going into the barrel so dump them right in there I like the water in there because it kind of cushions them so they don't fall down to the bottom well they fall but they fall slower because they're going through water thank you so the rocks are in there and it's maybe two-thirds full might be hard to see in there through the water about like that and then I'm going to throw in my other three rocks but I want to show you these uh the ones that aren't quite done hands wet now uh this one has kind of a rough spot there um there's some other spots right there there's a little hole I'm gonna grind out there's a little bit of a spot right there uh there might be a couple others a little pinhole right there this is very close to being done and it actually might turn out just fine but I'd usually grind that stuff out now this one is super cool can you see that you can see right through it so this is one of the fancy Jaspers I think this is the same thing as Green Tree Agate but it has a crack right there I wouldn't tumble that whole thing out but I at least like to get that smooth there are a couple other bad spots a little spot right there I can feel so it's very close also but not quite there then this one I would say isn't close at all this is very rough back here it's been through the tumbler I don't know how many weeks it's been in there but I'd say probably one or two no more than that and it's just got kind of a deep valley through there I don't really like just spots all over the place so this is I just wanted you to see one that isn't tumbled very well at all uh in my opinion and see how it comes out later on so we'll put that in so now we're about I don't know at least two-thirds full probably more like three quarters full so at this point we're going to put ceramic media in there looks like this this is well used I have mixed sizes uh you can buy a couple different sizes and I just mix them together and we want to have maybe 20 or more of this in now if you're doing like I do other things like uh little shapes I got some crosses sitting right here ready to go in if I'm doing flat things like that I'll put a much higher percentage especially if it's got a bigger flat surface than that flat surfaces are harder to Tumble and so I go maybe 50 ceramic then there's a lot of voids in there so that's going to settle down it'll settle down even more when I put it on the tumbler but I'm going to fill this right up all right so I do want it down a little bit um it can be full the only problem with being too full is if you have a big rock in there it'll as it's moving around it'll push the lid off and if the lid falls off everything inside dries out so you know if ideally it'd be down about an inch and I think it'll be about that I might even have to add some but uh down about an inch is good gives it a little bit of room to move in there all right so uh now I need to drain the water off so this is full of water everything in there is obviously wet I'm gonna just put my hand over the top and just leave a little bit of space between my fingers try not to drop all the Ceramics and I'll tip that over and let all the water drain out so what we want is wet ceramics no standing water at all and that's for this tumbler like I said with other vibratory tumblers they might work a little bit different all right there we go so I'll take this over put it on the the tumbler itself and uh get it going I have my lotto tumbler underneath the stairs that go from my basement up to my garage I do that because it muffles the noise from them just a little bit I have two of them down here and with both of them running you can hear them upstairs a little bit if everything's off if the refrigerator is running or something you can't hear them but yeah uh just makes it a little bit quieter upstairs it does make my videos a little echoey under here so I apologize for that so I'm going to be using 220 graded silicon carbide grit in here you could also use 120 220 . one of the other to find doesn't really matter I haven't noticed a difference in the two uh so I'm going to turn this on and add the grit [Applause] that's probably a little more full than it should be [Applause] any really big rocks in there so I don't think I'll have a problem to be okay I'm gonna have to check on this about three times a day especially in this first stage the first stage grinds quite a bit of rock off and so it'll dry out in there pretty quickly looks pretty good right now I am going to go to bed pretty soon it's about eight o'clock at night so I'm going to go to just a couple squirts of water to get through the night and then I'll check it first thing in the morning I put a rubber band around this to keep the top on a little better if the top comes off it'll dry out really quickly in there all right we'll check on that in the morning it's next morning so it's time to check this you're looking pretty good in there a little bit thick give it a little water important you don't add too much so it's hard to take it out so squirt a little and then wait a little bit more [Applause] all right I'll check it a couple more times today but that's looking pretty good for now [Applause] he's been going for two days now so it's time to do a clean out [Music] a really nice thick slurry in there I'm just going to pour in some water quite a bit of water and a little bit of dish detergent and then I'll just let that run for about I don't know 10 or 15 minutes and it'll be a lot easier to rinse them off at that point [Applause] foreign those a few more times in the bucket to get the slurry off I don't want any slurry going down the drain I am going to take a little chance and a little tiny bit going out because I'm going to scrub these up the only three rocks I'm going to scrub with a toothbrush are the ones that were not perfectly done in the first stage a little bit of a hole there so I take a needle and if there's any deeper holes I kind of poke around and make sure there's no grit in there now you really don't want grit going from one stage to the next because that larger grit in with all the smaller grit will just scratch everything up that doesn't look too bad these other two weren't too bad in the first place I don't see any obvious spots on those that could trap grits so we're probably good yeah that looks fine so all this is going to go in back into the barrel uh Ceramics and everything this is the time where you don't want to let this stuff dry out from here on out after the the very first stage it's fine but from here on out as the grit gets finer and gets into some more tinier places you just don't want these to dry out so the Ceramics can go in uh into the next stage if you're using plastic media you wouldn't want to move it to the next stage but you can't use plastic media in the lotto tumbler so that's not really an issue for us so let me get this loaded up and we'll take it over to the uh the tumbler and I'll show you what we do next next thing I'm going to do is just give this whole batch a good scrubbing before we start the next stage a lot of people call this burnishing but I think it was just a good washing so I'm putting in borax and I'm going to use one tablespoon I'm going to let this run for about an hour in here and uh I think I can just dump that right in I'm gonna put in enough water to make the action slow down so watch the rocks you see them slow down a little bit like that that's probably about enough maybe a little bit more something like that and so those are just washed for an hour this step is much more important to do if you have uh rocks and a lot of holes and cracks and stuff in them these these moves so there's really not much place for any grit to get stuck in there anyhow so this probably isn't necessary here a lot of times I'll skip this if my rocks are all really smooth [Applause] I just rinsed those off from the sink again after about an hour of washing in there and I dried one off even though not supposed to dry them off at this stage just so you can see how it's looking and it's not shiny yet it's got maybe a little tiny bit of a gloss but not very much the next step will make them a lot shinier so if this was a if I was doing this in a rotary tumbler the two days that I just did I would have done for a week instead and this next stage I'm gonna run for three days if I was in a rotary tumbler I run that for 10 days so this is a lot quicker and I find it a little bit easier to get a shine with a vibratory tumbler than a rotary tumbler so uh let's get this going here we're gonna this is the this is the 500 stage going to start by putting in one tablespoon of borax and the borax just makes the slurry a little bit thicker and it helps since it's thicker it helps the grit stick to the Rocks better and their grits going to do more good if it's sticking to rocks so this is my uh 500 aluminum oxide I'm going to use you want to use aluminum oxide in this stage because aluminum oxide is better for polishing so up to this point we've been using silicon carbide which is better for for cutting and grinding they're only using a half teaspoon by the way this is a different set of teaspoons too because I don't want to I don't want to accidentally mix up my different grips and a lot of this 500 to get in my borax so I actually have a spoons here all right so we're gonna let that run for three days and I'll be checking on it a couple of times a day make sure it doesn't dry out too much in there [Applause] it's been three days so it's time for another clean out foreign through the exact same cleaning procedure I did last time and I pulled one out for you here dried it off so you could see how it's looking already very shiny but it's going to get a little bit shinier with this next step so I've got a polished Barrel you don't need a polished Barrel probably helps a little bit but I don't think it's really all that important but I'm going to now put in one tablespoon of borax and a half teaspoon of Polish borax when you get your polish make sure you get good quality polish I buy it from one of two plates so I've got them both Linked In the description and it's not expensive doesn't have to be expensive at all it just has to be good stuff so check out those links and uh I think you'll be happy with the the Polish to buy from them so polish is just a finer grip not a coating that goes in the rocks or anything like that we're just sanding them smoother than they were before so these will go for two days and then they'll be done well they're all done I've got them washed up and dried off and I just wanted to show you how many Ceramics were in the barrel when I was filling the barrel it's a little bit hard to see exactly how many are in there by the time they all filter down in between the Rocks there's probably more in there than you would have thought so let me pull the camera up a little closer we'll take a look at these all right so I got them all sorted into piles by the type of rock they are and I want to start with this pile which has a couple different kinds of rocks in it these are the ones that I said weren't quite ready to go on to the final stage so I want to show you how they look when they're not quite perfect these two are really close so they're they're not far off probably another week or two and they would have been good I'm hoping you can see some of this stuff see that little pit right there and there's some other little pits in there kind of show them to you in the glare like I said this one isn't very bad at all there's some little little spots right there I try to get all that little stuff out of there but even if you don't I mean those don't really show up that much so this one's still really cool so this is uh I believe a tube Agate they've got these little tubes they're going vertically the way I'm holding it right now you can kind of see them there there's some quartz down in here which isn't Agate egg it is quartz I guess but egg it's a special kind of quartz I think that's a super cool rock and then this one was almost done also so this is the fancy Jasper uh and it's I don't know if there's a difference between fancy Jasper and green tree Agate this looks a lot like green tree Agate to me you can see through it in places which usually Jasper you can't see through so it's not all like this but I I think some of this is is a green tree Agate but you can see there's some little imperfections here and there see that little spot there that didn't grind out there's a crack here now that whole crack I would probably not grind out I could break it along there but um it's just some little pitting here and there you can see some stuff there so if that kind of kind of stuff doesn't bother you then you don't have to Tumble these quite as as much as I did this one was not very done at all this is way far from being done so I don't like the shape of it I don't like how it's kind of angular I don't like that deep hole that isn't real smooth and I really don't like this but other people tell me that adds character and they like it so I wanted to show you that you don't have to agree with me you can do it your own way so if you're tumbling your own rocks do whatever you like I don't like that but you might all right so let's get on with the rest of these so these are the Bahia agates uh I was surprised that these were the most rounded rocks to start with uh they're already shaped pretty well and they took the longest to grind I think they're just harder than the other ones but these are just super cool rocks I think of this batch of rocks these are my favorites super shiny really really nice looking so those are the Bahia agates from Brazil and then next we have the porcelain Jasper this is from Mexico and I would say of all these rocks these took the least shine not that they're not shiny but they're not as shiny as the other ones I think this was my favorite of the bunch so you can see you see it's got a shine on it it's just uh just a little bit duller I don't know if you'll be able to tell on camera but I can tell here in person but isn't that a cool rock nice stuff and some of these like this one seems a little duller than the other ones let's see if I can get the glare on it you can almost see there's like a little little uh undercutting right there undercutting is where part of the rock like one mineral is softer than another and it wears away faster so uh these are not disappointing but I was I was hoping for a little bit better shine on them really like that one all right then we've got the uh this is the zebra Jasper from South Africa I may have some of this sorted wrong I wasn't really sure what that one was it almost looks like something called desert Jasper but I don't didn't think I had any Desert Jasper mixed in here uh nice stuff they all kind of look the same they don't look the same the same but they don't have the as much difference as some of the other ones do but they took a nice shine and it's first time I've done them so I like them and then the last one here is the Indian Jasper I'm sorry the fancy Jasper from India and that shines up really nicely nice colors I think that's sorted right I'm not even sure it doesn't look quite like the rest of it but there is some variety they tend to be all one color you know you got some variation in that one and they they change a little bit there's a little bit of variation but you don't get the really cool patterns like you do in some other rocks but really nice stuff I like this stuff a lot so that's the fancy Jasper and remember this this is also fancy Jasper uh at least it came in the same batch oh by the way all these rocks came from the rock shed so if you want to order some of your own I've got a link in the description of the rock shutter just type in rockshed.com and you'll find it did anybody notice that I have rocks from Africa uh I've got rocks from Asia these are Indian Rocks these are from Mexico which is part of North America and these are from Brazil which is part of South America so I've got four continents represented here in these rocks so that's kind of fun hey if you're new at Rock tumbling I think you'll really enjoy seeing uh the playlist that I've got here it has a lot of rock tumbling tips like what to do with your slurry when you get done with it and just a whole bunch of stuff difference between silicon carbide and aluminum oxide in a little more detail I think you really enjoy that playlist so click on that and I'll see you over on one of those videos

Channel: Michigan Rocks

Views: 356,626

Keywords: Michigan Rocks, rock tumbler, rock tumbling, rock tumbling tutorial, rock tumbling instructions, How to tumble rocks, how to use a rock tumbler, how to polish rocks, how to shine rocks

Id: hz2E0xJYEWY

Length: 54min 35sec (3275 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023