How to Get a Great Shine from a National Geographic Tumbler

hi i'm rob and this is michigan rocks a couple months ago i bought a national geographic rock tumbler it's not that i needed another rock tumbler i have a great big cabinet tumbler that holds a whole bunch of barrels so i didn't really need another one but i've seen so many people that have trouble with this tumbler that they can't get the rocks to polish that i thought i'd try to help so i made a video uh first off reviewing this tumbler and then i followed the directions that came with the tumbler and i used the included rocks and the included grits and uh it was a huge failure the the rocks didn't tumble at all so in this video i want to use my own methods and show you how to use this tumbler to actually get shiny rocks so um first thing we need to do is put some rocks in the barrel and uh i like to put more rocks in than what the national geographic direction said they had me putting in one pound of rocks i like to fill the barrel up at least two-thirds full quarters is okay also so i use my pretty little green ruler here and i measure the barrel and there's a little lip down here the lid sits on i measured to there and it's three inches so that makes two thirds really easy to do i just want to fill it up to about the two inch line so i pre-measured these before the video just to save time and that's filled to about two inches so uh the one thing i'm a little bit concerned about is that this tumbler will turn itself off it's overloaded and i don't know if this is going to overload it or not so if it does i'll just take a few rocks out next thing i'm going to do is add some water so we want the water to be just down a little bit from the top of the rock so down between a half an inch half an inch and an inch from the top of the rocks so i have to hold this flat to do this you might not be able to see but trust me i'm down a little bit from the top here okay i don't want to completely cover the rocks next we need some grit so uh if you're you if you've used up your grit that came with the kit you're going to need to do something else i would buy some i got 46 70 grit here but 60 90 grit works well and 80 grit would also work well those would all be good choices for a coarse grit and in a barrel this size i'm going to use three tablespoons all right then we're just gonna put the lid on oops and i'm gonna use the slowest speed on this thing i'm going to use the slowest speed for all the stages all the tumblers i've ever used before go much slower than this one the lower tone tumblers run half of the speed of the slowest speed on this one so it's going to be really moving i'm going to check it in four days normally i would let this run for a full week but since it's going twice as fast i'm going to go for about half that time i'm going to go four days and then i'm going to check on it and see if the grit feels like it's gone or not you can just reach in and kind of feel it between your fingers and if it doesn't feel gritty then it's not doing much good anymore so that's how i'll see if i if four days is enough or not so uh got this on speed one and uh we'll let it run for a while see in a bit it's been four days so i'm going to check and see if the grit is used up yet or not so i'm going to do is just dip my hand down in there run my finger along the bottom of the barrel and see if i can feel any grittiness and i feel nothing everything feels smooth so that means that this grit has broken down into such small pieces that i can't even feel it anymore so it's not going to be grinding the rocks at this point so i know that four days is plenty longer on this i could probably get away with three days but for now i'm gonna stick with four days one of the differences between what i do when i tumble rocks and what the directions and rock tumblers say to do is that i run the first stage many times i just keep running it over and over and over again until the rocks look the way i want to look so at the end of the that stage or that run i go through and i inspect every rock so this one's all bumpy all around here that needs more time this has a big hole here crack there i don't like that stuff in my finished rocks so that goes in for another week or another four or five days uh there's a hole here there's kind of a bump there that i like taking off because there's a ridge around the edge there uh it's a little roughness around the edges there all these rocks are gonna need to go in again there's a big groove right there that could come out so i've already looked at these there's none that are ready to to move on to the next stage yet this one's really broken up i think these little pieces came off here you can see there's a big chunk out of there there's a crack coming along here so some of these cracks are probably already in there but this tumbler does go really fast and it's going to be a little harder on the rocks so some of these that have cracks in them um i don't know if is a good thing or a bad thing uh it's breaking the rocks but they're probably rocks that should be broken along those cracks anyhow so maybe that's not all bad so this one's got a hole right here so i just look at every individual rock and like i said i already looked at these so these are all going back in and the volume is going to be down a little bit because some of the rocks were away but it still looks like it's about two-thirds full so for this week i'm not going to add any more rocks in there but i may in the future i definitely will in the future so then we're going to do the same things we did before you can't reuse the grit it's all used up so we need to use fresh grit so i'm pouring in water just like last time a little below the top of the rocks and then i'm gonna put in three tablespoons of the same grit 4670 grit and then we're going to run that for another four days and uh take a look at it after that and do this again so this will just keep getting repeated over and over again so uh see you again in four days all right these have run for another four days so it's time to look them all over again so each week i'm gonna do the exact same thing i'm gonna take each rock i usually use this cheap little magnifier i got this for like 10 bucks and i look at each rock now if they've got big right now they've got big holes in them so there's a dent right there there's a nick right there i don't really need the magnifier but as things get ground down more and i'm looking more closely i'm going to use this to look for for smaller imperfections so this has a huge crack right there a big hole right there sometimes i just feel them with my hands i don't even dry them off so i can feel a groove right there there's a bump right there and a bump but a hole uh so i don't think any of these are going to be ready this week uh when i did the rocks that came with a tumbler they got done really quickly but i think they are mainly softer rocks than these um except for the agate that was in there um that was pretty hard and it held up pretty well and polished a little better but all these um these bahia agates are pretty hard rocks they're gonna take a little longer to tumble so i don't see anything that looks like it's finished yet so they'll just like i said just keep rolling week after week like this and i don't think i'll bore you with every week but i do want to show you one more thing let me just go through these real quick okay there's little chips in there put those in there doesn't hurt anything um so this is now not two-thirds full anymore so the other thing i'm going to do forgot to get them out but there's some more rocks down here okay i found them uh so these are more bahia agates so as the the volume goes down in here because these are getting smaller i'm gonna just throw in some more rocks so uh try to get it about two-thirds full again so like that i think i don't want to get too full because then they're not gonna move around as well and they won't tumble as well so one more i think i don't know that one out so about two-thirds full again uh i'm gonna do the same thing i did last time i'm gonna put in some water just below the top of the rocks uh put in three tablespoons of fresh silicon carbide grit and throw it back on the tumbler for another four days so see you it's only been three days since i put this on the tumbler i decided to open it up and see if the grit was used up in that amount of time and i felt around the bottom again and didn't feel any grittiness so uh no point running at four days if it gets done three days so from now on i'm running three day runs in this uh once again i'm using 4670 grit and uh running on the slowest speed and it's it's chewing up all that grit in that time so i went through all the rocks none of them are ready to come out yet although they are looking smoother all the time remember these are much harder rocks than what came with the kit originally that's why it's taking so long and they'll probably shine up better because of that also the harder the rocks the easier it is to get them to shine so i'm just going to put this back in throw some more grit in here throw some more water in here and put it on for another three days and i'll see you then well it's been another three days and uh nothing's done quite yet uh the volume's down a little bit so i'm going to add in three more rocks and put it on for another three days well after five rounds of 4670 grit we still don't have any rocks ready to move on but i'm pretty sure after the next round of tumbling i'll have a at least one and probably several rocks ready to move there's a lot of them that are really close so i'll see you in another three days that's about another three days so just rinse the rocks off and i just wanted to show you in a little more detail what i look for at this point um up till now i've just been saying oh i rinsed them off and there's none ready to go on but i want to show you what i'm actually looking for so i'm going to take each individual rock and inspect it really closely i'm going to look for any kind of flaws at all and i want them perfectly smooth they're not going to be shiny this is still wet but perfectly smooth i don't know if you can see right there helps if you dry them off too there's a little bad spot right there so probably one more week and that'll be gone but if it takes two weeks it takes two weeks my goal is just to get them as as nice as possible so that one's going back in the barrel and then i look at the next rock so this one has i should dry these off it is easier to see them when they're dry i think but you've got bad spots there bad spot there there's a lot of bad spots little holes all over so that's going to go in for several more weeks this one i can look at it really quickly sometimes i just feel them and i can see there's bad spots all over the place that needs a lot more time that one might have just been in for a couple of weeks because i keep adding new rocks all the time too got some bad spots right there no need to look any further uh this one's looking pretty good let's try it off good on this side so i can feel a little tiny crack i don't know if you'll be able to see it there's just a little bit of a crack right there i can feel the rest this is all looking really good so it's a very very small flaw but if you want really perfect rocks that goes back in for another week um a little hole right there this has a bad spot bad spot sometimes you can look at real quickly this has little bumps all over i can feel them bad spot there and there um yep i can feel a little something right here and there might be more bad spots but all i need to do is find one right there and i know it goes back in for more that's got lots of bad stuff this one's got a little crevice right there um bad spot here i hope there's some that are done there's a bad spot last time i thought they were going to be maybe two or three that were going to be done big hole there now some of these things i have other tools and a lot of times i'll grind that off on a grinder but uh i'm assuming if you're buying this tumbler probably your first tumbler and you probably don't have a grinder same thing with that there's a little bump right there that could be easily ground off which is what i would normally do but i'm not doing that today i'm just doing it on the tumbler bad spot here this is a cool rock i like this one i've been watching this a little bit of a hole right there in that dark spot you see the hole um hole here bad spot there oh you might have a winner i kind of remember this from last one last time i opened the barrel not a very pretty rock but i think that one's ready to go i don't see any flaws in it at all so remove that on a lint on it right there i think okay so that one i'm setting aside that's not going back in the barrel um it's just going to be put in storage until i have more rocks to go with it that's got a bad spot hole little dip right there come on camera focus okay whoops that one's on the floor uh there's that one's got a bad spot you can see a bad spot right here okay maybe i'm only getting one out this time right there there's a really little bad spot these are very small flaws so those will be i'll have more of these out next time what's this one looking like that one's good i don't see anything wrong on that one at all so that will get moved on this is bumpy around here oh that's got a little bump in the hole right there uh cool little eye on that one but there's a big notch right there and then there's just some really little pieces these are too little that i'm not going to save these so they'll just go back in and help with the grinding so at this point the barrels down a little bit i took two little rocks out and uh the other rocks would keep getting smaller so this is where i take a brand new rock uh one that hasn't been in at all um and it goes in with the other ones so i think i can fit two in there this has a big hole in it uh once again this is something i would take on a saw and just cut that hole right off but uh i'm not gonna do that this time and you don't have to get every hole out i usually like to but you don't have to all right so that's about two-thirds full again i'm going to add some water and some fresh grit and it goes back on the tumbler for another three days this time these four are coming out and these two are going in another three days another three rocks done three more rocks going in this time i got five done uh one of them's just a little tiny guy but uh five done and i only have these to put in so i've got two kind of regular sized ones and a little tiny piece to put in there next time i'll have to find something else to fill up some space in here all right this time only one rock was finished and ready to move on so i'll set that aside i've got this rock that has a big hole in it it's not like a cool looking hole there's no crystals or anything in there so what i'm going to do with this rather than trying to tumble it all the way to the bottom of the hole actually i have a couple choices i could just move this aside make sure i clean that out really well in between the next few stages but what i'm going to do instead is put a chisel in there and break the rock right along there that way i'll have two smaller rocks that both look as perfect as i can make them um instead of having one with a big hole in it so that's just my preference you can do it however you like and then the barrel is getting a little bit empty so i've got a couple pudding stones here that i know i won't mix up with the other rocks uh i could tumble these all together but i just like to keep my rock uh rocks separated in a lot of cases so if i know that these are all bahia eggettes i like to put them in a little box and label it bahia agates and then i know what they are so those are going in just to fill up some space and uh we'll run it for another three days after i break this one in half this is my rock breaking setup so i've got it's an old cutting board and a piece of plywood on there the cutting boards to protect the floor and then the plywood's kind of to protect the cutting board probably don't need both of them but that's what i've got then i've got an old sandwich box that i drilled a hole in it's got some cracks in it because i've used a fair amount but uh still works fine so what i do is put the rock here cover it up with this i always wear safety glasses and then i put the i'm going to put the chisel right in the the crack there sometimes i use an old screwdriver if it's a smaller crack but this one this will fit nicely so i just put it in here and then give it a smack and hopefully it breaks right there so now i'll have two small pieces at work that looked fine at the end uh instead of one big one with a hole in it this time no rocks were done and ready to come out so i'm just adding in a pudding stone to fill up a little more space because these are getting smaller and i'll put it back on the tumbler all right today i have uh these two rocks are done uh this one looks really good this one has a crystal pocket here uh that looks kind of cool and it never tumble away anyhow so i'm gonna move this one onto the second stage so that's we're going to start today is moving on to the second stage so these rocks are the ones that have been done over the past few times these are all perfectly flawless or at least really really close so no holes no cracks nothing these two are going in with it and then these rocks all have flaws there's cracks in them there's holes in them there's different things here that aren't quite right i don't like moving these kind of rocks on because i like my rocks to be as perfect as possible and to me perfect means no holes and no cracks to some of you you might not have the patience to take as long as i'm taking or a lot of people just like their rocks to have some little flaws in them um i call them flaws they call them character so if you're one of the people who likes a little more character in your rock i'm gonna put in some of these rocks so you can see how they look done the way i like them done and then the way some other people like them done so everybody doesn't have to do them the same way i do them so uh these are going to go in with the other ones here i've got some pudding stones here i'm going to put in one little pudding stone this isn't perfect there's a little bit of a flaw right there so i would run that another week normally but it's going in some of these other ones this one has a kind of a large deep hole at the end here now on a rock like this or some of these other ones i would normally just run it on this machine and then grind it off this is a cabochon machine or just a cab machine for short and the wheel down here in the end is quite coarse and i could just grind that off and not spend as much time but i'm trying to make this like a beginner video most people don't have one of these things because these are expensive so i'm doing with just the tumbler so anyhow that needs to be cleaned out really carefully so i just scrub that out with a toothbrush under running water and i got to make sure that no grit gets stuck in there so between every stage i'm gonna have to really look at these and any that have a crack or a hole in them they need to get some special attention so where's that one one of these is kind of this one this has some big cracks along here but it's a really cool rock with this really neat pattern so i kind of hate to grind that one down anymore anyhow and it's gotten quite a bit smaller since we started so i'll throw that one in there and i'm just going to throw in a few others and i've already gone through and washed out all the little holes so uh maybe a couple more on those we'll leave those for another load all right then we're gonna put in ceramic media so you can either use plastic beads or these ceramic little cylinders i use mixed sizes some of these are the the large cylinders and some of the small ones these have been well worn these have been through a lot of different loads the first time you get these you want to run these in your tumbler just just for a couple of days maybe in like 220 grit just to kind of rough take off the rough edges or the sharp edges so what i'm going to do here is add some of this in so i'm i'm not measuring obviously shake it down there so we want this to do is get in between the little nooks and crannies so when the grits in there if there's big gaps in between the grit doesn't really do much good so this gets in between so there's just more surface areas contacting each other and makes the grit work a lot better so that looks about right i'm about three quarters full which is where i want to be and i'm going to use 120 220 silicon carbide grit uh this is this is what you want to use next either this or 220 or 220 straight 220. so this is 120 220 but straight 220 same thing uh it's this a little coarser but it really doesn't make any difference so i'm going to put in three tablespoons and then i'm going to add in some water so the water i'm going to put just below the top of the rocks here so i'm going to tip it on its side so i can kind of see when i'm getting there so i can see water down here right now i don't know if you can or not i'm going to put a little bit more in okay so i'm down maybe a half an inch from the top this isn't critical it doesn't have to be perfect so it's going to go on the tumbler for one week seven days and then we'll take it off we'll move it to the next stage i'm keeping this on speed one the slowest speed and i'll put this on seven days and let her go okay let's see how these are looking there's the slurry and we need to rinse these off really well i've rinsed this out four times now you can still see a couple specks in there uh just some white stuff i'm not sure it is but i'm going to rinse this really well uh before i put the rocks back in it i'm also going to have to go through all these under the sink one at a time any of them that have any little holes or cracks in them i'm going to go through with either a sewing needle or a toothbrush or both and i just clean them out really really well i just dried this off which is something you really shouldn't do you should keep these wet so that if there are any cracks in them you don't have any grit get stuck in there if it dries in it's really hard to get out so i think this is still a little bit damp here and there which is why you're seeing a little bit of shine in a couple spots but this should not be shiny at all right now this should just be uh kind of a matte finish and we're just trying to smooth it out so don't expect to see a big difference here so i'm just gonna go through each rock and if there's cracks like this has a little crack right there and big cracks back here so those are just going to get rinsed like this a toothbrush and if there's anything really stuck in there then take a sewing needle and this one doesn't look like it has anything but i'll just show you anyhow take a sewing needle and you can kind of scratch it out with that while you're running it under water and that get that'll get rid of any grit that's really stuck down in the cracks deep so i'm gonna go through every rock and inspect them if you don't have rocks in there with cracks in them like this you really don't have to do this step you can just rinse them off really carefully and uh and then go on to the next step from there this next step is optional but if you really want to have your best possible chance of getting some shiny rocks it's probably a good idea most people call this burnishing i just think of it as a good cleaning between stages so i'm going to put in water up to about the top of the rocks maybe a little more than i have been with the their various grits then i'm going to use borax you can use borax or you can use ivory soap just shave some ivory soap in here i'm putting one tablespoon in and then i'm just going to run this for several hours three or four hours and then i'll rinse it out and we'll move on to the next stage now that the rocks are super clean i'm gonna move this onto the 500 stage so we're going to start by adding some water like we did before about the same amount a little below the top of the rocks and i'm using 500 aluminum oxide so this comes in silicon carbide or aluminum oxide you can get 500 either way silicon carbide has really sharp little particles so it's really good for grinding so the first two stages i did use silicon carbide now i'm going to switch to aluminum oxide because these have more rounded particles this is better for polishing so we're going to get the polish started by doing this i'm going to use five five use three tablespoons not five and i'm going to put this on for 10 days i could probably get away with just doing uh a week but just to be safe i'm going to run it for for 10 days not going to hurt anything by doing that so i'll see you in 10 more days i just rinsed these off using the same procedure i did last time i cleaned out all the little holes and then i ran them for a few hours with borax and uh boy did these take a beating so let me give you a little closer look this little pile of rocks will not be moving on to the next stage uh because they're kind of all beat up so if you look at this one it's actually getting a really nice polish on it after just 500 grit it's looking pretty well polished already it'll get better but right here you can see there's kind of an outer layer that all got chipped off so uh that's no good and i don't think it's going to scratch up the rest of the rocks in the batch but it's not going to look very good either so i'm just going to take that one out this one i think i will put back in and it did fine up here and back here you can see the shine on it but all around the edges is all banged up so this is the downside of this thing running so fast and i ran these for 10 days i probably could have gotten away with just running them for like a week seven days uh because it's going so fast it does work a lot quicker and i probably didn't have to have them in so long so anyhow that that i i don't think it'll come out in the next stage i don't think it's gonna hurt anything either so i'm gonna put it back in then we get to the really bad ones look at this big chunk came out of there so there's that piece and it fits in there it's upside down i think but anyhow you get the idea it fits in there somehow that would have been loose already there would have been already a crack in there before it went in but it made it all the way through this course stage and then came out now in 500 so that's kind of weird i have never ever had this happen uh in any kind of tumbler where i had this much damage maybe a little chip here and there but nothing like this here's another one once again this would have already had a chip or i mean a crack in it but this whole piece fell right out of there so that was there and came right off so and you can see it's even getting shiny on the inside here so this happened early on in the 10 days and the rest of the rocks looking really good and then here's another one with a huge chunk out of it there's the chunk and then these little guys are all chipped up too so i'm just going to pull those out so this is the last step the one we've been waiting for the rocks are down a little bit because i took some out here's the ceramics i had in there before which are probably worn down a little bit but not too much but i'm going to add in a lot more ceramics if i was going to do this over again i would have put more ceramics in here in the first place probably filled it up like 80 percent full that'll make them a little more gentle ride for it maybe prevent some of that chipping that happened so i'm really loading this up good now learn my lesson all right so that looks like that put some water in there okay so the water's showing right down here now so it's just just below a little bit from from the top and i put in three tablespoons of aluminum oxide polish this is the worst part about this tumbler the polish that comes with it is not good polish in my opinion so i would suggest getting your hands on some really good aluminum oxide polish i have a link in the description for where i get this uh and it's also in my amazon storefront so if you want to buy it from either of those places that's what i use and it's worked really well for me so it's going to go back on the tumbler i was going to do two weeks but i think i'm going to cut it down to 10 days honestly one week would probably be enough but uh just to be sure i'm going to run it for 10 days so uh we'll put it on the tumbler at the slowest speed again and i'll see you in 10 days they're all done and i could not be any happier with the results uh since i last saw you these have been running for 10 days i rinsed them off cleaned out any little holes with a toothbrush and then ran them in borax for a few hours and here they are so let's take a little closer look well these definitely got a good shine i don't think i've gotten a better shine than any rocks that i've tumbled no matter what kind of tumbler it is the patterns on that thing kind of amazing some good color here on the end so remember i put some of these through that had some imperfections in them and then some that were nearly perfect this is one of the imperfections that i'd rather not have there but there's really no way to get rid of that and it goes you'd have to break or cut it along there then you have to cut it along there also you wouldn't have much rock left by the time you got done with that you'd you'd lose this whole big pattern here so sometimes you gotta put those through and not let them bother you and for some of you that doesn't bother you anyhow look at the eye on that one that cool here are a couple of my favorites i really like that one did end up with a little chip here right there on the top you see that and that's probably due to the high speed that this thing's rolling at or that wouldn't happen in a slower tumbler i think this is my absolute favorite in the batch it looks like it's been cut like that but i don't remember any of them being cut and i didn't cut them and then this is a little pudding stone that i put in there and you can see it's got a good shine on the jasper there but the matrix didn't turn out very well at all and that's typical of putting stones uh it's really hard to get this stuff to to polish up without having little pits in it some rocks are worse some are better this is pretty bad but you can see that that part shined up nice so sometimes you know if you put in kind of crummy rocks they come out kind of crummy not that i think pudding stones are crummy but like this one see how that didn't shine right there there's no shine here at all this is the hole so it wasn't going to shine in there anyhow but that didn't shine well but the rest of the rocks really good so good rocks in good rocks out usually all right so i'm going to make a little slide show here for you and during the slideshow i'm going to kind of compare the difference between what i did in this batch to get these to turn out so nice compared to what the directions said to do and hopefully you can get some nice rocks out of your tumbler too the first thing that was different between this batch and the batch of rocks that came with the tumbler is i use better rocks these were agates and typically agates and jasper are a good first rock to try they're some of the easier rocks to tumble they're very hard i used all the same kind of rock also so they're the same hardness you don't want mixed hardness that's that's a little bit harder to do especially in a rotary tumbler and you don't want softer rocks you saw in that first batch if you watch my first video that some of those rocks just disappeared and these tumbled a lot longer and they didn't disappear second i ran everything in this at the slowest speed and if i could have slowed it down more i would have so uh i i just i don't have any use for the really really fast speeds in this tumbler as it is it nicked up some of the rocks and cracked some as you saw i ran the first stage multiple times in the directions of most tumblers including this one it usually indicates you can just get away with one week and then they're going to be done with the first stage it does say something in these directions about run them or if you're not happy with it but it didn't really emphasize that so i think that's a big difference between what i do and what most beginners do because they just don't know any better so if there's a flaw in your rock that you don't like then put it back in for another week and you don't have to run them all the same amount of time you can take a rock out and put a rock in so if they don't look the way you wanted to look after the first stage all those flaws will still be there at the end if you don't mind that then move them on sooner if you like to get rid of the flaws then leave them in there a little longer i used ceramic media mixed with the rocks after the first stage you could also use plastic i like ceramic because it's easier to work with you can just move it along with the rocks with plastic you have to have different plastic media for each stage because it's soft and the grit gets stuck in the plastic so if you opt for plastic take the plastic out after the 220 stage and store it for the next time you do a 220 stage and put in fresh uh new plastic for the 500 stage um then when you're done with the 500 plastic take it out put it in a little container and save it for the next time and put in new stuff for your polish stage probably the biggest difference between what i just did to get these rocks shiny and what i did when i followed the directions that came with the tumbler is i used different grit the grit for the first two stages that comes with the tumbler was very similar to what i used it was silicon carbide grit uh those are okay nothing wrong with those at all but the third and fourth stage grip in the with the tumbler came with silicon carbide that's where i switched to aluminum oxide that's a lot better for polishing so you saw even after the 500 stage these rocks are starting to get pretty shiny and after polishing they're very very shiny so if you'd like to use the same kind of grit that i use i have links in the description of this video to the place where i buy my grit and there's also i have an amazon storefront i have the grit listed in there also so that works well i'm sure there's other places that sell good grit but that's the one i know works well for me so that's the stuff i always use another thing i did was to keep the barrel about three quarters full all the time with the rocks that came with a tumbler they wore down so quickly there was hardly anything left by the end the last thing that i think was maybe a little bit different was that i cleaned the rocks more carefully between stages this time the first time i ran the rocks that didn't turn out i rinsed them very well and it was probably a sufficient cleaning for those rocks because they didn't have a lot of holes and cracks in them so it's probably fine but this time i was extra careful i scrubbed out the holes in the cracks with a toothbrush and then i put them back in the barrel with some borax and ran them for a few hours you can also use shaved ivory soap that works fine but that just gives them an extra little scrubbing if you enjoyed this video you'd probably like some of my other videos too i have other tumbling videos similar to this one i have a whole series of videos where i just show off rocks that i've tumbled in the past so if you're not interested in tumbling your own rocks but you'd like to look at some pretty rocks it's called rocks in a box that series there's there's over 50 videos like that i have other lapidary videos like how to make jewelry and then i've got a lot of uh just rock hunting videos where i get out on a beach and look for rocks so check some of those out and i'll see you next time

Channel: Michigan Rocks

Views: 217,494

Keywords: Michigan Rocks, rock tumbling, how to tumble rocks, Nat Geo Tumbler, rock tumbler, National Geographic rock tumbler, nat geo rock tumbler, Bahia agate, How to polish rocks, rock tumbling tutorial, rock tumbling for beginners, polishing rocks

Id: CsTc1kXUuPo

Length: 38min 41sec (2321 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021