Rocks to Avoid Tumbling

hi everyone today i'm going to do something a little different i'm going to intentionally tumble rocks that i don't think will tumble well so when i'm on the beach a lot of times i'll pick up a rock and i'll say well this doesn't look like it's going to tumble well and i'll toss it back in the water and then i move on i never really explain myself very well so i think it's about time i explained that so this is that time uh you might remember this rock uh this is a rock i picked up on the beach a lot of people yelled at me because i left it behind i said i didn't think it would tumble well and it ended up tumbling much much better than i thought it would i thought it might be sandstone it seemed very grainy and it turned out it's probably quartzite so it was sandstone at one's time and then got compressed and heated and turned into quartzite which tumbles much better so i might be wrong about some of these we're going to find out together but i'm going to show you each one of these rocks a little closer and explain why i don't think it's going to do well and then we're going to try it out and find out let's start with a couple fossils these are bronchiopods little shell fossils so there's two reasons i don't think these are going to tumble well uh one is that they're limestone and limestone's really soft and generally doesn't tumble well but the other is that the neat thing about fossils is the shape of them so we've got sharp edges here those are all going to get worn away got little ridges in there and those are all going to be gone so you're just going to end up with a gray blob of rock so uh i wouldn't throw these in the tumble tumbler normally by the way don't get upset with me that i'm destroying a couple fossils that are 350 or 360 million years old i can find these i can find buckets of these things if you know where to look there's lots and lots of them there's a quarry in town here that's just loaded with them another fossil that doesn't tumble well is petoskey stone so let me just get that wet and show you this uh pretty nice petoskey stone um i could tumble this but you need to use special techniques if you just throw them in with your other rocks it's not gonna go well so um i i won't destroy this rock i don't think i think i can reverse it and fix it after i get done messing it up here but that's gonna that's not gonna do well just mixed in with a bunch of other rocks using normal tumbling techniques here's another petoskey stone this is out of rockport quarry and the reason i don't think this is going to do well is because i've tumbled these in the past and they haven't done well or i've polished them up on wheels even and they don't do well so you see that there's there's like a three-dimensional pattern there what i've found is as soon as you're growing through that you're just left with a gray rock underneath so uh that's kind of a little different different problem there uh this is rhyolite i have one book that calls it porphyritic rhyolite and another one that calls it amygdaloid o rhyolite so i'm not sure which one it is amygdaloidal means that there are holes in the in the rock and the rhyolite in this case that get filled in with another mineral later on uh porphyritic means that there are different sized crystals in it so with porphyritic some crystals are small like in the in the rhyolite the reddish rock there and then you've got these larger crystals that formed and i don't know if those are crystals or filled in holes i just not good enough at geology to know the difference so uh the problem with this one is i think it's going to undercut which is when one mineral is softer than another and wears away quicker so you might have seen the video i did with my son-in-law david where he explained the mohs scale of mineral hardness [Music] this orange stuff seems to be softer because it's sunken in there so i think it will wear away quicker and not shine up i'm not sure if any of it will shine up but i'm especially worried about the orange stuff this is called an omar or omaro luck is the full name of it the the rock itself is gray wacky and these come from a very specific place in canada and they had a different mineral in there that wears away leaving that hole so not all rocks with holes in them are called omars but but this one is so the problem with this is that the other rocks aren't going to be able to rub against that inside part and you're going to end up with this possibly being shiny i wouldn't doubt that that could get shiny but inside the hole is not going to get shiny this might actually turn out really cool might be a nice contrast between the two but but don't expect concave parts like that to get shiny all right then we have jacobsville sandstone [Music] and this is just very grainy and i don't think that that graininess is going to wear off or polish off i think that graininess probably goes all the way through and is never going to look real great this one is gauganda tillite these can be very big in fact it was kind of hard to find a small one like this but this is granite here and then this part i'm not sure what it is but i've had a hard time getting this part to polish before i have a friend who has good luck with these or he says he's had a good luck with him i believe him so either he's using a different tumbling technique than i am or he's just picking up better pieces of this stuff so we'll see what happens all right if you know me very well at all if you watch my videos on the beach you know that i don't like granite uh it's not that i don't like granite i just don't like the way it tumbles it can be really pretty it's colorful lots of beginner rock hunters go out and bring granite home they try to tumble it so the problem with granite is that it undercuts i believe the dark parts are mica i'm not 100 sure about that but it's the dark parts that don't do well you can see on this or maybe you can see can you see how that's worn in it's it's sunken in right there that'll turn like a dull gray it won't ever get shiny and it'll sink in even more in some cases there's another bad spot right there so this one you can actually see little sparkles in it see right there remove it uh i think that's mica and all the gray parts in this one so i've got several rocks here now the the non-gray parts might shine up really well they usually do so uh you might not be disappointed in this like i am i'm just kind of a perfectionist i don't like the the sunken in parts i picked this one up because it looks like granite i'm not sure it is granite i'm just i'm not a geologist i'm just not sure but i don't see the black part so i think this one's going to turn out okay so i wanted to show you that to just show you if you're going to pick up granite see if you can find the stuff without black and you'll probably do better okay a similar rock to granite is nice and same problem here that black stuff's not going to turn out well on any of these [Music] i have no idea what this rock is it was kind of interesting looking uh but i don't think that's going to tumble for the same reason that the granites won't see how the orange stuff is uh worn away more already than the gray i think that's going to undercut badly i don't think that orange stuff's going to do well i'm not sure if the gray stuff's going to do real well either [Music] this is not the perfect example of what i wanted to show you here but if you find a rock with really deep holes in it let's say a hole goes like halfway through the rock if you want to tumble the holes out you won't be able to because you're going to tumble away the whole rock doing it this is probably holy throughout the rock this is called stink stone apparently if you break one of these open they stink inside i've never done that i really should one of these days but i think those holes are going to go all the way through so maybe the white will tumble i don't really expect it to but that might be okay but the holes are just never going to go away so if you're trying to get rid of the holes you'll be disappointed now this is a little slab this is a really cool uh green and white i guess we call it light color and green uh rock i found on the beach when i found this everybody that watched the video was really excited about it i was too so i ran home and slapped it up and i did a hardness test um david actually used this in his mohs video and we scratched this with a knife and the the darker part the green part scratches really easily and the white part seems to be very hard so i don't know what this rock is but it's got different hardnesses and that's going to undercut also by the way i don't usually scratch rocks on the beach like i could grab a knife and scratch this one and have a pretty good idea if a knife scratches it's going to be more difficult to tumble harder rocks are easier to tumble soft rocks are really hard to tumble i usually don't do that i just don't take the time to my method is throw it in the tumbler and see what happens and then you know next time whether it tumbles or not this is specular hematite this is from michigan's upper peninsula from a town called champion there's an old wire in mine there and this stuff's really cool but i'm going to drop it on the table here a couple times and you can see that it leaves all this dust behind uh the roads up there are covered with this dust and they just sparkle in the sunlight it's really cool so if it's falling apart like that right here i can't imagine that it's gonna hold together after it's tumbled so i don't think that's going to go real well make a mess all right my wife wife held this up in a video she she found this and she said it looked like an eyeball i agree kind of looks like an eyeball it has these dark parts that's like the granite i think you can really see it right here um it's wearing away more and i think it's going to be just like granite and have little dull spots all over it i hope i'm wrong because it's a really cool looking rock i don't even know why i think this isn't going to do well i think it's more the the flatness of it there's no gloss whatsoever to this rock it's got some little crystally parts right here um i don't know just have a bad feeling about that one so in it goes and last i've got this rock i like my rocks to have no holes no cracks i'm really picky about them you may not be but when i see a rock like this see these holes around here i think those are going to go all the way through i think there's like kind of a porous layer there so it's solid here porous here then solid again and then there's another layer of holes right around this left hand side not so much right there but they go most the way around so if you don't mind those holes being left in there that's fine but i don't think you're ever going to be able to tumble those holes out i think this rock probably will shine up um you're just going to be stuck with those little rolls rows of holes i'm going to give these rocks the best chance possible to shine up i'm using a small barrel so it'll bang them around a little less than in a big barrel i'm going to start them in this and then finish my lotto tumbler which is why i do most of my rocks i'm going to throw the petoskey stones and these little brachiopaths in first this slurry's going to get really thick because of those if you ever open up your barrel and you've got like pudding slurry in there like it's as thick as pudding you've probably got a soft rock in there or maybe a bunch of soft rocks so that's going to kind of mess with my slurry a little bit and then i'm just going to randomly put in the other ones here they're not all going to fit here but uh i'll do a couple couple runs or replace these as they as i get done so we got the barrel about three quarters full put some water in there [Applause] should probably have some smaller rocks in here these are kind of big rocks but it'll be fine so i'm going to show you some uh some stuff along the way you know as they they come out of each stage we'll look at them see how they're doing i'm putting three tablespoons of silicon carbide grit in there um this is 46-70 which is pretty coarse you i could use 80 grit or something like that too anyhow just gonna put the lids on pop them on my tumbler and we'll take a look at them in a week i'm expecting the slurry to be pretty thick i would have said really thick because there's two petoskey stones in there and a couple of brocco pods which are all limestone but i shook it around and it doesn't sound really thick but uh i think it'll be thicker than normal so let's see yeah it's pretty thick let's pour it in there and see what we got not nearly as thick as i thought but thicker than usual let's start by looking at the limestone fossils i put in here this is the petoskey stone that i found in the quarry and i predicted it was just going to look gray and it wouldn't have any pattern on it and it's it's a little better than that i can see a little bit of pattern but it doesn't look great those holes are pretty deep so i would normally grind those out but i think they probably go you know close to halfway through the thickness of that rock so if i grind those out the rocks going to be gone there's a little one back here i normally grind out but i think i'm gonna call that one good enough for the first stage just to avoid wearing the whole rockaway here's the nice petoskey stone i put in there and it still looks nice problem is it got really small usually i tumble these for three days maybe four days but going a full week that got smaller than i would have liked and these the two little brocco pods i put in there you can see a little bit of striping still on that one but generally i've kind of ruined these so we'll move on to the next stage even though they're not going to look like much here's the omar and you can see that the outside of this and the inside look quite a bit different so i don't think much grinding went on in there at all the rest of it looks really good so i'm calling that one done done with the first stage here's the sandstone it got quite a bit smaller also and it looks smooth all the way around it's as smooth as it's going to get its sandstone so it still has some some rough texture to it this one is the rhyolite uh it looks quite a bit different it might be a little damp down there still i dried most of these off but a little dampness there it's still got some holes there i think i'm going to try to grind those out so that's going to go in for another week and this one which is just sort of a nondescript looking rock still got some deep holes in it i don't know if i'll be able to get that one out this one i can probably get out but we'll run that for another week here are the pieces of granite i put in there this one has kind of a bad looking spot right there a little rough spot there so that can go again this one has a deep hole there i'm going to try to get a little more of that out so i'm going to run that for one more week and if it still looks really deep i think i'll just move it on that's got a bad spot there this one's looking good smooth all over so we'll call that done here's a couple pieces of nice and i don't see any rough spots on that that will move on and we'll move this one on this looks good also so no no problems with these yet um you know this looks nice and smooth everything looks like it's going fine it's later that we're going to run into problems with this one so i'm going to put these five back in and i'm going to add in some of the other ones that didn't fit in before so i've still got a tub of them here that didn't fit in before so we'll fill the barrel up again and run it for another week i just emptied the barrel and rinsed them off and this goganda till it looks like it's ready to move on these all have little things wrong with them uh most of these will be ready next week but i want to show them a little closer in a minute and uh the stink stone is going to go in that's the last one to go in if there's room i'm going to squeeze that one in there so let's take a look at these a little closer most noticeable thing here was that this piece uh broke right off so uh that looks like fresh break and it must have happened late in the in the week so that's got to go back in these other ones just have little little tiny flaws this this one's getting really smooth there's just a couple spots that feel a little bit rough this one has a hole right here i don't know if i'll tumble it all the way down to the bottom of that hole but there are a couple other little rough spots so most these are coming along pretty well they just this has a little bit of a rough spot there nothing big but i want to give them their best shot at doing well so they're going to go in again uh i don't think this one's going to get any better than it is that hole's pretty deep there but i'm going to give it one more one more run in the course grit just to see if i can make a little bit better so throw these back in all right we're done with the third week and these rocks are going to be set aside for the next stage these are going back in for a little more tumbling i'll have to put some filler in with those but i want to show you a couple of these up close uh so you can see how they're coming along first thing i want to point out is that the stink stone did not stink up my barrel but you can see those holes are like swiss cheese it's going to go all the way through so i'm moving that aside i've rinsed out the holes really well i kind of used a toothbrush and ran under water this is kind of similar but actually turned out pretty cool if the rest of this rock polishes up this is going to be a really neat rock because it's got these little crystal bugs here that have opened up and i don't think i saw those at the beginning but you can see the crystals in there and putting that in the tumbler if this does indeed hold up to tumbling those i don't have to worry about i'll just have to clean them out really carefully but the the grit won't polish away those i've done rocks with little crystal pockets like that before and they come out just fine this one it still has some holes in it it's just always gonna have holes in it i think so i'm calling that good enough i want to point out a couple things here this these uh this one that had remember the yellow was kind of worn away more it feels really smooth now this one looks great i still don't think it's going to turn out okay in the end i might be wrong but uh for right now it looks awesome and this one i might have been wrong about this i don't know um if the black really is softer it's not going to turn out but man that white crystal looks great it's like quartz there you can see all the i don't know the crystalline nature of it there uh that rock's looking really cool once again it feels super smooth um this one's smooth uh this part's going i can almost guarantee that black part is going to turn out bad and this one had a hole in it somewhere can't find it right now um anyhow i just decided i'm going to move it on and just be careful to clean out the hole carefully but it feels smooth everywhere maybe this isn't the one with the hole i don't see it anymore oh well anyhow these are these are getting set aside and the rest are going to go in for another week so we'll see you then i'm calling these rocks done um this is the last of them so i'm ready to go on to the next stage uh they're not absolutely perfect but i think they're good enough for what i'm trying to show you there's a little tiny hole right there i can feel the rest of this feels smooth all the way around oh there's just a little bit of a spot right there too but very smooth in the rest of it this one has just a little bit of a hole right there and it isn't a black spot the black parts the part i'm most worried about so other than that this feels smooth all the way around and this one has that white spot that's a little bit i can just barely feel that it's a little bit of a dent right there and there's a couple pin holes around the edges here so next thing we're doing is putting these in the lotto tumbler that's a vibratory tumbler it's going to spend they're going to spend a week total in there these plus the other ones in that tumbler we're going to start with 220 grit silicon carbide for two days and we'll take a look at them when i take them out of there so you can see how they're doing i'm not going to spend a lot of time telling you exactly what i do in the lotto tumbler if you want to see that i'll have a video at the end of this video i'll linked and you can see my whole process that i use on probably about 95 percent of the rock side tumble it's a really good method and it's just what i use most of the time [Music] i just rinse these off after a couple days and 220 grit and i'll start with this rock because i kind of hate this rock this is the stink stone those holes are all filled with slurry so when i rinsed off the rocks i used a sewing needle and spent a very long time digging around in there trying to get the grit out uh rinsing it under water the whole time then i threw the whole batch back into the tumbler for most of the day they were in there for probably six hours maybe longer i used borax and dish detergent in there gave them a good scrub and then i took it out and i scrubbed these little holes out again i got them pretty clean but i'm hoping i don't carry any grit onto the next stage and contaminate the whole batch but i do have some other stuff in here i've got a turtle in here different things these little christmas ornaments i've been working on these will be nice indicators to see if the batch comes out good if these come out good then i know everything else should come out good if they're good rocks because i've been doing a bunch of these and i i know they shine up well uh this piece is getting really i can feel a big dent right there i doubt you'll be able to see it maybe if i go like that there you can see it um and then on this side also where the dark parts are i wouldn't be surprised that hole goes all the way through it's not quite lined up but might go all the way through eventually i don't want to dry too many of these off because it's not really a good idea to dry them off if there are little holes the grit will dry in there doesn't come out very well this one's actually looking quite nice it's still a little damp that's why it looks a little shiny but that looks really good that i'm starting to wonder if that rock's actually going to turn out uh here's a piece of gauguin to till it and it's looking fine it's the dark part i'm worried about here but right now it looks pretty good take a piece of granite there's just a piece of granite uh that spot was a little low when i started and it still feels a little bit low everything else feels pretty good this is looking fine so uh the reason i'm showing you stuff now and then again later is because a lot of times you're gonna be surprised you're gonna think everything's going fine and it's when you get into the finer grits when i go to 500 i expect bigger problems to start this petoskey stone looks awesome that looks really good but i would i would expect this to start going bad i'm going to spend three days in 500 aluminum oxide and i'm not exactly sure what it is but i think just the smaller particles can get in between smaller particles in the rock a little better and start eroding stuff that you don't want them to erode so uh that's usually where the batches start to go bad it's you'll think everything's going fine and then all of a sudden uh it's not fine so we'll take a look at him again after three days and 500 aluminum oxide still in the lotto tumbler i just cleaned out the lotto tumbler again uh this was after three days in 500 aluminum oxide and you can see this is starting to look pretty bad along along those black parts there can you see that in there we'll take a closer look later but um that's what i expect to happen with our granite and a nice this was easier to clean out this time this is still wet so i don't think it's actually shiny although it looks shiny right now um those little holes uh rinsed out pretty pretty nicely i think the slurry isn't as thick this time around and just comes out a little nicer um this hematite's interesting this actually turned out a little better than i thought it would so it's still a little damp it's getting shiny there's definitely some undercutting but it's not just crumbling away to nothing i don't think it's going to turn out great but maybe passable no hole through that one yet let's uh dry off one of these christmas ornaments and this one should turn out good and it looks like it's getting a shine on it already after 500 grit they should start looking kind of shiny here's the petoskey stone the really nice petoskey stone and is it looking okay yet yeah just looks pretty good actually all right so i'm gonna throw these back in we've got two more days in aluminum oxide polish and then we'll clean them up and take a close look at all of them alrighty it's time for you to find out if i know what i'm talking about or not but before i show you these i just need to say that i know this is going to be a controversial video and some people are going to say i'm crazy and the rocks are shiny enough uh and that i'm just way too picky and that may very well be true but i'm going to try to convince you uh why i said what i said but before we look at these let's take a look at the christmas ornaments i put in here and these have a nice shine to them so let's see if i can get some there we go some glare on them these came out nice uh no complaints about those so uh the whole batch was not ruined because of something i did so let's look at these okay we'll start with this one this is the omar and it did exactly what i said i said the outside might shine up it's not super shiny but it's okay it's not bad uh but that this hole probably wouldn't shine up any kind of a concave spot like that usually doesn't do well so i think that looks pretty much like it did going in so uh okay on that one this one actually got a little bit of a shine to it um not great but more than i thought it would so uh i guess i'm uh half right on that one i'll give myself half credit [Applause] uh this one we're gonna i'm gonna try to show the glare when i can here we go can you see the darker spots aren't shiny and the lighter spots are so again that's about what i suggested would happen uh it's not a horrible looking rock though i mean we did get a little shine in it but i don't like when it when it looks like that you might be just fine with that and say what are you talking about that's great uh this one uh those little holes are kind of a pain to clean out uh not as bad as as this stink stone was but kind of a pain but there's some little crystals in there so it's kind of a cool rock uh the rest of it shined up okay but i don't like the holes if there's going to be holes having crystals in them makes them better but um might call me wrong on that one that one turned out okay let's look at the granites i have these four that i think are granite and if you've watched very many my videos you know i don't like granite so can you see like right there uh just any of the black spots kind of turn out kind of kind of bad there's certainly a shine right there that doesn't look very good it's gonna get a glare on that so i don't like that look and i'm absolutely sure a whole bunch of people probably think that looks awesome i'm just not one of those people this one has some black on it but that black turned out pretty good it's not perfect but it's not bad that one's that one's okay i don't i don't dislike that one this is probably the worst one you can see in here the undercutting i don't like that it just bugs me but if it doesn't bug you tumble some up this is the one i predicted would look better because it didn't have so much black and i think i was right this one actually looks pretty nice you can see there's a little bit of difference in the shine but not too bad all right let's take a look at the petoskey stones this was the one from the quarry that i said would lose most of its pattern and it did and it's not very shiny this one isn't like completely ruined it got really small because i left it in too long so petoskeys i usually do in shorter stages but since this was in with everything else uh it went for the same length so here's one i hand polished as a comparison see the shine on that there's there's no shine on this one so yeah it's okay not great all right here's the uh gauganda tillite and you can see that it's kind of shiny that's pretty shiny but there are some bad spots like right here hopefully you can see that that does not look great so uh it's just i don't know it's kind of how this turns out there's some kind of bad spot right there so don't love that here's the rhyolite this had the little blue and orange specks the blue and orange specks are gone the rest of the rocks kind of shiny but all kinds of undercutting where those those different little colors were now this one surprised me this is super crumbly stuff i remember there was dust coming off it uh kind of surprised this polished up at all it is undercut right right through there and over here and you can see it right there it's not great but better than i thought it was going to be [Applause] let's see these were these were what i thought was nice this one turned out okay i'm trying to show you that glare again there are there is undercutting there it's not too horrible you see the little dull spots the little pitted spots so like right in there hopefully you can see that see the pitting right here so it's not real deep it's not awful but i don't like it this one i'm not sure this was even nice and there is a little bit of pitting in the black there but this one actually turned out pretty nice there you can see the little bit of undercutting there but it's not too bad i actually like that rock [Applause] oh this is the one that had holes all the way around i thought there was kind of a soft layer or a porous layer in it and once again not quite as bad as i thought is it weird that i'm disappointed that these turned out i'm just too darn good at tumbling one of one of the things uh that helped out well two things i didn't use the lotto tumbler i think a rotary tumbler these would have turned out worse i think my lotto vibratory tumbler is is easier to get a good shine on and i used a lot of ceramics ceramics really help out this one had see i think there was a right there you can see some undercutting but again better than i thought definitely worth tumbling uh the sandstone did not shine up at all there's there's no shine whatsoever these are my brachiopods now they're just little gray lumps that aren't shiny now that's that piece off of uh that broke off of this and this one kind of didn't shine up there's there's a slight shine but not much all right so i'm going to defend myself a little bit by showing you good rocks this is rhyolite and that's got a real nice shine with with no undercutting at least not very much i don't know what that is but it's it's got a nice shine all the way around this is banded shirt this is one of my favorite tumbled rocks ever these are all from lake huron or lake superior by the way so just like the other ones were beach rocks that i picked up these are beach rocks too i think this one's jasper you see the difference how that that whole surface is nice i got a couple pieces of unicite here i really like this one i've shown that in other videos but i like that one a lot and then here's a little saw scrap you can see how nice that whole surface is where's the there we go this is some green quartz i don't know what this is but it's nice and shiny oh and here's the petoskey stone i guess i already showed you that didn't i um just the comparison between shiny and not shiny so uh in my opinion these are better and these are yeah mixed results i'll call it i wouldn't i wouldn't say that i'm real proud of this batch so there you go uh beach rocks that uh tumble differently at least maybe not bad in your opinion but uh not as good as these i think we can agree on that you want to see more michigan beach rocks that did turn out well click on one of the videos here and i'll see you next time

Channel: Michigan Rocks

Views: 380,205

Keywords: Michigan Rocks, rock tumbling, rock tumbler, How to tumble rocks, rhyolite, granite, Petoskey Stone, brachiopod, gneiss, Omar

Id: z5S4nwYSOBE

Length: 36min 18sec (2178 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022