wades
starting to spend too much on rocks
Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734)
Member since February 2006
Posts: 202
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Post by wades on Apr 4, 2016 11:23:14 GMT -5
I think I am going to try weekly entries here, maybe to help me keep track of what I'm trying when. I posted a thread in the Visitors & Members forum last week, mentioning a 12# Lortone and a 3# Thumler that I started. During the week I found that Thumler belts don't have a 10-year shelf life. Both of the ones I'd had on tumblers broke in the first few hours of operation on my AR-1 base. I found a bag with 3 spare belts for the Lortone, natch, but not one for the Thumlers. There was a big black O-ring that looked the same size, more or less, as a Thumler belt, and it was with the spare belts, so I tried it. It seems to be holding up. The prices on replacement Thumler belts are offensive to the Scotsman in me, so I ordered some silicone O-rings from an Amazon vendor for $3/qty 5. They are only 1/16" so I'll probably try using 2-3 of them. Though really what I wanted was 3/16" wide by 4" ID O-rings, the Amazon vendors don't seem to have those. Saturday night I dumped the Lortone. I'd loaded it with most everything I had lying around that was partially finished and not in a container that said where it should go next. It had probably 6# of rock in it. A couple of pounds of that was quartzy material, mainly amethysts. I decided to pull all of that to do separately in a 3# barrel. I also picked out about 1# of various jasper, agate, and tiger eye that I think is ready for medium. So I had 3# and change left. The most pricey thing in my inventory was probably a 3# lot of Laguna agate nodules gotten from Superagates.com long ago. I also had right at 1# left in the "Laker gravel" (also gotten from Superagates) bag, including a pretty fair-sized nodule, and a pound or so of partially-tumbled Laker gravel/jasper bits/partly tumbled hammer-broken stuff/handfuls of Botswana agate that I want to redo. So I loaded all of that in, for a total close to 8#, and added a cup of 60/90 grit. The old slurry was rather thinner and more watery than I'd expected: I re-used it. The medium barrel I opened and added another 4 Tbsp of 120/220, noting that the slurry was a lot more like what I thought it ought to be. I picked through the quartzy stuff, and through a dish of polished rocks that's been on display for a long time, rescuing from the latter all the amethysts and aventurine that were not perfect. I quickly had 1.5# of that, which I put into another 3# Thumler barrel along with enough hammered jasper and agate bits to make up to 2#. Then I added some plastic pellets and 120gm of 60/90. It seemed awfully full. The barrel had gotten slightly out of round about the mouth, which made it a challenge to get the lid in, but I managed. I transferred the black O-ring "belt" to the AR-2 (after wiping down the base, adding a drop of oil to each roller bearing, and a drop or two in each oil port on the motor) and put both the medium barrel and the new coarse quartz one on that. I'm pretty excited to see what the Laguna agates come back looking like. I didn't bother to take any pictures of the rough, though you're not missing much. It was nodules of agate, most around an inch or so, with the crust still on (though some had windows chipped in them to confirm that they're agates). Though this is not the pics board, I'll leave some here: this is a dish of mostly Botswana agates I did back when I was active with this. It's been following me from one job to another, and is currently on its 3rd desk. The red one is a bit of that "Laker gravel" I mentioned. Laker gravel, a couple of pieces of something I got from a once-upon-a-time RTH member, which he called "Georgia Queen picture jasper," and a mostly-white agate that was one of the better rocks in the starter rough that came with my first tumbler, which I recently found the invoice for, dated Jan 2002. The political button has been with the rocks about since they were polished, and illustrates how long it's been.
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rastageezer
starting to spend too much on rocks
Member since December 2013
Posts: 169
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Post by rastageezer on Apr 4, 2016 11:49:35 GMT -5
That button kinda ruins what might have been some nice rock pics
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wades
starting to spend too much on rocks
Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734)
Member since February 2006
Posts: 202
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Post by wades on Apr 4, 2016 11:53:49 GMT -5
That button kinda ruins what might have been some nice rock pics Thanks for the attitude!
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Fossilman
Cave Dweller
Member since January 2009
Posts: 20,676
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Post by Fossilman on Apr 4, 2016 13:19:34 GMT -5
Nice tumbles....
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Post by Jugglerguy on Apr 4, 2016 14:30:40 GMT -5
Wow, those are some really nice rocks tumbled very well. Keep the pictures coming!
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wades
starting to spend too much on rocks
Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734)
Member since February 2006
Posts: 202
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Post by wades on Apr 4, 2016 16:41:25 GMT -5
Wow, those are some really nice rocks tumbled very well. Keep the pictures coming! Thank you! Should be about another month or 6 weeks... I have a bunch of stuff in bags marked "for polish" that I haven't really looked at but don't think will quite make a 3# load. I'm thinking the load I have in medium now will go another week, and then 2 weeks in 500, at which point I should have a good amount for polish.
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wades
starting to spend too much on rocks
Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734)
Member since February 2006
Posts: 202
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Post by wades on Apr 12, 2016 9:26:23 GMT -5
This past weekend I got a 3# load (it was actually right at 1.75# of rocks) from 120/220 into 500, and dumped and picked through the 12# Lortone. That part went as planned, and I also made some comical errors. Last week, I said And it was awfully full! When I opened this barrel, I had a thin slurry, and a wad of mud, rocks, and unused grit in the bottom. So, I'd made a beginner's error. In trying to correct it I made it worse. I tried dumping the rock (leaving the wad in the bottom) and picking through it without rinsing so I could get most of that half-pound of hammered stuff out, which I did, also recovering most of the pellets. Then I tried to get the barrel going again without cleaning it out well enough, quickly saw that I had a bad leak, and in trying to fix that I wound up dumping the load on the pavement, making a big mess of mud and grit, and even breaking a few pieces that might have turned out nice soon. In the end I had to declare most of the grit and pellets lost in combat, but I finally got it back up and going, possibly with too little grit and too many pellets. But at least it's loaded in a way that will tumble now. When I picked through the coarse load, I found a few handfuls of pieces that I wanted to move on, plus some gravel that I decided I could use for later stages without picking through every bit. My reasoning is that if it's well-washed and free of obvious jagged points and edges, it will work as fill, and bits that weren't really ready for polish will be obvious when they come out of polish . I'd expected to be have to pick and choose a load for medium, but it turned out that I needed all of the rocks I had to get up to 1.25 or so pounds. I had about 0.25# of 3/8x5/8 ceramic angles, so I added them, and enough of the gravel to get up to 1.75#. At this point I made my second error and charged it with 500 grit instead of 120/220, but I figure I can correct that just by adding the right grit next week, and the week after. I really, really meant to get a picture of the Laguna agate after its first week, but it was late at night when I was at that part, and my phone was about dead. I did get a couple of pics, of the stuff that I moved out of medium into fine: I think the little white dots on the rocks are actually reflections of the sun. I don't seem to have it recorded, but I thought the weight of those rocks going into medium was right at about 1.75#, and it's still right at about that going into 500.
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wades
starting to spend too much on rocks
Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734)
Member since February 2006
Posts: 202
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Post by wades on Apr 25, 2016 11:44:59 GMT -5
Didn't do an update last week. Last weekend ( i.e. the 16th-17th) I opened all the barrels and found at least some unconsumed grit in all of them, and decided that plastic pellets (which I've experimented with in the past, but never used extensively) might be slowing down the grinding. Only the 12# barrel had no pellets, and it was running with re-used mud. Which was very thick, to the point that it was probably interfering with the grinding action. After seeing that thread about the mud-reuse experiment that I got referred to a couple of weeks back, I am no longer attempting to re-use mud. Years ago, the lid liner for the 12# Lortone barrel had worn a hole through the center, where it rubs on the head of the bolt in the middle of the lid. I'd repaired it with a small (about 1.5") tire patch, which held up for a while, but when I was cleaning up last week I saw that it was coming detached. After cleaning up the mess of heavy mud, I removed the patch and made ready to repair the hole again. I cleaned the lid liner thoroughly and trimmed some hardened rubber around the edges of the hole, which is now about the size of a nickel. When everything had dried out for a day, I cut the largest possible square out of a mountain bike tire tube and trimmed the corners to make it an octagon, which I cleaned of traces of talc and roughened with #100 sandpaper. I also roughened the surface of the lid liner. On the lid side of the liner I patched the hole with a '+' made of two pieces of Gorilla tape. I slathered the work side of the liner with a generous amount of black silicone adhesive and stuck the tire tube patch over it, working all the air bubbles out to the edges and ensuring that the edges were bedded in excess adhesive all around. Then I placed it patch-side-down on a couple of layers of newspaper on a heavy steel plate (my rock-smashing anvil), laid a spare Thumler's lid on the lid side (this lid being just larger than the patch) and put a 30# iron dumbbell on the Thumler's lid. I allowed the adhesive to cure for 24 hours before removing the weight and clamping lid and peeling the liner off of the newspaper. There were some boogers of excess adhesive, some with newspaper stuck to them, but I knew this would be gone in a few hundred hours of time with rough rock and coarse grit. I completed the repair by putting another '+' of Gorilla tape over the head of the lid bolt (which I'd cleaned by wire-brushing while the other stuff was curing and drying). My thinking is that the Gorilla tape is fairly shiny and low-friction, and anyway if it seems to be wearing away I can just peel it off and replace it. The 3# Medium and Fine barrels still had very close to 1.75# of rock. The Fine (500) grit was almost consumed, while the leftover 120/220 was a little more visible. There was significant 60/90 still in the coarse barrel of quartzy stuff. I decided that there were still too many pellets in this load and removed some. I recharged all of these barrels and planned to leave them running for 2 weeks before checking them. All of that should have been last week's entry. This week I dumped the 12# and saw that were were traces of unconsumed grit, but it had only been running about 4 days so I'm happy with that. The patch is holding up nicely, and as expected most of the excess silicone is already gone. I pulled a few pieces out to go into the cushioned coarse barrel with the quartz ( e.g. a Bot that has a crystalline quartz center, which was getting a bit banged up, and a few other delicate-ish items). I also pulled to go to medium a few things that were ready, and a number of others that I judged would never be perfect but which have at least one good side that will take a showy polish. When I weighed the rock after picking it over there was 5.5# left so I added 1# of rough red jasper and 0.5# of river pebbles. The level looked low at that point, and I had 1# of small hammer-broken pieces of misc. so I dumped that in too, to make 8# of rock so that I could just measure 1C of 60/90 into it. I have good confidence that this load will exhaust the grit in a week or less. The three 3# barrels I did not touch this week.
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randynmi
off to a rocking start
Member since March 2016
Posts: 5
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Post by randynmi on Apr 27, 2016 11:09:48 GMT -5
Great information! Looking forward to more of your posts, "Keep thumbing my friend".
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Fritz
noticing nice landscape pebbles
Member since May 2016
Posts: 77
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Post by Fritz on May 5, 2016 14:03:09 GMT -5
Great pics, New here and I'm digging the journal.
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wades
starting to spend too much on rocks
Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734)
Member since February 2006
Posts: 202
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Post by wades on May 9, 2016 10:35:28 GMT -5
Didn't do an update last week either. The weekend of 4/30-5/1 I was away: my kid was graduating from college, so all I did that weekend was dump the 12# Lortone after I got home Sunday. I ran the rocks for a few hours with borax to clean up the mud, which seemed free of unconsumed grit. Then during the week of 5/1-7 I picked over the rocks for things to move to medium. So the 12# was offline for a week, while the 3#ers kept running. So the coarse and medium barrels ran 2 weeks, the fine for 3. After I'd picked over the coarse rocks from the 12# there was about 5.5# left to go back in. I added a pound of red jasper, probably 3/4# of river pebbles, and a few odds of larger rough that I had lying around. These images are supposed to be clickable, if I have the incantations right: [EDIT: the incantations are not right, or else there just is not a way to make an image tag be the display element for a link. If you want the full res pictures they are here.] [EDIT EDIT: Maybe the incantations are OK after all, and it's just some interaction between proboard's URL-rewriting and some security software on my end that's the problem.] The fine barrel had been running for 3 weeks and the mud was very thick. It is hard to tell with 500 grit, whether there is any left, when the mud is like this. But I think it was all consumed. After running with borax for a few hours the rocks looked like this: The material in here is mainly "fancy jasper" from superagates.com, with some moss agate hammered out of a big chunk of rough gotten from eBay, and assorted odds and ends mostly from a long-ago RTH travelling rock box. I picked through this, removing the moss agate and combining the remainder with more fancy jasper (which has been sitting in a bag marked "for polish" since sometime in 2007 I think). This left me with 1.75# of fined rock for polish, and I put it in my dedicated 3# polish barrel with lots of plastic beads and 3 Tbsp of new tin oxide. The medium barrel had been running for a couple of weeks: the mud was a much more reasonable consistency and the grit appeared to be all used up here also. After cleaning them up, these are the rocks: Tigereye, obviously, and some of that same red jasper that was shown rough above, and more miscellaneous old RTH rock swap material. The red jasper was gotten from Rock Shed early on in my adventures, maybe around 2002-03. And some ceramic angles. I did not weigh this or move it on: it looks clearly not to be quite enough to make a load. Also I wanted to get the polish barrel running. The small coarse barrel had also been running for 2 weeks, also had mud about the consistency of whole milk, and also had no obvious unconsumed grit. Mainly amethysts (also from superagates, long ago), other quartz from RTH swaps, amazonite, and some jaspery bits of fill. I will pick this over and combine the quartz with a batch that is waiting for medium, and make it back up with some agates that I am afraid would be knocked apart in the Lortone. Not pictured, a load of 1.75# of material that had been in the Lortone and is now in medium. It consists mainly of agates and red jasper, including some of the Laguna agates I mentioned at the start of the thread. As can be seen from my previous pictures, I am a believer in keeping things in coarse until every pit, chip, and notch has been smoothed out and the entire surface of the stone can be polished to the smoothness of a raindrop, but I think if I tried that with the Lagunas they would mostly be ground away to sand before they got to that point. So I am picking out ones that have at least one smooth face showing the fortification pattern: we'll see what kind of results I can get with that.
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peachfront
fully equipped rock polisher
Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them.
Member since August 2010
Posts: 1,745
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Post by peachfront on May 10, 2016 11:39:58 GMT -5
Awesome. I really need to study this. What gave you the idea of using campaign buttons to date the batches? You worked on the campaign? I always think I'll remember when I did what but...
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wades
starting to spend too much on rocks
Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734)
Member since February 2006
Posts: 202
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Post by wades on May 11, 2016 12:54:38 GMT -5
... What gave you the idea of using campaign buttons to date the batches? ... There was no such idea, it just kind of happened.
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