Tumbling Question

[Moops]

I just took out my first batch from the polish barrel. When I rinsed the stones they looked great, but after they dried they have a matte finish to them. I checked them under a magnifying glass with fluorescent lighting and can't see any scratches on the stones. There are some fractures in some of them and they seem to have some white polish in the fractures. I scrubbed them with a toothbrush and the white residue is still there.

Do I need to run them through another polish cycle or is there another method to shine them up?

I have an old digital camera and I am having a terrible time taking close up photos. If I can get a good shot of the stones I will try to post a picture

Thanks in advance,
Mark

[sandsman1]

try running them through in borax and pellets over nite that might get the polish out or most of it -- you can run them longer then that just make sure you use alot of pellets so they dont kill each other

[Sabre52]

Mark: If you've gone through all the other stages and the polish is still sticking in pits, fractures, etc enough that the finish is satin like, I suspect the stone is either too porous and is never gonna take a good shine or the stone needs more grinding to remove polish catching pits and defects....mel

[Moops]

Tried the borax over night and now I have a bright shiny batch! These stones were all gathered from Lake Superior at a place called Agate Beach, near Grand Marais. There is not an agate in the bunch! We had no idea what to look for and ended up with a load of beach stones. We'll try again and maybe be more successful now that we have some idea of what an agate is.
Thanks for the tips.
Mark

[tacomaguy]

You sound just like me 2 batches ago, but that your 1st was better then mine... lol On my second batch, following info i gathered from here and some trial and error, i tried to clean my rocks with borax and pellets BEFORE ( just a little borax as i have 3# barrels ) i went to polish. Sure enough, it turned out WAY better then my first. My first was beach stones that didn't turn out very well... My second batch beach stones from the coast rather then the Puget Sound, and they turned out better after i used the borax/pellets thing. Hope this helps you Mark. - Eric

This is good advice isn't it? Does anyone else do that have the success i have had? I actually do the borax/pellets thing between all the steps to clean the rocks off, before the next step.
Don't want to give out bad advice here. - Eric

[Jurrasic Jonje]

the borax or burnishing steps never hurt the cleaner the rock is going into the next step the better.

[carpqueen]

Hi Mark...I have been polishing (or should I say "trying to polish") Michigan beach stones since February and it is very discouraging because the majority of them just don't take a shine (even with Borax). They are just too soft and porous and I get the same as you do with the dull matt finish and the residue also. They sure are beautiful in the water though.

One thing that this has taught me is the hardness of the rocks that I pick up. So I feel these past months have not been wasted because I now know what to look for and sometimes the pretty granite-type rocks are better left in the water.

Have a good day,

CQ

[spacegold]

Scratch, scratch, scratch. In the field, you have an opportunity to differentiate hard and soft stones fairly easily. Get a stone you know is an agate. Use it as a scratching stone. Any stone you can scratch with it is softer, and will not shine polish with harder stones. Harder stones will scratch it in the polish medium, pellets or not. When that happens the scratches are too small to see with a magnifying glass, but they are deep enough to dull the shine.

I have had some luck taking the dull stones out and polishing them separately in a small tumbler with jeweler's rouge for about two weeks. The rouge will enter the tiniest fracture, though, and make it ugly. so it doesn't work on fractured stone.

Stones you can't scratch with the agate are hard stones that will polish well together. Agate, jasper, chalcedoney, flint, quartz, etc. Some granite will also polish passibly with these stones as well.

If a stone is pretty in the water it will usually be pretty polished, but the softer stones have to be separated for polish. I tumble all stones together through prepolish. When they come out of prepolish I can tell which ones are so dull that they are not going to polish in the last stage, and that is the point that I separate them.

Some stones are so soft and porous that they will never polish, no matter what you do. These are leaverite. The best thing to do is learn from tumbling what they look like and leave them in the field. My collecting area contains several categories of such stone, that looks pretty good when wet. But I have learned that it is a waste of time to cart it home. Tumbling greatly improves a collector's skills.

[spacegold]

Whever you get a batch out of polish and find them dull, there is always the possibility that some upstream grit found its way to the polish barrel. I had that happen once. I could not figure out why a batch of hard stones came out dull. Checking all the rocks carefully, I found one with a pit I had not noticed. I pulled that one out and scrubbed the polish barrel with soap and water. When I ran the rest again for a week they came out fine. The pitted one had apparently carried just enough of some upstream grit to spoil the finish on the whole batch.