Yvette bought a cheap rock tumbler from the clearance section of Walmart awhile ago and we just had a chance to fire it up for the first time. It came with a bunch of stones to start you off, but Yvette and I substituted some more interesting varieties such as Amethyst, Obsidian, and a few others.
If your not familiar with rock tumbling, basically what your doing is simulating a river or stream and as the rocks rub and grind against each other in the stream's current it is actually polishing and rounding over the hard edges of the stones. These rock tumbler kits give you special powdered grits like the one above which help quicken this process. The first cycle with a course grit powder is supposed to tumble for 4 days. The next cycle that Yvette and I will be doing next can take up to a week long and is the fine grit powder. And finally the last step is a polishing powder that should be left tumbling for around 4 days. All in all, this process is roughly a two week cycle for a full batch of polished stones, not to shabby instead of the years that it might take to polish a stone in a slow moving river.
Stay tuned to see the end results!
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