Rock Polishing

Last blog of the year and my 2010 New Year Resolution is satisified!

In grade school I had a good friend in my grade named Rayla.  My younger brother Eric was the same age as her younger brother, and they were pretty good friends too.  Rayla and her brother got a rock polisher for Christmas one year, and Eric and I were both intrigued and envious.  Despite repeated requests, Santa never did bring us a rock polisher.
Flash forward 30 years or so, and my brother Eric was assigned my daughter F in the annual Christmas name drawing. Of course he knew just what to get her! A rock polisher!
He got a nice big one and sent it to F. He ordered all the grit also, and that came too.  So after she unwrapped the rock polisher we scurried around and found all the rocks we'd collected over the years and put them in the rock polisher. The tumbler is supposed to be 5/8th full when you start.  With all the rocks we had it wasn't even a quarter full!  So we have been collecting rocks on our various excursions over the years and putting them in the tumbler and finally we had enough to run the tumbler this Dec.  F by this time is a junior in college!

 So we went through all the steps listed in the grit package. The first grit was supposed to run for a week. I opened up the tumbler and got a shock!  It looked like liquid cement.

Had our rocks tumbled themselves into oblivion!
But no, underneath it all I found our rocks.  Rinsed them all off and put them back in the tumbler with the next grit size.  The tumbler now was less than half full of rocks!  Another week and we were able to add the pre-polish.

The rocks looked so shiny after rinsing.  I didn't dry them off at this point, so I really don't know how shiny they really were.

We were very excited to add the polish, but I have my doubts about this step in retrospect. The rocks just aren't very shiny. I think the polish got in the fine cracks on some of the rocks.  I have to read up more about this step of the process. At the end the tumbler was only about a quarter full of rocks.  I wish we could remember where all the rocks came from.  Some of them have definite memories associated with them, but others are a mystery.