How To Cut And Polish Rose Quartz #crystals #geology #rockhounding #minerals #gemstone #polishing

Hi, G'day. Today I'm going to be cutting up this big chunk of rose quartz. It's really going to push the limits of my nine inch rock saw, but there are ways I'll show you. This I got at the half price table at the rock shop for 30 bucks. It's about, I think it was eight and a half kilos of rose quartz. It's not the rosiest of quartz, but it is still rose quartz. Thanks for tuning into my YouTube channel. I make videos on all things rock related, from collecting, to cutting and polishing, along with helpful hints. If you enjoy my videos, please consider subscribing, as well as liking, sharing, and commenting, to help me build my channel. Thank you. I've also got a few other bits and pieces here that I'll go in as well. So these will be cut up into smaller bite-sized pieces, and then, uh, tumble polished. Look at this one. Looks like a dirty old rock, but no, it's rose quartz on the inside. See, just little bits and pieces. Now I'll just get shaped. Don't need to be cut. Cutting in two, probably that one. Same with that. So yes, I'm going to cut these up, pre-shape them, and then tumble polish them for a few weeks. But it won't be a few weeks for you. It'll be a few minutes, and then we'll see the results. Here we go. Time to cut this big chunk of rose quartz. How to fit it in the saw, that's the problem. All right, let's go. This isn't going to be quick. I'll speed it up. All right, so I've cut sort of halfway through. The rest I'll do with a hammer and chisel. Give this a whack. It's got through. No, it hasn't. I'm going to buy a hair, and one more whack should do it. There we go. Beautiful. Rose quartz. Good stuff. All right, now I like to round off the rocks once they've been cut. So get the basic shape first, and knock off any dirty brown bits from the edges. Get it to this point, and then shave up all these edges. What this does is it knocks off about, well not only knocks off the edges, it knocks off a few weeks in stage one of the tumbler. Saves a lot of time and a lot of grit as well. A lot of people are concerned about my hands so close to the blade, but you really need to do something pretty stupid to cut yourself on a diamond blade. Even being as stupid as this is, you still can't cut yourself, and this is what I've ended up with. A lot of pieces of rose quartz as well as some amethyst and some smoky quartz, and this is what I had left over from that chunk of rose quartz. I'll do for another batch at a later date. Time to load up the barrels. I'll be using my second largest barrels for tumbling these. They should fit nicely. Let's always speed these up, it gets a bit boring. Basically you want the level of the rocks to be about two-thirds the level of the barrel, the height of the barrel. I think there's a bit of tourmaline. If it is, it's not going to work out very well. So yeah, I'll keep loading up. Oh, that's nice, isn't it? Very, very translucent. Should come out nice. All right, now some filler rock. This is basically off cuts from the saw from cutting these rocks. Always good to use rocks the same hardness. The fact that they came off these rocks means they should be the same. They should be the same hardness. Time to add some grit. I'll be using 46 grit silicon carbide. A lot of people use about, I think it's an 80 grit. I just find 46 makes even shorter work of the first stage of tumbling, and it is a pretty time-consuming process. So any shortcuts to me is worth it. So each of these barrels gets six tablespoons of silicon carbide. How many is that? Six? That's six. All right, and then we put some water in. So the water goes to just below the level of the rocks. So the rocks are at about three quarters of the barrel, and then you fill up with water so you can just see it below the level of the rocks. All right, now someone's made a bit of a mess here. You don't want any of this grit and rocks and stuff around the seal or else they will leak. Quick toothbrush, and they're ready for their lids. All right, these lids match because this is a homemade tumbler. One notch goes with one notch, two notches with two notches. I'll fill these up. This will take a little while, and then lift these heavy barrels into place. So I've never actually measured how much is in these, but I reckon they're probably about nine kilos each. So what's that? 18 pounds? 18 pound barrels. Leave them to tumble for a week, come back and have a look. Now this was unplanned. The power went out, and when it came back on, the motor didn't start up, so it just sat there, not spinning, with the power running through it. So that's the end of that one. I'll need another one, another motor. So I changed barrels back to the old Lawton's, and this is how they turned out. This is after a week. It's amazing that one of them's sort of sloppy, one's very muddy, one's bubbly, and one's dry bubbly. It's all the same materials. Weird, all right, let's tip them out. This is after stage one, ready to be rinsed off. That's disgusting, isn't it? All right, let's continue. Time for a quick rinse of fresh water, and get our first glimpse of how these rocks are progressing. I've got to say, I'm pretty happy. This is rose quartz, beautiful. This is actually, I think, smoky quartz with tourmaline, tourmaline crystals in it. This is the same stuff, and a bit of amethyst. That one, I think, is just smoky quartz. Time for stage two. I always do stage two, three, and four in the vibratory tumblers. It goes a lot quicker, and uses a lot less grit, but this will be using 220 grit for stage two. So just three tablespoons of 220 into each barrel, is more than enough. That is, we'll tumble for two days. Here we are, two days later, and I don't often show this, and people say to me, how come you have rocks without any water, go in, and then you empty them, they're all full of water. Well, I give them a rinse for a couple of hours at the end of each stage. This is the end of stage two. I just fill that up. I rinse for probably one or two hours, and then I tip them out. It just helps clean the rocks. Here we are, tipping them out after stage two. Another quick rinse with fresh water, and yes, they still look nice. All righty-o, stage three. Stage three, we'll be using 600 grit silicon carbide, and again, three tablespoons into each barrel, and they'll be left for two days. Here we are, two days later, the rocks have been rinsing for a couple of hours. We'll empty them out, give them a quick fresh water rinse, and then they'll go into stage four, final polish. I like this one here with the bands running through it. It's really very translucent. This one I think is smoky quartz, again, translucent. What's that? It's like a smoky amethyst, if such a thing exists. And here we go, stage four, final polish. A bit mesmerizing how it does that. One goes clockwise, one goes anticlockwise. So something different this time. Normally I'd use aluminium oxide, but this is tin oxide. Aluminium oxide is one micron. This is two microns, so it should give us a better polish, hopefully. We'll see. So again, three tablespoons of the tin oxide into each, and again, two days, something I like to do in the final polish stage is check their progress. So this has been 12 hours, and I'm pretty impressed. Normally you don't see much gloss after just 12 hours, but this is coming out very nice. Back it goes, another day and a half. And here we are, emptying the final polish stage. So these get tipped out, again, rinsed with fresh water, and then run under a cup, then scrubbed with a toothbrush, and with a tourmaline in it. Now, this is something a lot of people do between every stage. I work to the last stage. Just give it a borax rinse. It just helps get rid of any grits and polishes that are caught up in the rocks. These normally go for a couple of hours. Sometimes they can go overnight. A couple of hours is plenty. And here we are after a few hours in borax, and then again, a fresh water rinse. They now go into the ultrasonic cleaners. I chose a bit of tourmaline because that has grit stuck all through it. So basically, these will all get an ultrasonic clean. Some of them might not need it, but it's just good fun. It's actually good fun to watch, you'll see in a second. Press start on this fella, go, and watch what happens. Instant clouds. Fantastic, isn't it? All that is grit and polish that's been stuck in the cracks of the rocks, being forced out through ultrasonic sound. Good stuff. As always, I will leave you with a slideshow and some nice music. Well, I consider it nice music. So that's it. Rose quartz, some amethyst, and some smoky quartz, all polished. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you haven't already subscribed, please consider doing that. I'd appreciate it. Till next time, see ya.