Mastering The Most Frustrating Rock To Tumble

Today I'm starting a batch of Labradorite. This will be the second time I've ever tumbled this and these are the results from the first time I ever tumbled it. I'll show you these closer in a little bit. I wasn't super happy with these results. They're not bad but I'm hoping that I can do a little bit better this time. So Labradorite is a type of feldspar and feldspars have these cleavage planes where they break along these flat planes. It actually has two different cleavage planes so it breaks very easily. That makes it a little bit hard to tumble because it wants to break in the tumbler or at least chip. It's also a little bit softer than some of the other rocks I tumble. A lot of the rocks I tumble are 7 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness and these are 6. Not super soft but a little bit softer. So that's both good and bad. It makes them a little bit more fragile I guess but it also makes them tumble a little bit quicker and that's good. The reason people like to tumble this stuff is because it has this iridescent shiller called Labradorescence. So if you turn it in the light it turns different colors and I need to bring the camera a little bit closer to show you that. So I'm going to do that now and then I'll tell you all the specifics of how we're going to tumble this. Let's take a look at that Labradorescence. You can see why so many people want to tumble this. If I turn this just right you can see some orange in there on the left hand side. There we go. Isn't that cool looking? Here's another one also wet and you can see some blue in that. So this stuff is rough rock I haven't done anything with. This stuff over here is some stuff that I made some jewelry out of. I made a video on that I'll put a link to that at the end. You can see some blue down here in the bottom blue or purple somewhere right there. So these are scraps from making jewelry and so I just decided to throw those in the tumbler. And then here's the stuff I already tumbled and I picked out a few that showed the iridescence a little better. Of course whenever you want to show somebody then that doesn't show up. So I think there's some blue on the bottom. Here you can see a lot in that one. Really pretty. Let's see if I can find it here. A little bit along the bottom. There we go. Got to turn it just the right way to see it. There we go. Left hand side. So anyhow this is the results I got last time I tumbled it and maybe this is as good as it's going to get. I don't really know. It does have a pretty good shine to it just not quite as good as what I'm used to. And not all of it's going to show that labrador essence but some does. So anyhow let's get to the tumbling part and see what we can do with this. See if we can improve upon this polish. When I tumbled these a couple years ago I'm pretty sure I used my regular tumbling method. I know I tried a couple different things but I think I went back to starting them in the rotary and then finishing them in a vibratory tumbler. Today I'm going to be using a completely different method. All these rocks I got at the rock shed and Sean there at the rock shed introduced me to Margie and he said that Margie had some pretty good luck tumbling labradorite. So she and I have been emailing back and forth and I'm going to follow her method which is quite a bit different than my method. For one thing she does everything in a rotary tumbler and I prefer using a vibratory tumbler for the last stages. Even though their methods are way different than mine I'm going to follow them to a tee because it always bugs me when people ask me for tumbling advice and I tell them exactly what to do and then they come back to me and they say oh my rocks didn't turn out and I used your method and then I start questioning them and I find out that they didn't use my method at all. They took all kinds of shortcuts and the rocks didn't turn out. So I'm going to do everything she says even when it doesn't seem quite right to me. So actually the very first thing I'm going do is not what she does. She uses a four pound barrel. I only have three pound barrels and six pound barrels and I'm going with the smaller barrel because since this rock's a little more delicate it's better to roll it in a smaller barrel. If it's in a bigger barrel it's going to fall farther and bruise it up more. The only problem with that is this is pretty big rock for this barrel but I think it's going to be okay. So I'm going to layer some of these in here. Put a of these in and then she uses ceramic media in the first stage which is something I never do. So I'm going to put a few of those in there and then I'm going to put in some I'm going to put some of these smaller ones in too. Another big one. I'm going to get them in there and then with another handful of these in and those those that ceramic will help with the with the bigger rocks. It'll kind of get in the nooks and crannies a little better. I don't have a lot more room in there so I'm just going to throw in maybe two more. That's a pretty full barrel. I'm going to fill up at least one other barrel maybe two other barrels and try to get most of this roughed out pretty quickly. This shouldn't take quite as long because it is a softer rock. All right then she uses a tablespoon and a half of borax. I've scaled all this down for my size barrel so one and a half and that's also something I never put in the first stage and then she uses four and a half tablespoons of 60-90 silicon carbide grit. So let me just count those out there and a half something like that and then she fills the water up over the top of the rocks a little bit. I go under maybe half an inch to three quarters of an inch in a barrel this size. She fills it up over the top so I'm going to do that. All right so that's a lot more water than I usually use but that's what Margie says to do that's what I'm going to do. So I'm going to button all this up throw it on the tumbler and then we'll check back on it in eight days. I usually go seven days she goes eight so I'm going eight. Well it's been 10 days instead of the eight days I planned on. Some things came up and I didn't have time to empty the tumbler so they ran for a couple extra days which isn't going to hurt anything at all. These are not done even after 10 days they're still pretty rough and they're going to need some more time in the tumbler. I do have three little guys whoops three little guys that are ready to move on. These are about as good as they're going to get so I'll set those aside. So I'm just going to keep running these the same as I did before eight or ten days at a time. I'll just add in the new rough ones as these get finished and I'm going to keep using the ceramic media but I wanted to show you something. Here's brand new ceramic media like I put in last week and here's what it looks like after a week. It's quite a bit rounded off, worn down a little bit. This is why I don't usually put ceramic media in the first stage because it just wears it out but in this case we want to protect this stuff because it's kind of fragile so I think it's probably a good idea to have the ceramic media in there. So I'm going to keep adding it in and like I said I'm just going to keep repeating this over and over until all this is looking the way I want it to look and then I'll check back in with you and we'll do the next step. It's taken about four or five weeks to get enough rocks to fill the barrel for the second stage but I'm ready to go now. This stuff is not perfect there's still cracks all over the place on it. It feels smooth but it's certainly not a flaw-free rock or anything like that. Some pieces are better than others but generally there's going to be some cracks in this stuff. So I'm going to fill this like I did before, put a layer of rocks in. This stage is exactly like the last except with a finer grit. Put some ceramic media in between, more rocks, more ceramics. I'm just sort of filling it like that and a little bit more. That looks pretty good. I might put some of those small pieces in I guess. Be kind of like more ceramics. So put in some of these smaller ones and maybe a tad more ceramics. All right I'm going to fill this up above the rocks like before. All right so I have the water higher than the rocks. I'm going to go with one and a half tablespoons of borax again and then four and a half tablespoons of 120-220 silicon carbide grit. All right and I'm just going to close that up and I'll put it on the tumbler for eight days I think this time. Yeah eight days. So I'll see you in eight days. I rinse these off really well and I already put the water back in the barrel because I don't want these to dry out from this point on. I did dry one off though this one and you can see it doesn't have a polish yet. So in this stage they get one and a half tablespoons of borax and a whopping six tablespoons of 500 aluminum oxide. That seems like a lot. In my lotto tumbler I use a half a teaspoon, not six tablespoons. All right see if I can fit the lid on there and that's going on the tumbler this time for 10 days. I just rinse these off again. I've got them reloaded into the barrel and before we go on to the next stage I'm going to wash these really well by using one tablespoon of ivory soap that I just shaved off and we're going to put that in there and run it for three hours. I just rinse them off again and it's surprising how dirty the water that comes out of that is. That three hour wash really does something so I think that's worth doing. I got the water back in here again keeping them wet. I dried one off for you so you can see that it's not shiny yet. There's a very little bit of kind of a matte gloss to it and I'm starting to be able to see a little bit of blue color in this one. I don't know if you can see it from there. So this is loaded up exactly the same as the last couple of times and this time I'm doing just like I did before with the borax, one and a half tablespoons and then this is 1000 aluminum oxide so we'll get six tablespoons of that and this time it only goes on for five days and after that we go to the polish stage which is a little different so I'm kind of excited about that. It's been five days so I just rinsed the rocks off and they're now in their three hour wash with some ivory soap just like before and I'm now here in my kitchen because the next step involves some cooking believe it or not. So what I'm doing here is making sugar water for the polish stage. We want the water to be thick and the sugar is going to thicken up the water and that cushions the rocks so they have a little more gentle ride. So the first thing I'm going to do is add one cup of water and then I know the amount of sugar is somewhere between two and a half and three cups so Margie said she starts with two and a half cups and then just adds a little bit more until it looks thick. If you add too much sugar you're going to get a super saturated solution. That's what you do to make rock candy so I don't want this to crystallize and harden in the barrel so I want to stop short of that. So I need to get this boiling so I'm going to just throw in one cup to get it started and then once it's boiling I'll turn the camera back on and I'll show you adding the rest of it and we'll see if we can get this right. All right it's just starting to bubble a little bit and my first cup is dissolved. Throwing in the second cup. All right this is a half cup. Doesn't look too thick yet but it's starting to feel a little bit thicker. All right so I'm going to try to measure this. I don't want to put in an entire half cup, a little bit more. Try that for starters and try just a little bit more. See where I'm at so far. All right about that much more. I think I might call that quits. Let's see what it looks like. All right I'm going to let that cool off while the rocks are washing. Three hours should be enough to cool it down to room temperature. Well I added too much sugar. I scraped a little off the edge as it was crystallizing and that was just a couple minutes ago and it's all kind of solidifying at this point. So I'm going to add a little more water. I don't know how much. About that much. I'm going to heat it up again and just experiment with this until I get it right. I added about two and three quarters cups of sugar. That's too much so I'd stick to closer to two and a half cups. Well I hope I have this right now. The syrup's looking pretty thick. It is crystallizing a little bit but not too much. So I think this is going to be okay. So I'm going to fill this with the syrup. So the water's just been drained out of here and I'm going to fill this up just over the top of the rocks just like I've been doing with the water. See if I can do this without making a mess. That's doubtful. It takes a little while to run down in there. And I don't know if you can see what I'm doing but I'll tip it up in just a second and show you. All right I don't want to get too much in there. So it's just over the top of the rocks a little bit. I'm going to put in one and a half tablespoons of borax just like I've been doing. That is not borax. That's the next step. Here's the borax. All right one and a half tablespoons. There's one and about a half. And then this next step is tin oxide polish. I used to use this in an old recipe I used to use and I stopped using it. This costs about four times as much as aluminum oxide polish which is what I usually use. But this is what the recipe calls for so this is what I'm going to use. Six tablespoons. I should have hopefully enough in here. One, two, there's five, and there's six. All right so I'm going to button that up and the recipe calls for seven to ten days of tumbling now. I'm just going to go ten and make sure that these are good and then we'll be all done. I can hardly wait. It should be all done now. I can't really hear much moving around in there. Very thick. You excited? I am excited. So Margie tells me you can reuse this syrup in here with a expensive grid in it up to two times. So I have the rest of these rocks ready to go into this stage so I'm going to definitely try to save this. Look at that. Well it's still liquid. It didn't all crystallize. That's good. So I'm not sure the best way to do this but what I'm going to try is just scooping the rocks out by hand. I do have more syrup in the, I put it in a jar in the fridge so if I lose a little bit of this along the way it's okay. This is a mess. All right I'm gonna rinse my hands off. They're slippery. Turn the camera off and try to pick all these out of here. I'll go rinse them off and then I'll show you what we got. All right here it is. It is not as shiny as I was expecting. So it's got some shine but it's just moderately shiny. I did better on this using my lotto tumbler. It turned out much better than this did. So I just sent a quick little video of this to Margie and asked her if this is what she gets out of hers or if she gets a better shine than this. So we'll have to see what she says. I might need to go back in for some more polishing. It was supposed to be in for 10 days. I actually forgot about it and it was in for 12 days I think. So it wasn't a short little run in the syrup. So we'll see what Margie says and I'll get back to you. All right last night Margie and I exchanged a couple emails. I showed her pictures of my rocks and she said they should be a whole lot shinier than that. She showed me some of hers and they were a lot shinier than mine are. She asked me some questions if I was doing this and doing that. I verified that I was. I've been following her directions very very closely. She kept mentioning that she uses a lot of ceramics. So I started wondering if I had enough ceramics in there. My ceramics are sitting down in the bottom of this sludge so I couldn't really show her how many I was using. But I'm going to add some ceramics and I was a little bit concerned that the barrel was too full. It was up 80-85 percent maybe and maybe the rocks didn't have enough room to move around in there. So since I'm adding ceramics and I want the total volume to be lower I got to remove some rocks. So I looked through the rocks and this big one really isn't showing any color at all and this other one that's pretty big isn't showing much color at all. So I'm going to take those out to make room for this other stuff and then I'm going to add in one more tablespoon of tin oxide just to make sure there's enough polish in there. I'm going to run it for probably another 10 days and then we'll check in on them there and hopefully this time it works out. All right fingers crossed let's try this again. I don't know a little discouraged after last time but I'm not giving up on this. All right there it is and once again I'm going to be digging around in these so I will uh dig all these out rinse them off and then show you what they look like. Rather than rinsing all of them off because they're a huge mess I decide just to rinse a couple off and these are definitely getting shiny. They're not as shiny as my rocks usually are. I think a lot of people would be very happy with this shine but I'm not a lot of people so I want to get them a little bit better. So the next thing I'm going to try is thinning this out. I think maybe this is just too thick and they're just not moving around enough in here so uh I don't know if you can tell but like these rocks up here just not even hardly moving down. So I'm going to add a little water to this take a little out to make room for the water. I'm probably going to add another tablespoon of tin oxide and I'm going to throw them on for another 10 days. Well here we go again. I hope the third time's a charm. Kind of afraid to look. All right well it's it's much more liquidy in there. It's not as thick so let's take a couple out take them over to the sink and see how they look. I'll be right back. I'm smiling. I think these look pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. So I'm going to go wash off the rest of these and we'll take a look at them a little closer. Hold on. All right let's take a look at these. See some blue. There it is. Nice blue on that little piece. With this bigger piece. Didn't see much color in that one. So I think the shine looks really good on these now. What doesn't look good is the stuff just has fractures everywhere. Oh there's a little on the top. See that little gold? And I don't know that there's much you can do about all the fractures. I don't think I caused all these by tumbling them because we gave it a pretty gentle tumble. So I think that's just the material and if you're going to tumble this stuff you're probably just going to have to deal with that. Oh there we go. Look at that. That's a good one. You really got to play around with it to see the color. Some of them just doesn't have color and some you have to tip every which way until you get it. I'm not seeing anything there. A little bit over here I saw a little glimpse of something. There we go. Right up in there. Oh that's a good one. That's cool. Saw something there for a second I thought. What's going on? Oh that's a good one. See on the left side there? There we go. That's neat. I don't see anything on that side. This one's really banged up. I don't see any color in it. Oh I saw some there. Look at that. Wow. It's like the northern lights or something. A little bit down here. Oh there we go. I saw something there. Where'd it go? There it is. Isn't that cool? That one I could see some blue. No it's gone. Right there. Where was I? There. I don't see anything there. I don't see anything in that piece either. You know you get the idea. All right so I'm calling this a success. What I really feel like I need to do now is compare that to a batch done my normal way. So I have these are the two pieces that I pulled out a couple weeks ago that weren't very polished and I wanted to make a little more room in the tumbler. And then these have only gone through the coarse stage. Same as these did. So I'm going to put all these in my vibratory tumbler. I'm going to start them on 120-220 grit. So these will go right back to being dull again. But that'll give us a fair comparison. And I'm just going to go through my normal procedure in the lotto tumbler. So it's going to be two days in 120-220 silicon carbide. Three days in 500 aluminum oxide. And then two days in 8000 grit aluminum oxide. And I'm not going to show any of that. I'll just be back in a week and then we can compare my normal method to this rotary method. So I'll see you in a week. These just came out of the lotto tumbler and these are the ones that we did in the rotary tumbler earlier. Let's just take a look at a few of these. I'd say the polish is pretty identical on the both of them. I can't say I like one better than the other. There's that color I was trying to show you. There we go. Boy that's pretty. This one doesn't have much on the big sides but on this small side there's some really nice color. Got blue and kind of an orangish yellowish and purple. This is a nice one. I just can't get past that stuff though. As beautiful as that is this really bugs me. That's what I don't like about this. Do yourself a favor and don't make this the first rock you tumble. Start out with a jasper or agate something like that. Something that's hard and doesn't have fractures all over the place. I think you're going to be a lot happier. Save this for after you've done quite a few other tumbles and you want a challenge. So one more time here's the shine you get in the rotary tumbler. Like I said I think that the polish is just about identical on both of these. So I want to say a huge thank you to Margie for helping me out with this. I couldn't have done this without Margie so thank you. And if you have any tips on how to tumble labradorite please write them in the comments. If you haven't seen my technique for how to tumble on the lotto tumbler it's what I do for 95 percent of the rocks I tumble. So click on that link and I'll see you over there.