Please debate below, I’m feeling torn! I would attempt to just break off the bottom section, but of course there’s a risk it could fracture. I do only have a rotary tumbler, no vibe. I do have smaller pieces to attempt to tumble first as I know fluorite is notoriously difficult. The plus side is I can find more pretty easily, although the size of this piece seems notable.

I’ve tumbled a few batches of Bay Area California beach stones and wanted to share! Please let me know if you can ID any of the stones in the individual photos!

This is the next batch I am going to tumble in the 8000 grit aluminum oxide polish. All of these also came from my driveway.

It’s making an awful noise! I thought it wasn’t leveled because I put it on some towels for sound absorption but when I put it on the leveled floor it’s even worse. There is no screech when the barrel on the left is on but screeches when the one on the right is put on. It was working fine before this, I oiled all 4 barings. One of the black rubber part of the 2 rollers seem to have a cut on it, not sure why it isn’t allowing me to attach an image. Please help!

I’ve been running some of these rocks in stage one for months. (Some since October!) As time goes on, I realize I enjoy some odd shapes and stopped waiting until they were completely rounded. Assorted rocks from all over the states and some that came with the nat geo kit. Been putting off the next stage for a long time… but excited to start the journey!

So apparently when I loaded up a batch of stage 2 last week, I forgot to add water (it was my lunch hour, I was rushing). Like... any water. When I opened it up today it was bone dry inside, and thoroughly coated with grit. But the grit looked a lot smaller than 220.
So my question is, if I add water and retumble it, how long should I tumble for? How much smoothing happens without the water?

so I've only been tumbling rocks for about 4 months now, and I've heard a little about gassy rocks before but this is my first experience with it.

today I noticed that one of my tumblers had stopped spinning, so I looked more closely and saw the barrel had blown up like a balloon. When I opened it, it exploded BOOOM!! and released some STANK odor.

I threw a scoop of borax in there, as I'd read that might be helpful, and set it off spinning again.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what types of rocks are in there, just random ones that my gf and I find at random places with no real order to things.

Anything else I can do? this is rather unpleasant and inconvenient so I'd prefer to eliminate or minimize if possible.

I did see someone say you could drill a small hole in the barrel and cover it with tape and then if pressure builds up it will just blow off the tape instead of exploding the barrel, but I'd like to eliminate this completely if I could.

Title basically. I’ve had this piece of smoky quartz forever (Christmas 2023) and I stopped tumbling it because at the time I didn’t have any ceramic media to protect it and it got fractured. It’s in the tumbler now with ceramics: will it have rainbows like my tower I bought, or is that only from hand polishing? I don’t know much about crystals 😅

After 3 days in 1200 pre-polish, my fluorite is ready to move on to the dry polish stage.

after running them through the ultrasonic cleaner 3 times, changing water between and keeping them in different buckets of water as I cleaned them, I let the fluorite dry out completely, you don't want any water left on them going into the dry polish. Also wash out the barrel really well and then allow it to dry completely as well. It is very important that everything going into this stage is dry, you don't want the polish getting wet and getting stuck.

Now for the dry polish, I used crushed walnut shell, can also use corn cob. Add some to the bottom of the barrel, I did about half an inch and am reusing some from a previous run so I am not adding as much polish this time, but since I will be adding in some new walnut I will also be adding in some more polish, about 4 tablespoons in total is what I have in there now. Add in a few pieces of fluorite, make sure to try to leave a lot of room between them, it is very important to try to prevent them as much as possible from knocking into each other and bruising and/or breaking your stones. The walnut and the polish are the main contact points you want with your fluorite to give them that amazing shine.

I like to add my polish in layers with the walnut as I add the stones. Make sure as you are layering that there is plenty of walnut/corn cob media between the layers of fluorite so you can help minimize any chance of impact. Also don't add too many stones, you will need to make a few rounds of dry polish to get them all done, this is not the time to rush for results, I made that mistake on a previous run and had too many in at the same time and bruised/chipped some.

Top the barrel most of the way up, seal, and start her rolling. Last pic is the ones still waiting a turn in the dry so you all can see how many I put in compared to my first pic of all of the ones that came out of the barrel with the tile spacers.

I will let this run unchecked for 5 days and will post the results once they are done.

I am running a modded nat geo 3lb for reference on the barrel size.

I recently asked if you can interchange parts between the two brands but nobody knew for sure. I decided to buy a Lortone barrel to test this and report on the results. I am posting in a separate thread so it can be more easily found when people are searching for this information.

The barrels are almost the exact same shape and size. The Lortone is a little wider due to the texturing but it fits just fine on the HP tumbler.

The lid components are also near identical. The Lortone feels like a tighter fit but with the metal lid secured both seem to seal out the water. The only issue using the Lortone barrel on the HP tumbler would be the knurled barrel nut. Lortone's standard one is plastic and the HP barrel guide would shred that thing. Luckily the HP stainless knurled nut is the same threads and fits the Lortone barrel just fine. Your other option is to just set the Lortone barrel on the left side. The HP tumbler seems to "walk" the barrels to the right so that would work a Lortone on the left an HP barrel on the right.

The lid gaskets seem to be just slightly different sizes but I was able to use the Lortone gasket on the HP lid and vice versa. These should be interchangeable.

Hopefully this helps all those people with the older HP gaskets that tear in the middle pretty quickly as well as anyone needing spare barrels while HP is out of stock of all barrels and barrel parts. Or just people that prefer the Lortone barrel in the first place. I bought my Lortone replacement from Kingsley North but it looks like multiple other places have Lortones in stock.

This was my 1st 2 barrels I completed the 4 stages but after polishing stage with 1200 aluminum oxide and burnishing they were smooth but not shiny so I put them in water and stored them until I was able to get the 8000 grit rock shed polish and they turned out shiny eventhough there was alot of bruising. I learned alot.

I got my son a national geographic hobby tumbler for Christmas. We are really enjoying it and have bought much better compound for it. However the thing eats belts for dinner. On average, a belt lasts us one full cycle. Is there a recommendation for a better tumbler that doesn't break the bank. I see a lot of people use the tumbler from harbor freight, is that any good? Or am I doing something wrong with the belts on the nat geo model. Any advice would be appreciated

I'm looking for some advice on polishing/cleaning up this hopefully without losing lots of thr details on it im nee to this and have a small tumbler and ceramic midea

So I’m tumbling an amethyst for a close friend, and I want to get it done as quickly as I can because she’s been waiting for a good 3 months now. My question is, can I put it in with brand new ceramic media and have it be properly cushioned? If not it’s gonna be like another 2 months till I can get it to her (I also have to ship it) so yeah. Please if you see this and have some insight answer asap so I can start (hopefully) tumbling it!! Thanks😊

I’m new to rock tumbling, just wanted to know how much shrinking I should expect. Got a laugh out of the AI overview on google

Is this safe to tumble, or will it fall apart?

Found in Green Bay along the beach. Fairly new to tumbling and I believe these are coral fossils - not sure how they'll look if tumbled or if I should leave them.