@markgrant4389

5 months ago

Hi, Ariel, I just wanted to say hi and that I’m enjoying your rock hounding and rock tumbling videos. I grew up rock hounding, my uncle and my Grand Dad were sort of rock hounds so I’ve been picking up rocks for well over 50 years. I’ve been tumbling rocks off and on for about 30 years. Enjoying your videos a lot. I like your experiments and your sound effects. Unfortunately my job keeps me over seas most of the time so I don’t get to tumble rocks as much as I’d like to but I recently bought another one and have picked up some nice pieces from the ground. Most are just quartz but some are jasper and granite. A few are greenish and I don’t know what they are. Recently, I found what might very well be a piece of a meteor. It’s metallic looking and about the size of a golf ball but really heavy for the size. It had just a little bit of surface rust on it but was not covered in it. I see nuts and bolts on the ground and they’re much rustier. A magnet easily sticks to it and I noticed that small metal objects sticks to it. I have on my desk and the other day I noticed a staple sticking to it so I did a few checks and it is slightly magnetic itself. I’m going to have it analyzed when I can to see what elements are in it. I suspect a little iron and quite a bit of nickel are there. There’s these cool stones I find fairly often that are mostly gray but have a pretty pink in them and sometimes a little bit of white. Not sure what they are but I had a couple of cabochons made from one of them and from those, a nice pair of cuff links. I could send you one or two if you would like that. Oh, what I originally wanted to say was that after each stage in the tumbler, I use dish soap, two sessions of 30 minutes each, then “Soft Scrub” for 30 minutes then another session of dish soap for 30 minutes. When I do my initial cleaning before the tumbler, I just use soap and water and agitate it several times. For the ones that will fit in something like a water jug or sports drink bottle (plastic with a wider mouth) I use warm water and those denture cleaning effervescent tablets in warm water. I use at least two but sometimes more depending on how many rocks I’m cleaning at the time. I let them soak in that for about a week, not that I think it takes a week. I’m just a patient guy. For me, it works well. I’ve even been known to clean them in the dishwasher in the silverware holder thing, after having washed them up to get them as clean as possible first. Last thing, I’m experimenting with using little pieces of a scotch brite pad cut into small 1/4 inch pieces in my polish stage instead of ceramic media or plastic pellets or the little sponges. I’m interested to see if this is going to work out for me.

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