New Tumbling Rough

Those look nice and took a great polish! Congrats!

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes leaving blemishes on the rocks add character.

So far, my longest stage 1 run has been 3 months. It was a batch of Aventurine that just took forever to smooth out. But once they smoothedout, they turned out great.

I have also lost patience sometimes and moved rocks on because I got tired of looking at them 😂.

The way that I do stage 1 now is this:

I put the rocks in and run it for 7 days or so. It depends on if I get busy or something comes up, then it may run longer than that. But for the sake of this, we'll just call it a week.

Every week I dump the barrel and rinse the rocks and barrel out very well.

I inspect all of the rocks and the ones that are not ready, go back in the barrel to be run again in stage 1.

The ones that are ready go into a bowl of water with a lid marked for stage 2.

I keep doing this every week until I have enough rocks in the stage 2 bowl to start a barrel on stage 2.

I do not use any ceramic media in stage 1, it is all rocks. Obviously, this may be different if running a soft rock in the 2-4 hardness range.

To speed up stages 1 and 2, get yourself some stuff called Old Miser Grit Carrier. It is a little expensive, but you only need like 1 tsp for a run and it actually helps you use less grit, so it works itself out cost wise. It creates a slurry very fast and helps the grit stick to the rocks and wears them down faster. It should only be used in stages 1 and 2.

My stage 1 mixture for a 3lb barrel is this:

Add water to 1/2 inch below the top of the rocks.

(Most people cover the rocks, but less water creates thicker slurry which will grind the rocks faster. But this may change as well depending on what I'm running).

I then add

2 tbsp 60/90 SiliconCarbide grit

1 tbsp Borax

1 tsp Old Miser Grit Carrier

Most will say to use 1 tbsp of grit per barrel pound( i.e 3lb barrel uses 3 tbsp of grit). But I have experimented and found that 2 tbsp works just as well and there is no unused grit left in the barrel after a week. Grit is expensive, so I use the minimum amount to get the job done.

Hope this helps to get your rocks done stage 1 quicker and more smooth. 👍