Hand Polishing Petrified Wood | How to Polish Rocks on the Cheap | Polishing Rocks #1
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ย. 2024
- In this video I show you how I polish rocks on a budget by polishing a couple of my favorite pieces of petrified wood from Nova Scotia.
Here is all you need to get this DIY set up:
- Old drill: $0
- 4" diamond polishing pad kit with arbor (50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500, 3000 grit): $75
- 5/8" threaded drill adapter: $10
- Time: $0 (Depending on the rock you can do one flat surface in about 3hrs using this method)
- Total Cost: $85
The results speak for themselves! However, I will be upgrading my rock polishing set up to be more time efficient and will reveal my new method in future polishing videos!
I am experimenting with different video editing software right now so I apologize if there are water marks in the video. The rocks are more important anyway!!
#thefinders #rockhounding #lapidary #DIY
I had a similar setup for polishing for a long time and it does work well, its just slow which is really the only downside. Looks like you're getting great results.
I've been doing it this way for over ten years.......I had a lot of time to perfect my technique! I'm finally ready to move on from it and bite the bullet on something a little more professional.
My hands get so beat up from trying to polish! Great job- it's hard work! I just ordered a flat lap but it takes a few weeks to get here. We have the same phone! It's great- I love mine.
So far I am liking the image and video quality much better than the iPhone. I miss imovie though. It was so easy to use. Now I'm using inshot and its taking me a bit to learn.
Wow that is Beautiful petrified wood
Thanks! Its one of my favorite local rocks.
Thanks for sharing. The pet. Wood is gorgeous. Don’t fret the lost footage, I saw plenty of good info and you got a better phone. I love the beautiful detail in the agatised wood. Such great stones. I can’t wait to see what you do with the rest. 🙂
Thanks! Yes maybe the phone dying was a blessing in disguise!
Great polish. I just got all the stuff to hook up to my grinder so I can learn to polish. Thanks, by the way, for the info on Ross Creek. I really enjoyed my day there. It's so beautiful. I even got in a couple of trips to Scot's Bay, it's fabulous. I found an Amethyst there on Remembrance Day. So happy. The Valley itself is so beautiful in the fall, well, any time of year for that matter. Keep up the great videos, You are a real inspiration!
Awesome!! Glad you enjoyed those trips! When using your grinder make sure you buy and wear a respirator. You can get one at Home Depot or Kent. You don't want to breathe in the rock dust. Very bad for you.
Gorgeous material! Very useful technique to draw the spiderweb, I will be cribbing that from you, thanks.
Awesome!! Glad you got something out of it! That is a trick I picked up a few years back from a local rockhounding friend here in NS.
Great job! Those before and after shots at the end really put things into perspective!
Thanks! These pieces really do have beautiful hidden details when cut and polished!
The flat lap will be a good addition
Yes I'm excited to use it. I think i'm going to use it to polish our 15lb cycad I just cut.
Bea-u-ti-ful! Nice job!
Thanks!! Yours should turn out some nice details when polished. They are like snow flakes.....you don't know how they will turn out once you polish them. Everyone is different.
🤩 WOW turned out BEAUTIFUL. Great job bro. I love those red tons in the pet wood. I’ve thought about making a similar setup but haven’t yet. May have to though. Saving up currently to buy a flat lap hopefully by next spring I can afford to get one.
Sorry to hear about your phone I’ve had similar issues with my iPhone and it’s super frustrating when that happens and you realize your footage is gone. Anyways thanks for sharing bro.. loved it.
Thanks dude! I might be ordering a vibrolap this weekend. I'm 95% decided. I've done all the research. I think it is my best option.
@@RockhoundingLife oh nice, can’t wait to see what you get and what you make.🤘🤙🔥🔥
I have lost footage too. It has always been my fault. I end up deleting something off one of my cameras before I've put it on my computer. It's easy to do when you have footage for several videos all in progress at the same time, which is something I do often. It's very frustrating, but I can't imagine losing my phone/camera too. That's a real bummer.
I do basically the same thing you're doing with my Makita electronic stone polisher. I use the same type of pads, but my grinder runs water through it. I have never tried to do a flat rock like that, except the bottom of a couple bowls I made. I have tried to polish slabs on my rotary flat lap and it's a very slow process. It's so much faster to do convex surfaces, even with small items.
Do some reading before getting a vibratory flat lap. I have read that they're very hard to use. I'm not sure that you can leave them alone for the day. I think you have to keep the pan wet, so you have to add water periodically while it's running. I'm not sure about that, but it seems like that's something I read.
Here are a couple threads from the Rock Tumbling Hobby forums that you might find interesting:
I read that too. I saw someone on TH-cam, maybe Classic Rocks, use an IV drip with his vibro lap. He could leave it for 6-8 hrs. I'm looking into that sort of ser up. It would be easy for me to do the way my garage is set up.
Thanks for the link! I'll be checking it out.
My phone dying could be a blessing in disguise. It made me go away from iPhone and into the arms of Samsung which appears to have crisper images and video quality.
@@RockhoundingLife You don't want to know my opinion there. Apple shareholder typing on a MacBook Pro here.
@@RockhoundingLife I read the same thing about using an IV drip system.
Nice but why is that considered hand polished when youre using power tools?
I guess technically it's not hand polishing. But its as rudimentary as it gets without actually using sandpaper in your hand.
Why not tie string around the drill trigger while polishing?
Really cool process. Turned out amazing. I've seen a few different ways of polishing with different polishing tools and I really like your setup. Do you get a lot of rock dust everywhere, how do you clean that up? Just wondering so I make sure I clean up properly.
Thank you very much! If you keep the surface wet you won;t get rock dust. It will splash around the table as mud. You just need to clean it up after.
Where do you get the adapter from for the pads?
Sorry to hear about your phone, looking forward to new crisper images though
Thanks!!
Hey, I'm interested in trying this method, and was wondering where you got your items from? I found the pads on Amazon, not sure where to get the proper mask for preventing silicosis, or the adaptor. The results are very nice!
Hi Elisabeth,
You can get the respirator at your local hardware store. You can also use the white 3M 95 masks (cheaper). I got the adapter off amazon as well. Just make sure its a 5/8" adapter.
I saw your Hi Tech Flat Lap video recently and am wondering --
Between the Flat lap and this diamond pad drill method, which would you recommend for cabbing, say 100 cabs?
I noticed the drill method produced a better polish / shine, yet takes a little more time.
Would you say this is still true, or have you had better success with a different technique on the flat lap to achieve the same level of shine?
And between the two methods, how long would you say each method takes per stone or cab?
Thanks infinitely for your help with this
Hi there,
I would 100 percent do a cab on the flat lap. Smaller pieces are easier to get a mirror shine. The drill and pads take a long time. 4 hrs per rock. You can probably do 10 rocks in 4 hours on the flat lap.
Hope that helps!
This is awesome for a newbie like me. How long for each pad, until the grid disappears?
Yes. Keep using the pad until the grid disappears. I stop using the grid after the 400 grit pad. After that use the pads for about 20-30 minutes each. These pads provide an amazing polish.
Wow.. good job my friend, is it really took 4 hours to do the polish?
Thanks! Yes, but you can do this in a couple hours. I spent a lot of extra time on the lower grits. More than I probably had to.
How bad is the dust in the room after doing this? I have been too nervous to try this because I always thought that rocks must be cut/polished with water. I have a Hi-Tech saw that I use for cutting and a mjr tumbler, but I'm trying to work out what I am going do to polish my cut stones.
In the video I use water. You can dry polish with these but I prefer to use water to keep the dust down. If you don't cleanup right away the dust that the water collected will escape into the air again after the water dries. So you need to do a good cleanup right after.
Do you wet the petrified wood with water before polishing them?
Yes. I wet the surface periodically.
That's a good idea about marking the rock first. Is that petrified wood from a conifer tree?
Thanks! Yes, it is the same type of petrified wood that I sent you. It is a type of cycad that grew during the early Jurassic period in a tropical environment. It would have looked like a miniature palm tree.
@@RockhoundingLife Thank you for your reply. And yes, that's why I was asking. Because I wanted to know what it was you sent me. Now that I know what it looks like inside I will ask my local friend who has a saw if he'll cut them for me. Thanks again!
Thats all,well and good but a bit misleading the 50 grit is the crucial stage if you dont get it flat you'll never get the following stages to to work and you dont need an hour after say the 500 600 800 which ever stage you go to even that stage doesnt require a long time to remove the scratch marks,from,the previous time and certainly not once you have hit the prepolish 1500 stage a matter of literally 1 minute will be enough to move on so to go from 3000 to 8000 would take 3 minutes each side not hours
Misleading? Hmm. I would agree that the lower grit stages our important to set up your polishing stages but a 50 grit stage may not always be necessary. If you have a nice clean cut with no saw mark or grooves then you can move to a 100 or 200 grit as your first stage. it's all about removing the scratches from the previous stage. They are all important. And depending on the hardness of the material the later stages can take longer.
@@RockhoundingLife all true I won't split hairs with you but it would not have taken you hours to go two stages higher no matter how hard your material from 3000 to 6000 to 8000 so short a time,that you your self,said hardly noticeable that I would agree with also I,do,take,mine,to,the 6000 pad but I also buff them,with green,jewelry rouge weather the 6000 is making,much of a,difference idk but,the,buffing certainly does
How bad is the dust when polishing dry?
Not bad but still need to wear a mask.
What size arbor is that I’ve been looking all around my area with no luck
5/8"
I ordered it off Amazon for $10
@@RockhoundingLife what is it called arbor adapter? Idk I don’t want to order the wrong part I’m down 15 $ already with the wrong sizes Geeze what a pain I. The but