2023-2-18 Polishing coprolite
I've done it. I've achieved my life goal of polishing a turd! All down hill from here, I think I can feel the mid-life crisis coming on!
I cut up a batch of slabs into future pendants and tumble polished them. I've done this before with Obsidian but this is the first time with other rocks. I was really surprised at how well some of these turned out. Check it out:
I started with a variety of types of rock. Coprolite is the redish one on top followed by 4-color jasper, gary green jasper and something else!
I cut them all in to little slices to hopefully get some nice looking pendants.
Then I spent some time taking the rough edges off and doing a rough shaping on them. I also cut most of my fingernails off in the process...
I only used that hard wheels on these so they ended up with some facets, but here's what I was going for. I'm hoping the tumbler will smooth out the shape a little.
A couple more 'before' pictures
This 4-color jasper should turn out nicely. They call it 4-color jasper because it has 4 colors in it.
Here's the pile after taking rough edges off and giving a little shape to. You can see how some are really scratched/ milky color from grinding.
Into the tumbler they go!
First cleanout
This shows them smoothed out but not polished yet.
Not too shabby
Nice shape. Same as what people say about me.
They went back in to the tumbler with a finer grit. Here it is after another day or two of tumbling. Starting to take a shine.
Another day down, here's the progress.
And another day. Starting to look good!
Almost done! This is after a day in the polish.
Bazinga. This is the final polish
Check out the back side. YOWZA!
Here's the line up. A whole hand full of pewp.
4-color jasper turned out pretty good too!
Check out the slab of Montana Moss that was in there.
Dat shyne!!
Well that was fun, I hope you enjoyed the progression of tumbling polishing some pendants from different types of rock. If you'd like to provide one of these rocks, please contact the Agate Whisperer so that one of our trained professionals can start the paperwork and interview process.