Cutting, Shaping And Tumble Polishing Chrysocolla.

My next batch is going to be something called Cristicola. I'm pretty sure it's in this bucket. Yes it is. Yeah, loaded up. Nice colours. Here's the Cristicola I've picked out. It'll now be cut into smaller pieces and then tumble polished. I've got high hopes for this stuff. It comes out really nice normally. Here's the Cristicola all cut up in tumble sized pieces. The next stage is going to be to pre-shape them against the tile saw. I'll show that happening and what that does is it just means that they reach their final shape a lot earlier in stage one so instead of being two three weeks or whatever they'll only be a week in stage one. Or seeing as this is Cristicola it might only be a few days. I'll have to check on it make sure it's not disappearing too quickly. This is the water supply system for my tile saw. So there's a main reservoir underneath, submersible pump pumping water up through this pipe which then goes into a reservoir up here which all tile saws have but this way you don't have to keep topping it up it's just continually being topped up and then it overflows here back down into the main reservoir to be sucked up again. I've added a little tray there to try and filter out any larger pieces of rock that fall through. That's it. Time to round these rocks off. Here it is after being rounded off on the tile saw ready to be tumbled. Nice colours. Okay time to load up the barrels for stage one. I've got two six pound barrels and four three pound barrels. Whether or not we use them all we'll find out. So these big ones they can go into the big barrels. There's some here, these ones. I'd be very surprised if there's anything left after stage one of these because they're very very soft. We'll put one of those into each of these small barrels. See what happens. Continue loading. It's beautiful this rock. So nice. One of my favourites. Cressacola. Probably my favourite of all. It's like it's got little aerial maps, little satellite images on it. I know it's not but it's what it looked like to me. You've got ocean and land. They come up pretty well polished as well. It looks like get away with just one of the bigger barrels. These are pretty much done once I get some filler in. That'll get them up to where I want them. So yeah go for one of these six pound barrels. Beautiful. All right now because Cressacola is such a soft rock. I think there's something like three or four on the Mohs scale. I won't be using rough filler. I'm just going to be using stuff that's already been tumbled. It's already smooth. So yeah grab handfuls of these. Chuck them in. Nice and colourful. Probably a handful of each in the three pounders. This one looks a little full. Exchanging between them. They'll settle. They settle down to about oh three quarters. This one could always do with a bit more I think. All right that's them loaded up. I'm still unable to get the 80 grit from the local supplier so I'm using this 46. This means it wears down a bit quicker. So each small barrel, each three pound barrel gets three tablespoons and the six pound barrel will get six tablespoons. Water. We add some water until it's just below the level of the top rock. So that's probably a bit much. No that's all right. Now I'm using dirty water from the saw and that's fine for stage one. It just actually probably helps to create a better slurry All right these are the little lids. All of these, well most of them have had patches put on them. The design has a little where they weld that on on the inside then it tends to wear through that rubber. So I just use bicycle patches. They do a good job. Come on. The ones here it's got a and then the metal lids go on and then each one gets a washer and then a nut to hold them in place. I've seen other tumbler models. I won't mention any names but they tend to spring leaks. I've never once had a leak with these Lawton tumblers. I think they have a much better way of sealing. It's like a, I don't know if it's a double seal compared to the others but it just seals so much better. And then give them a little shake and then they go into the tumblers to tumble away. Get it in there and that one and that one. Now I need to turn on this noisy bastard. It wouldn't even know it was on. What I'll do is I will put the empty one on the other side. That's so I can see these reflectors on my security camera. They've got them and these ones both have them and my camera which is up there. I can see that my barrels are turning on that. That's it. Now I'm going to check that normally you would leave these running for a week but because it's crystal coal and like I said it's very soft I'll check these in two days. I don't expect them to be done in two days but I just like to keep a check on them. They might take three four five days I don't know yet but whatever happens happens. Okay see you then. It's actually been three days since I started the crystal coal tumbling and I'm just going to check them. Usually they'd run for a week tumbled stones but this is crystal coal and it's very soft. I'll check on it. A lot of people don't like to open the barrels and then set them off again but as long as you make sure that there's nothing like grit around here it's fine. It's not going to leak with law tones at least. Some others might be different. So what do we got happening here? Now this is uh I guess it's interesting what's happening is it's undercutting that bit there because it's softer. That there's solid that's slightly more solid but in between there is very soft so that's what's called undercutting. Let's see what else is happening. Oh they're really wearing down. It's coming along okay still got a bit to go but yeah you can see how much has gone it's just they're well down. Some of these are probably almost ready to move on to stage two. I might just let them go another day. These little bits that just need to be smoothed off a bit more. So yep back in they go another day nothing around there that's good. We'll give them another day and then see what happens. In you go. That's them. Here we go. The crystal collar has been tumbling now for five days. It's time to get them out open them up and see if they're ready to go into stage two. This one's empty. This one that we got that's not empty. That's heavy. Let me just unbutton them and we'll check them out. All right these all seem about what I'd expect. Okay our first glimpse of crystal collar after stage one tumbling. All right so the colors are nice but I'm noticing a lot of jagged edges things that have just broken up. That's the problem with crystal collar it's very soft very fragile. Hopefully there'll be enough here to make it worthwhile. Yeah stuff like this that's going to be good I think. I don't know if that was one or not. There's one of the white ones so that's pretty much unusable um just because it's too jagged. Another broken piece that's part of the pitfalls of tumbling crystal collar. Anyway we'll give them a proper rinse off and assess them. Okay here's our crystal collar out stage one ready for rinsing and into stage two which will be in the UV10 the ultraviolet 10. That's his bowl there unless there's not quite enough. Not sure yet. Then they'll go into my homemade UV10 bowl which is probably equivalent for about eight and a half pounds. Yeah we'll start loading this one up see where we get. Sure some nice colors. Let's see what I love about crystal collar. The colors is fantastic. It doesn't always polish that well but this is what I like to see in the crystal collar. It's sort of like an aerial shot of the beach like a drone shot. You've got the water and the beach land here. To me that's what it looks like I think he'll come up all right that one. As it turns out the 10 pound bowl was pretty spot on. I did leave out a few that were just destroyed. I'll show you those in a minute. So here we go ready to start stage two. I'll be using this here 220 silicon carbide and as always it gets a bit noisy so I'm not going to bother talking over this. These are the rocks that didn't really survive stage one. They were the ones that I thought would cause trouble and they have. They've just got eaten undercut everywhere. This is way too soft. I don't know what I'm going to do with them. We put them in the garden. That's part of the problem of crystal collar. Crystal collar has now been tumbling in the ub10 for two days. I've had to top it up a few times but it seems to be going okay. I'll switch this off dump it out and see what we've got. Oh that's heavy. The crystal collar is all rinsed off and ready to go into stage three grit. I'm gonna turn this thing on it's gonna get noisy. The crystal collar has been in stage three for two days. I will switch her off give it a rinse and put him straight into the final stage of polish. Undo this little fella that's tightening him you dopey bastard. Come on here we go. Can I do this one-handed? Maybe one hand and one elbow. No not gonna work. One second. It's rightio. There is the crystal collar rinsed off after stage three. Now I am sort of just skipping through these stages because I've shown it before. If you want a better idea of exactly what goes on between all the stages the rinsing and stuff like that I've got a video on banded rhyolite. I'll add a link hopefully at the end of this video and you can see what it's a more detailed explanation of what goes on. So let's start up the noisy one and add some polish. See you in two days. Now this is going to get rinsed in clean water and then it will get back in the tumbler here with water and borax. Probably overnight because it's getting late. So we'll check it out in the morning and see what we've got. I know this won't work one hand so I'll have to cut here. Back again. Chipped it all out. I actually did a bit of cheating and checked on how they were going and I'm really quite pleased with the gloss level. Not that you can see it here when it's wet but yeah compared to crystal collar I've done before I think this is going to come out fairly nice. There's a few bits of blue that have come through as well which always looks nice. Things like that. There's just a few bits and pieces like that as far as I know that's what is that azurite. Azurite and the green is malachite mostly. Yeah that's crystal collar. But yeah we'll give them a rinse. Give them a rinse and then it'll go back into the tumbler with some borax overnight and then we'll see what happens in the morning. I know a lot of people don't bother with this last rinse in borax but I find it makes a quite a bit of difference. But then up here in Yanshep we have some fairly hard water. There's some chemicals in there that I think create a film maybe on the rocks. So yeah I always use borax and it just tends to give the rocks a bit more shine. So I'll turn this noisy one on again and add some borax and then in the morning now because it's pretty late we'll check them take them out and have a look at the finished results here goes the noisy part. I'm not so noisy because there's water in there. Now the other thing is have a look at the color of the water. I don't know if you can see it. It's probably a little bit milky because of the borax but in the morning that will most likely be quite a bit dirtier which means there's stuff coming off the rocks that didn't quite come off in the rinse. Again we'll check it out in the morning. Here we are next morning about to take the Chrysocolla out of its borax rinse and we'll see how dirty the water is. Oh look at that so yeah that was all out of clean rinsed rocks. So that's what the borax does. We'll rinse them off again and have a final look. They may need to go through the ultrasonic cleaner but we won't know till we have a better look at them. This is them out of the borax and had a rinse and fresh water but even though these have been scrubbed with a toothbrush and rinsed in borax you still get bits of polish caught in areas like that there and there. So what I like to do and a lot of people do it is to put them into ultrasonic cleaners. So these are the ultrasonic cleaners. They've got water in there already. I'll chuck a few of these in and we should be able to see what happens. I'll fill both of them up. Okay now we should be able to see muck come out of the rocks once I turn them on. Let's just have a look. Wrong button. This is the finished batch of chrysocolla. Very happy. Just thought I'd single a few out for close-up images. I'm very happy with the gloss level on this chrysocolla and this blue that comes through as well is very nice. Usually chrysocolla is difficult to get any sort of a gloss on. Well I've struggled in the past but yeah very happy with this. This has a little bit of undercutting there making those weird sort of sections in there but overall I'm very very happy with how these turned out. I really like the detail in these ones and the colours the patterns. Chrysocolla has to be probably if not my favourite then one of my favourites. I'm sure most people would agree. Everyone seems to like the colours that this stuff comes in especially when it gets that blue in it. Very nice and these ones have a bit of quartz as well showing through this clear grey stuff which is different. I like it more of the blue. How good is that? The blue is azurite. Chrysocolla is a mixture of minerals azurite, malachite, quartz, you name it, it's in there. It usually happens around copper mines so it's a sign that there's copper in the area if you're finding chrysocolla and that's why you go looking for abandoned copper mines because you'll usually find chrysocolla there somewhere. Another one with that quartzy sort of blend coming into it and even these bits of brown when you get the brown in it I really like that as well like this one here where it goes brown just had something different in that nice vein of whatever that is running through there. Look at that beautiful and like I said very happy with the gloss level. The stuff I've done in the past has been really dull and some of it even although I don't tell anyone I clear coated with an automotive lacquer just to try and get it looking right. This is one of my favorites because I take quite a few drone shots of the ocean this is it reminds me of that. This one again with that little whoops yeah that's really nice I like that colors that pattern running through a bit of blue beautiful same here the last one one of these bigger ones that chipped away at the edges and stuff I don't know why it just became very brittle um maybe if it was a bigger piece like thicker here it wouldn't have done that but overall I think it looks pretty nice. So that's it chrysocolla done. Hope you enjoyed it. See you next time.