My rock tumbler, part 1

I'm doing this post partly because of a conversation that I had in the replies of a post by @isaria talking about crystals.
I have a mid-sized rock tumbler that was made by Lortone, it's a model QT-12. It has a barrel that can handle 12 pounds of rocks at a time. The only problem with that is when you only have a couple of pounds of rocks. Then you need a filler take up enough space in the barrel to make the tumbling action work properly. The instructions suggest that the barrel be at least 2/3rds full to 3/4s full. The polishing process is a 4 step polish, with rough, medium and fine grit abrasive, and then a run with the polishing abrasive.
I have several pounds of rose quartz that I needed to repolish because of a breakup of a couple of the rocks during the final polish run, those pieces messed up the polish on all the edges of the rocks. Since the rocks were run through the process previously, I started with the medium abrasive instead of the coarse. So, lets take a look at how this works.

The tumbler setup.

Here's the rose quartz that needs to be redone. If you look close, you can see the frosty edges.

They don't take up much space in the barrel.

Here's the filler. These are plastic pellets that are made for this purpose. The grey ones are used, the white ones are unused. If you save the pellets after use, you have to wash the old abrasive slurry out of them before you use them again. Also, only reuse them with the same size abrasive, using the pellets from the coarse tumble with fine abrasive could cause problems with the polishing process.

With the filler pellets in the barrel. I also added a couple of pounds of polished common rocks to the barrel , it just wasn't full enough. At this point, I also added the abrasive, 20 TBSP of 220 grit.

Add enough water to almost cover the rocks...yeah, I added a smidge too much. The slurry might be a bit thin, but it should still work. It takes less water than I was expecting...

Put the top on the barrel and put it on the rollers of the tumbler, turn on the tumbler, and wait several days...

And that's it for part one. When I pull the rocks out of the tumbler, I'll do another post about the next process.

Thanks for stopping by and checking out my post, eh!

Here's the post by @isaria
https://steemit.com/life/@isaria/5-beautiful-gemstones-for-spirituality-enlightenment-and-psychic-intuition

As always, feel free to leave me a comment or question if you'd like.

And don't forget,