Polishing some rock slabs

Hello, steemians, and welcome to my blog!

Today, I'm going to show you a few pictures that I took when I was running my slab polishing machine with a few different rock slabs in it. To start with, I should explain that you can't polish just any rock, softer rocks can't be polished. Most harder rocks can be polished, and softer gemstones like opal can be polished if you're careful. In this case, I'm polishing a few different slabs that were cut on a rock cutting saw. I bought most of the slabs unpolished, and had a couple of them cut from rocks that I found.

The machine that I use for polishing slabs is called a flat lap. The machine has a flat shallow pan that is held into the upper part of the machine. This upper part has a motor and an offset counterweight that vibrates the pan. The lower half is the stand, and the mounts for the upper half. The machine looks like this. The grey stuff in the pan that looks like sand is the polishing grit. This is 220 grit, generally what you start off with.

This is some of the slabs, and a couple of rocks with a flat side that I wanted to try polishing. The machine is running, and you can see the vibration pattern in the grinding slurry.

This is most of the slabs that I was trying to polish. The rose quartz slab is not in this picture. There's a slab of fossilized coral, an agate slab, a couple of slabs that I had cut from a rock, a rock I had cut in half, and I don't know what the blue slab is, but it's hard enough to polish.

Here's a close up of the fossilized coral.

Here's a close up of the slabs that I had cut from the rock I found. This rock contains a lot of marine fossils. It was 1 rock, but it was so thin in the middle that it broke in half.

I really should run the next step in the abrasives to get the slabs closer to the final polish stage, but I've been distracted by other things lately. Hopefully, I'll start on it again this week.

That's it for this post, I hope you enjoyed it!
I'll put up another post about this when I make more progress.

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