In tandem with searching on the internet, and asking around, I thought I’d through this question out tall my lovely friends to see if you can help me…
Whilst on my trip for Iceland, I found a really nice lava pebble on the beach there, which I thought it would be nice to have polished up made (simply) into a necklace. So what can anyone tell me about stone polishing.
Anywhere near Oxford where one can get this done? Or where can I buy a machine to do it cheaply? Any info at all, basically…
If you don’t want it shaped in any way, just want it the same shape it is now but smooth and shiny, then you want it tumble-polished. I have a tumbler from when I used to make stony jewelry (I only tend to do silver work now, and not even much of that!). Took about 4 weeks of constant tumbling with progressively finer grades of grit.
Manchester Minerals sell a tiny tumbler for about 50 quid:
http://www.manchesterminerals.co.uk/acatalog/Tumbling_Machines.html
You might be surprised how many people have these things – worth asking around at work or in the band or wherever.
It’s the size and shape and want, just polished up I think. Does the tumble-polishing make it much smaller?
Thanks for the link by the way – it’s tempting!
Does the tumble-polishing make it much smaller?
No, hardly at all if it’s a material which polishes well. But whether it polishes well depends a huge amount on what kind of material your pebble is. Most polished stones are hard minerals. Softer stuff or fragile stuff wouldn’t survive so well.
“Lava” covers a lot of possibilities…fine grained basalt to dense almost glassy rock to actually glassy obsidian to lighter puffy rock to crumbly tuff.
I’ve polished almost glassy basalt before, and you can buy tumbled obsidian so I guess that will tumble polish quite happily. Grainier stuff or weaker stuff…I wouldn’t like to say so confidently.