I have been collecting rocks for about 4 months. I have used books and websites to attempt to identify them, and have tried to find decent ones because everything you read specifies, "garbage in garbage out." This means, if you find crap rocks, and polish them, you will have polished shit. In addition, your crappy rocks can break and damage any desirable rocks that you have in the tumbler with them.
Other people may not need such a long period of time to find these lovely treasures, but for me it took awhile to fill the tumbler. There are a variety of sites that will tell you about the proper way to polish, but in general, you need good stones and you need enough to fill the tumbler 1/2 to 2/3 of the way full. Now, this is misleading. By the time you are done with the first round, you lose a bit of rock, so I had to do 2 separate batches on the coarsest grit to then end up with 2/3 of the way full for the next step. It also depends on how big of a tumbler you have. I needed about 10 lbs of rock per load. You can purchase other material to help you fill the tumbler...ceramic bits and whatnot.
Other people may not need such a long period of time to find these lovely treasures, but for me it took awhile to fill the tumbler. There are a variety of sites that will tell you about the proper way to polish, but in general, you need good stones and you need enough to fill the tumbler 1/2 to 2/3 of the way full. Now, this is misleading. By the time you are done with the first round, you lose a bit of rock, so I had to do 2 separate batches on the coarsest grit to then end up with 2/3 of the way full for the next step. It also depends on how big of a tumbler you have. I needed about 10 lbs of rock per load. You can purchase other material to help you fill the tumbler...ceramic bits and whatnot.
Each step takes about a week.
Step 1: Coarse grit
Step 2: Finer than coarse grit
Step 3: Even finer grit
Step 4: Finest grit
So basically you load up your tumbler, add about 2 tablespoons of grit per lb of rock, and let it do it's thang. Then at the end of each week, you clean the shit out of the tumbler and the rocks, because if there is even 1 grain of grit left, it will scratch the dickens out of your rocks at the following step.
Step 1: Coarse grit
Step 2: Finer than coarse grit
Step 3: Even finer grit
Step 4: Finest grit
So basically you load up your tumbler, add about 2 tablespoons of grit per lb of rock, and let it do it's thang. Then at the end of each week, you clean the shit out of the tumbler and the rocks, because if there is even 1 grain of grit left, it will scratch the dickens out of your rocks at the following step.
Here's the thing, I think I actually like stones rough better than I like them polished. Also, I ran out of patience and frustration tolerance at step 3...
I think I'll keep collecting stones. The polishing by tumbler thing is not for me. It is super expensive (tumbler, grit, electricity, etc). There are some places localish that teach you how to polish each rock by hand. Now, that could be interesting.