At the end of a tumbling stage there are often stones that aren’t quite ready to progress to the next stage of tumbling. I call these redos or retumbling stones.
It can be quite hard to keep track of stones (and their tumbling journey) when you pull them out of batch and place them in the holding box until another batch of stones is going through the grit required for a redo stone. I’ve got a couple of partition tray “holding boxes” that I use, along with post-it notes to help sort of keep track of where stones have come from. (These sistema ones are great). According to my tumbling log (I’m still playing backwards catch up with my blog posts) Batch 11 consists of 21 stones – random stones from holding container that needed a retumble at 400grit. I’ve noted down that I’m using up old stock of 600grit (which I later came to regret).
It doesn’t look like I took any before photos but I did weigh the stones – 700g at the start, and I did use pellets to help cushion the stones. 21 stones is a very light batch so I’m guessing I just wanted to clear the holding box of those stones. They tumbled for 13 days and lost 42g. A stone must have been removed after the grit tumbling as the log says 20 stones went into the soap tumble for 24 hours. Although the log says the stones are ready for a polish, I really have no idea if I put them in the holding box ready for the 4lb tumbler to do a polish tumble or if they went straight into the 4lb tumbler with another batch for polishing!