Batch 22: From Papatotara

Batch 22 from Papatotara means all the stones hail from down the beach out the front of our house at The Cliffs, Papatotara. 32 stones are from the very first fossick I did with JP – when I invited him out to fossick here. (Still can’t believe he accepted my invitation -eek!!) Another 6 stones still need redoing at 80/100grit (they were originally in Batch 19) and the rest were waiting patiently in one of many containers of stones collected in the past year from many trips down to our beach after work or in the weekend!

What I have noticed in collecting stones mainly from our beach and from Gemstone Beach is that the stones on Papatotara Beach are not as smooth as the stones collected from Gemstone Beach. They have more gouges and more pits in them usually so I am curious to see just how much tumbling these particular stones will take to get a smooth finish. Since I’m using the twin tumblers for this batch – 3lb Tumbler 1 has the Pap stones in it and the other twin tumbler (Tumbler 2) has some stones from Gemstone Beach in it (Batch 23). I’ve set them both off at the same stage and the same time for comparison.

Tumbler: 3lb Tumbler One

Stage 1: 80/100grit

Number of Stones: 50
Collected from The Cliffs, Papatotara
Weight in: 984g
4 Tbspns of 80/100grit – no pellets added.
Days Tumbling: 16 (not usual!)
Weight out: 795g – loss of 189g

Stage 2: 220grit

Number of Stones: 50
Weight in: 795g
4 Tbspns of 220grit – 7 Tbspns of pellets added.
Days Tumbling: 10
Weight out: 705g – loss of 90g

Stage 3: 400grit

Number of Stones: 50
Weight in: 680g
4 Tbspns of 400grit – pellets added
Days Tumbling: 9
Weight out: Did not weigh

Stage 4 | Stage 5: Polish Mix | Borax

Number of Stones: 50 + 37 – 4 = 83
New Polish Mix of 9 Tbspns polish powder + 600ml water – pellets added
Days Polishing: 10
4 Tbspns of Borax
Days Burnishing: 2
Final Weight : g total loss of:

After Stage 1’s inspection of stones (which tumbled for 16 days – a lot longer than usual due to being wiped out by a nasty flu for 4 days!) there was a group of about 11 stones from the 50 that either had chips or gouges in them still.

I did leave all of them in for Stage 2 and will inspect them again to see if those chips and/or gouges have smoothed out enough to carry on to Stage 3.

B22-after 80/100 — Still some pits and gouges after 16 days tumbling in 80/100grit

B22-23 removed — Removed after polish – too pitted.

Pre-tumbling …

Batch 22 - Papatotara Stones — The crossed out stones were removed (too many in the tumbler)

Finished …

B22-23 polished — Both Batch 22 & Batch 23 – it’s too hard to recreate pretumble image when you combine two batches!

I am not as disappointed in this combined batch of polished Papatotara stones as I was in the previous lot that came out of the 4lb Tumbler ( Batch 20 & 21). I did pay particular attention to what stones moved into the final burnishing stage. There’s six stones in the Pre-tumbling image above that were already repeating the whole tumbling process and only three of them made it through to the final stages. The other notable change I made was to use brand new plastic pellets for the polish and burnishing stage.