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My mum spent much of our youth, upon return from yearly holidays to her small seaside home town, tumbling rocks. We were kinda cluttered people growing up, so among other things (an extensive sci-fi collection, hundreds of kitchen gadgets, every microcomputer under the sun) we always had little piles and containers of beautiful shiny rocks strewn around the place. I never had the patience for the tumbling process, but on every beach I considered it my responsibility to find the most intriguing shapes and colours of rocks, fill my pockets, and bring them home. She died this year. We were supposed to scatter her ashes on that beach but my dad refused for inscrutable reasons. And I have a big pile of boring, dull rocks, that neither my mum, nor the relentless sea, is ever going to transform.

I have a rock tumbler that I got as a present. It's neat, but this page is right - it takes a long time, and you end up using a lot of grit as well, and it must be done in order. Oh, and did I mention that it's noisy? Definitely not a hobby for ... me.

But! One thing I have found interesting is that you can make your own "sea glass", by breaking wine or beer bottles, and tumbling the big-ish chunks. The thicker the glass, the better, of course. I'm experimenting with just using some sand as the grit material; the glass doesn't come out shiny and smooth, but it definitely wears down the sharp edges.

(And I run the tumbler thing in our detached garage.)

I have strongly negative connotations with rock tumblers. When I was about 8 I saw one in a store and thought it would turn regular rocks into precious stones. One of the biggest disappointments of my childhood.

I've been tumbling rocks with my kids for about a year now. Two tips that made it actually sustainable: (1) ceramic media is a must-have, not optional - cuts the noise by 80% and you can run it indoors, and (2) skip the "perfect rocks" hunt and just tumble broken glass bottles instead. Takes 2-3 weeks vs 2-3 months, looks amazing, and my kids can actually see results before they lose interest. We keep a jar of the sea glass pieces on the kitchen counter and it's become a surprisingly nice conversation starter when guests visit.

My family (wife and 2nd grade daughter) have taken to coming home with numerous rocks from every vacation we have taken in the past few years. I purchased a double barrel tumbler and we have a nice little ritual each weekend of being able to move two batches of rocks at different stages along their polishing journey, admiring the changes and characteristics of the batches as they move along the process and then their ultimate result.

We now have quite the collection of wonderfully polished rocks of all kinds from the places we have been. I do the cleaning and preparing each weekend but have it down to a quick 10-15 minutes in total time. It’s simple yet magical and I’m slowly seeing how my house is going to look come retirement

I had a rock hounding phase in my life ... It was something fun to do with the family and we have a lot of interesting rocks in BC.

I built my own rock tumbler using some wood, hardware store bits, and an old geared DC motor... I also used commercial rock tumblers. Those worked better ;)

It takes a really long time to tumble rocks, you have to go through the grits like a week or two at a time, and they sort of come out without a lot of character. Hand polishing them (with power grinders and polishers) is a lot more satisfying and you can make them into your own. That does require more equipment though.

I'm having fun putting garbage into mine right now. [0] Glass is pretty hard to go wrong with.

Not so fun when particular rocks crumble into clay, and eat all the nice ones into concrete, but it happens.

[0] https://mastodon.social/@shaknais/115432438259932708

The only thing I know about rock tumblers is that Steve Jobs thinks they're like teams of people building software...

Apple must have been a noisy, violent place :P

Similar tumblers (just a little bigger) are used to deburr and finish metal parts after fabrication.

https://www.enginebuildermag.com/2020/10/parts-tumblers/

Small pieces of the old world still exist, if you can find them

Lots of comments are talking about how loud rock tumbling is. I have an interest and space in my basement but I'm reticent to pull the trigger without knowing if it's going to be intolerably loud upstairs. Does anybody know how many dB the process actually generated?

Edit: Finally got to a PC to do some search-engine investigation and found this: https://rocktumbler.com/tips/how-much-noise-does-a-tumbler-m...

I think I like this post because, simpler things, simpler times.

Funny, was just thinking about this the other day as my daughter is currently obsessed with rocks. Did some research and.. nah, I'll just buy polished rocks off the jungle store.

A long time ago I had a brief rock-hounding phase and found some cool rocks. Polished them on a friend's polishing setup. That was pretty fun. I'd rather get back into that vs tumbling.

I have favorited this thread. It has the best comments I have read in 10 years of hn.

I want to go and build a tumbler now. I'm imagining it is another good use for an old sewing machine (I hoard a few for projects)

Loved this as a kid. But as a parent, even putting it in the garage is just too much noise for my household, haha!

I see a missed opportunity to use the domain rocktumblr.com.

We had one last year and followed the directions exactly. The stones came out very smooth but cloudy and dull. Not sure what went wrong.

That's cool and all but ... what's the point? What do you do with these rocks afterwords?