Hey everyone, Christmas is coming up and I need to make a gift for my
son-in-law David. So I think you've seen David in some of my other videos
he likes to take off his wedding ring while he washes dishes, and he puts it up on a
windowsill in front of his kitchen sink, and so what I'm planning to do is make
a little dish for his wedding ring.
So I've already tried this once, and it was a little bit of a failure but I
learned some things along the way. I picked up this piece of, I think it's
quartzite on a beach. I cut off the bottom so you can kind of see what
it looks like back here
and then I hollowed out a little part on the top here but that's where it didn't
go so well. My plan was to leave it rough around the edges here and have it polished
in here for some contrast.
So what I did is I used a dremel with a little diamond cutoff wheel on it and I
just kind of crosshatched it, I guess you'd call it? And then I broke out the
little pieces. Then I used this wheel, this is too big to go on the dremel, but
this I got at Harbor Freight, so it's diamond around the outside, so I'd
round it out with that, and then I bought these little sanding discs, and they go
in the dremel, they've got a little sponge backer, and I used it to kinda go in there
The plan was to smooth it out, and it got sort of smooth, but it never really got
shiny. It's a whole bunch of grits but they wear out really really quickly.
So I'm hoping that I can do this with a petoskey stone and it'll go better
because it's a much softer stone. Worst comes to worst I can just sand it with
sandpaper, I know that works. So I'm gonna put that aside. By the way, I
thought about putting this in my tumbler, it didn't fit in the Lot-O tumbler, and
these hollowed out concaved parts never polish well in a tumbler so that wasn't
going to work anyhow if you're thinking about that.
So, here are the rocks I have to choose from. I thought this size was pretty good,
a wedding ring will fit in there fine, it's not too small. This one seems a
little bit small to get a hole in, plus it's got a chip on the side here, so I
can't do my natural thing, I'd have to polish the whole rock, which I might
do anyhow. This one seems a little bit big it's a pretty nice rock other than that,
although it's got some black here, so I don't know if I dug down into here if I'd
get into that black. It's a very good possibility.
This one is the one I think I'm going to try first. It's a little bit shallow, so I
don't think I'll be able to make a very deep dish out of it, but I don't think
it needs to be very deep anyhow. So I'm going to try this one first and then I've
got some fallback options, and if worst comes to worse I'll go out on the beach
and see if I can find a new petoskey stone
So that's the plan, let's try it out!
Alright, the first thing I'm gonna do is flatten out the back of this a little bit,
since this is so shallow I don't want to take very much off, but there's a little
bit of a bump right here, and when it sits this side sits a lot lower than this side
does, so I just want it to sit up like that a little bit more, so I'm going to
take a little bit off and just sort of play with it and see how it goes.
(Saw whirring)
Alright, I'm over here at my flat lap, and I'm just gonna smooth out the back here
a little more, you can see where I cut it I've got a big saw mark right there
so I'm just going to smooth it out on this machine.
(flat lap rasping)
Alright, I got it all smoothed out, and I think I'm going to work on the top next
and if it works out, I'll come back and probably polish that up a little bit
even though it's gonna be on the bottom, why not have it look nice down there?
I'm just gonna use a sharpie and kind of sketch out where I want my bowl to
be here, if you aren't aware, sharpie can be erased with acetone, or nail polish
remover.
So if I mess this up it won't be the end of the world, I can just start over again
I want a little bigger than that.
That looks about right, something like that. I have a little dish of water here
that I'm going to be using to attempt to keep the dust down while I do this,
I'm also wearing a respirator so I'm not breathing any of the dust in
(Dremel buzzing)
(Hammer pounding)
(Dremel buzzing)
(Wheel grinding)
Alright, I've been working at this for a while using this harbor freight diamond
wheel here, and I'm making some progress
So it looks like that right now.
I did try this dremel wheel, it's a little smaller wheel, but it kind of digs
in a little bit too much, so I don't want to make extra gouges with that, so
I think what I'm going to do now is try this, this is the little sanding pads
I got, these little velcro things, and they go on the dremel, so I guess
we'll put that in there now, and the trick is I don't want to go outside the
lines here and I want to keep this rough, and I very well might change my mind
and decide to polish that later, but first I'm going to try to get the inside
polished with the outside rough just for that contrast, so let's see how this
works.
(Dremel buzzing)
(Dremel stops)
(Dremel buzzing)
(Dremel stops)
Velcro's not holding so I'll try a new one.
(Dremel buzzing)
It's working but the sandpaper keeps flying off, so I got another fresh one
and this also came with this little kit, this is spongy, this is harder
so I'm going to try that on there, oops wrong way,
see if this makes any difference.
So you can see it's all spongy there. Alright here we go.
(Dremel buzzes, then stops)
Nope.
(Dremel buzzes, then stops)
Alright, well that doesn't work!
If anybody knows of a better tool like this, I'd love to hear about it.
(Dremel buzzing)
That time I used a little lighter touch, and it worked better, but once they
fling off they seem to be dead. See how this goes.
(Dremel buzzes)
Alright, I've gotten frustrated using those little sanding dics, they just
keep flying off after about 20 seconds, I went through about a dozen of the
60 grit, and I started in on the 80 grit and the same thing was happening.
I was also wrong about the nail polish remover taking off the sharpie, since
this is a porous rock it soaked in, and it wasn't coming off very well. So I went
back to this little thing in my dremel, and I worked around the edges here just
to get over to the sharpie, and I've got a couple dents, like right there there's
an - I can feel it's deeper right there. So I need to take some stuff in this area.
So I resorted to hand sandpaper, uh what is this? I don't even know what
grit this is, I think it's like 60 grit.
This is automotive wet/dry - nope, it's 80 grit. So anyhow, I've just been
sanding in here like this.
(Sandpaper rasping)
And I think it's working almost as well as the other thing. At least I'm not
frustrated while I'm doing it.
So I'll work on it a while longer, and I'll report in on it when I've made some
progress.
Well I just spent some time hand sanding that, and it went better than those little
little discs flying off all over the place
So I think I'm going to go back to the discs and see if I can get them to do the
finer work, and if not I'll go back to hand sanding.
(Dremel buzzing)
Those lasts few discs went a little better, because they didn't have to
stay on so long, they got a good shine on there.
I haven't used any actual polish, the discs went up to 10,000, so I
figured that's probably good enough. But, I'm not sure if I like the look that
I was after. The idea was to have contrast between the unpolished petoskey and
the polish on the inside. I've made a few bowls like this, and I did it the same way
I left the outside natural and I polished the inside and I liked the look there, but
I don't know if I like this so much. So let me show you what it would look like
if I polished the whole thing.
It would look more like that. And I think I like that better.
So I'm going to finish this up on my cab machine, and I'll show it when it's done!
Well I think that looks much better that way.
I like my original idea, but it just didn't look good with this particular
rock. Let's see if it works.
Hey, it works!
If you know of any better tools to do this job, I am all ears, because the
little things that I was using were not working very well. So let me know in the
comments if you know some better way of doing it, and if you want to see how I did
that last step I'll have a video linked here so you can see me polish a few
petoskey stones on a cab machine.
And I'll see you next time! Thanks for watching.