back in 2019 while rockhounding the south shore of lake superior i found an agate
then in 2020 i broke out my dremel to smooth the face to expose more bands
and after that i used wet sandpaper to polish it by hand
it took over 10 hours so unless you want your hands to look like this
would not recommend that and now it's 2022 and when i look at this
i laugh at how bad it is look at these lumpety bumpities
all over the face of this polish it's so bad we're gonna fix it and we're also gonna time
it to see how long it takes to fix our mistakes on this so scoopy hit the timer
you know you're pretty much worthless since your head fell off i'll just do it
all righty so the first stage to get these lumps and bumps and all that fun stuff
out is the 80 grit wheel we'll get some water going here there it goes and we'll fire it up
here it is after the 80 grit wheel and this is how much time has elapsed only a couple minutes
so next up is the 220 grit wheel again gonna get some water going fire it up
another two minutes have gone by so now my favorite part which is getting
into these soft back wheels there's four stages of these
that we're going to be running through the first one is the 280 grit
i'm really excited this is where you start working out some of the flat spots that are in the face
there's not a ton there's a couple up here but let's work them out
there it is after the 280 grit wheel next up we have the 600 1200 and 3000 and right now we're
sitting at just over six minutes of time on this polish and the bands are looking really great so
i'm going to get rolling with these three and we'll see in between each stage
oh
alrighty we are through the 3000 grit and i have paused my timer because we have one stage
left which is the the end disc the cerium oxide that is looking absolutely amazing yeah my timer
says about 15 minutes.. 15 minutes to run through this whole process
so far that's looking pretty good let's uh hop on the cerium oxide disc
which is this guy right here and i think i'll have enough room but i still got to take these
end pieces off these little knobbies off so that i can access
my water we'll turn it on and finish it up
oof get that turned off pause the timer
get the water shut off here so we're all done with the polish it looks fantastic and i'm looking
at my timer right now and it is just shy of 17 minutes and if i take out probably two minutes
for moving the tripod around and chatting and all that uh that's 15 minutes 15 minutes to do a
perfect polish on a beautiful lake superior agate and i just i laugh because we found it in 2019
polished it in 2020 and now we're able to give it a perfect polish here in 2022. it's
been a few years in the works and just happy to have brought all of you with
on this lapidary adventure and also if you guys are in the early stages of lapidary by you know
even if you're hand polishing it's okay that's it's a great place to start that's where i started
you know i uh grit my teeth in that in that area and it's it was fun it makes me appreciate the
nice equipment that i have now so uh that's enough talking though let me show you this
beautiful stone so here she is all polished up i'll let the light play on there a little bit
it's got some really cool details right here in the center you can kind of see it in the light
i thought that was like smudges but it's actually just the details of the stone
really fun getting to see this and its greatest form that man can give it which is polished
and uh it's been through a lot let me put some pictures up on the screen on
right now to show you the journey that it's been on
yeah pretty fun stuff well thank you all so much for joining me on today's lapidary video
i hope you enjoyed it if you did please leave a thumbs up if you're new hit that subscribe
button so you don't miss any of our future lapidary videos and we'll see you next time bye