Homemade sodium silicate (water glass)

Quickie Tire Tumbler

Works well, will be slowed down a little more though. This is cleaning local turquoise. Notice the rolling action, a lot depends on getting the slurry right, and not overloading it.....it will throw some material sticking to the inside of tire, use a drop cloth or board to catch until the load adjusts itself.....b

Making Saw Blade Shaft Adaptors

One thing everyone has had to come to grips with are saw blade adaptors, now that the majority of the diamond tooling we buy is made in China.  There have been problems with consistency and other things, things like arbitrary shaft hole sizes in the same lot, et al.   Sometimes, even most of the time, a Chinese item will work ok, as long as you fix it first.  Remember that natural law, rocky-san.

When you put your new sawblade up to the shaft of your saw, and the hole in the blade is too big for the shaft, you are in need of a shaft adaptor.  There are some commercial adaptors available and if you can find those that work (Good Luck!) stick with them.  Otherwise, fashion your own from thin cut cross sections of pvc pipe, sanded and/or filed and/or cut down; or punched out of leather or plastic with round punches of varying sizes.  That last I have been recently successful with.  Tape your adaptor into the blades hole from one or both sides of the blade.  Lighters can come in handy during these operations as well.

You want the blade to rotate without wobble, so it has to be centered on the shaft pretty closely.  It can be done, perhaps not easily, but correctly.  When doing these make 4-6, use the best one.

Cost Savings

I happened to pick up a catalog from the most well known manufacturer of lapidary equipment here in the states, and it was driven home to me once again the value of this book I sell, and I am glad to do it.  When I first began cutting rocks, it was long before the net, and there were no alternatives to buying the equipment as it was manufactured, usually used, though I have bought a new machine or two in my life, and they were not worth the money.  Some of the old timers built their own machines, and I owned a few of them over time too.  Mostly though, I began experimenting early with my own devices.  It was because of things like I saw in this catalog I picked up:  6" trim saw with arbor $270.00+ (see the photo-plans in this blog where you make one of those for about ten dollars),  10 pound capacity vibrating tumblers start around $500.00, Bench Lathe Electric Arbor Systems $700.00 and up,and even a flat lap near 2 grand!  Some people might think the 50 bux for the plan sets/lesson plans/how-to book is steep, it is not.  It will get you working stone quickly and cheaply, and perhaps even inspire you.  That is the wished for result.

How To Make Flap Wheel Sanding Discs For Bench Lathe

The best way to make flap wheels for the bench lathe: cut a circle out of sanding cloth, punch a hole in the middle, put it on a mandrel with two washers, either side, and then make four equal and equilateral cuts at four places on the outside of this disc. Cuts are at 12 oclock, 3, 6, 9 oclock, and come in only about 1/4 " or so. 

They deform spherically and uniform every time, make nice inexpensive and easily replacable sanding tools. I use 100, 220 grit belts mostly, I cut the worn ones up for this, or if I need real aggressive action I use new sanding cloth in those grits. 400 and 600 work too. 

 One must be forceful to get the propellor shape to manifest, and this should happen as the disc begins to wear some, so that you get max cutting power from the new cloth. Once the propellor shape happens you will get a true flap wheel effect and it will be harder to use the center of the disc. The tool will take a lot of hard wear before it wears out. It can be used inside hollows, and works well for that, just watch that metal from the tool does not hit the stone.

Increasing the number of cuts at the outside of the disc can create some interesting effects, and by making the cuts deeper at the edge of the disc you can actually get a flapwheel effect. Finally, if no cuts are made, the wheel wears and forms in certain predictable ways too, giving you a real nice spectrum of variability in your sanding work.

 

My Vibrating Tumbler

It will be hard for anyone to build one of these and make it work without the books chapter, but this will show the buyers of the book a larger sized quickie version of the tumbler I developed for my book and work.  It is a monster, and works well, and can easily be constructed anywhere.  A 50 pound capacity vibrating tumbler is worth a few thousand dollars at least if you buy it new, so one can begin to realize the savings when building your own equipment.  as with any equipment, one must constantly monitor production and quality, adjusting the machinery to wear of many types, and variance in loads.  If one sticks with it for just a few hours, one may gain an advantage extraordinaire.  The smaller version of this tumbler, as explained in the book, is good for a few pounds of rock, but the size of the machine is limited only by your resources at hand.  Most of this is made from salvaged parts, if not all of it.

How To Build A Diamond Saw On The Fly

A picture essay of a saw I recently built to handle a 14" blade which I already owned.  The blade is the hard part of this project, the bigger they are the higher the cost, and I needed something to cut with fast.  I found the arbor somewhere, and it runs nice and true. This is my first real wood project, and Gunn Cues was right, vibration was nearly eliminated.  This thing cut like a hoggy dog.  I made the blade spacer/bushing  for the shaft from a slice of pvc pipe that was then cut and adjusted to make a perfectly round run on the saw.  That takes some practice but is critical and it can be done if the time is taken.