Rock Tumblers have been used for many years to make smooth, shiny polished stones from rough rocks. People tumble pebbles they find on the beach or bits of other rocks they find when out and about. Then there are those that only tumble semi precious rough rocks like Amethyst and Carnelian to name a few. But whatever you are tumbling, in the end you are asking a machine to do in weeks what it takes nature thousands of years to do. Just think about it, how long did it take the sea to smooth out those pebbles on the beach? Rock tumblers do the same thing over several weeks and your stones are polished at the end as well.
A Look at the Rock Tumblers Available
These machines come in many different sizes but all operate in basically the same way. Your rough rocks are placed into a barrel along with silicon carbide grit and water, a lid is placed on the barrel to seal it. It’s then left rotating on the machine so the stones can be smoothed out by the grit and water for around a week before being opened up again. There are usually four steps to the process including the polish.
Some machines will only accept one small barrel, others will accept a number of barrels in combination. Then you have the commercial rock tumblers were barrel capacities are measured in litres instead of pounds or grams. The latter category of machines uses special purpose built barrels, whereas the other machines for the most part, will work with plastic or rubber barrels.
You also get the choice of plastic or rubber barrels for most machines. A word of advice, we started with plastic barrels which found to be very noisy, think of the sound of heavy rain on a tin roof! We also found them difficult to get a good seal, hence we would find the water/grit leaking which is no good. Rubber barrels, although more expensive are the best choice They are almost silent in comparison to the plastic ones and much easier to get a good seal.
Our Rock Tumbler Range
- Pro Beach British 5lb Single Rubber Barrel Rock Tumbler Starter kit
- Pro British Advanced 3lb Rock Tumbler/Sea Glass Single Rubber Barrel Starter Kit
- Pro British 3lb Double Rubber Barrel (2 x 1.5lb barrels) Rock Tumbler Kit
- British 3lb Dual Plastic barrel (2 x 1.5lb barrels) Rock Tumbler Starter Kit
- 3lb British Dual Barrel (2 x 1.5lb barrels) Rock Polisher Starter Kit
- Single 3lb plastic barrel British Rock Tumbling Starter Kit (Special Barrel for Fragile Stones)
- British 3lb single plastic barrel Stone Rock Tumbling Starter Pack
- 3lb Pro British Single Rubber Barrel Rock Tumbler Machine Starter Kit
Industrial and Large Scale Production Rock Tumbling Machines
- Rotabarrel 12l British Dual Barrel Commercial Rock Tumbler
- Rotabarrel 18l British Triple Drum Industrial Rock Tumbler
- Rotabarrel 6l British Single Drum Industrial Rock and Stone Tumbler
- Rotabarrel 6l Twin Drum British Commercial stone and Rock Tumbler
A Quick Look at our Rock Tumblers Working
View this video on our Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/88ayMzKN9FI
Affiliate Notice
We are in an affiliate partnership with the UKGE Group for all of the Rock Tumbling mchines referred to on this page. This means that if you make a purchase on the UKGE Group site we will earn commission for that sale.
We purchase a lot of our Lapidary requirements from UKGE. We have always found that their level of customer service and speed of delivering orders to be second to none. Therefore we have no problem in recommending their products and services to our readers.
