A neighbor posted in our local Buy Nothing group looking for someone who might be able to clean up their grandfather's tumbled rock collection after it burned in last year's Almeda fire. I'm kicking myself for not getting a before picture-- they were all coated in a thin, grey, smokey, cemented-on film. They had tried scrubbing and soaking to no avail and were hoping to find someone with a tumbler to see if that grimy coating could be coaxed off.
We put one load all the way through the tumbling process, but the structure of the stones had been compromised in the high heat of the fire so many broke, and getting anything to polish when they kept generating their own ragged edges was nearly impossible!
We ended up running them in small batches overnight, in a tumbler barrel with plastic medium and borax. That minimized the breakage and actually got the coating off! I'm sure the stones lost some color being burned, but they look (and feel) SO much better than they did. It feels like we helped restore a little piece of family treasure. 💕
