These were used to make cabachons for use in jewellery findings. Other gear I inherited was a diamond saw to cut slabs and a bench grinder with different grades of wheel including a buffing wheel for polishing. Now I’m retired I intend to drag the old tumbler out of the shed and get it going again again with some of my choice finds. Sixty years later I still go to that same beach at low tide and often find several agates if big seas have moved the sand cover and the stone beds are exposed. She used tin oxide as the final polish after the last (carborundum?) grit stage. The finished results were beautiful, especially the hardest stones like the agates. I don’t know how essential this was, I just wanted to put it out there.
Occasionally she “burped” the containers by stopping the tumbler, removing the container, briefly unscrewing the lid to release any pressure buildup, retightening the lid and starting the tumbler up again. This also helped in reducing the amount of material lost. The coarsest grit stage could be reduced or omitted.
Also, as beach stones can be quite smooth from the natural tumbling effect that has occurred from wave action, selecting the smoothest ones for a particular batch shortened the time required to tumble them. She found that a having variety of sizes of stones in each batch worked better. Collider? Did you mean colander? My mother became interested in lapidary back in the 60s and tumbled beach stones (mainly agates) she collected at low tide near her home (Mid North Coast of NSW, Australia).
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