Just use Wet&Dry and elbow Grease....

[l0ckcr4ck3r]

A while back i began thinking of some sort of automated way of finishing picks and came up with tumble finishing. After a quick search on here, i found a reference to it in the following 2 posts...

http://www.lockpicking101.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=46563
http://www.lockpicking101.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=48818

I dont think anyone has reported back on it as an idea so i thought i'd see what it was all about and figure out if i could save myself some work.

So 4 pieces of Aluminum, motor and gearbox from a paper shredder, some transfer rollers from a laserjet maintenance kit and 4 3x8mm bearings... and about 4 hours on a Bridgeport i got this.



I looks a bit rough but depending on the size of the barrel i use it runs between 25 & 55 RPM so about right. I used some vitamin bottles with some baffles in them as the barrels and bought a rock polishing grit set and some mixed ceramic media to try this with.
First i tried just Ceramic media but after 8 hours it had done nothing except cause some surface rust....



Next i added some 200 grit silicon Carbide powder to the ceramic for 8 more hours and again nothing except more rust!!!



Maybe im missing something here but as i understand it you need to tumble in water with some detergent so the debris is held in the water. Im thinking that the these picks are just so light and the steel has enough carbon in it, that no meaningful abrasion is gunna happen... it wont even remove rust!!

Any more ideas would be welcome else ill just stick some rocks in it for the Mrs.

[femurat]

cool job! you may use oil instead of water to prevent rusting.
look for sanding blob here on the forum...
cheers

[l0ckcr4ck3r]

thanks for the idea femurat... I always though that oil will act as a lubricant and slow down the abbrasion but ill give it go and see what happens!!

[Evan]

It sounds like you might be overloading the tumbler with material to be polished and not adding enough water or media... When I was in college I took an elective class in rocks and minerals from the geology department and 1/3 of the "capacity" of a tumbler is divided between the water and the media... So in a 15 pound tumbler you could only tumble 10 pounds of rock at a time...

If you had all of those picks in the tiny vitamin bottles at the same time, they probably formed a clump and the media couldn't penetrate it... What size and kind of baffles were you using, when tumbling something to polish it you definitely want everything in the barrel to be able to freely move around without restriction...

The grit/media also has to be of an equal or slightly greater hardness to what you want polished in order for any work to be done, the "sanding grit" is meaningless in a tumbler, the material used has to have a better hardness than what you are trying to polish...

~~ Evan