My vet pulled my donkey’s tooth today. She suggested I try tumbling the tooth. I’m intrigued and am going to try it.

You know what's not faux? How cool this channel is! Thanks for bringing us cool content and giving us cool ideas on what to do with our tumblers!

What a cool experiment. The color change is really unexpected! I thought wood had to be exposed to sun and weather to get to that gray shade. I guess the water and weathering that you created artificially was enough to accomplish the oxidation process by opening up the cells in the wood. Nice! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

I have picked up beach tumbled, bonfire wood pieces. The burnt wood was quite striking because it wasn't completely burned through. So the beach tumbling smoothed, rounded and then accentuated the grain of the campfire wood, while most of the black remained. Makes me want to try some in my tumbler, now that you presented this video!

Old disabled house bound dusty rusty rockhound here: Thanks Rob, this was really interesting!

The idea of tumbling wood had never even crossed my mind before. It turned out pretty cool especially the pieces that started out as boards. I would imagine that true drift wood could have spent many days if not years in the water or may have alternated spending time on the beach baking in the sun and then returning to the water. And then again it has probably spent several seasons of going through freezing and thawing processes so there’s a lot of variables that it could have gone through. The finished product looked pretty dry I just wonder how long it took to dry out. Loved the colors. I have made several batches of beach glass and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. The slurry ended up being pretty black so I assume the shattered glass was grinding up the inside of the barrel. I’ve saved some plastic containers with the idea of tumbling glass in them but haven’t tried that yet. Nice experiment Rob !

I have been "making drift wood" in my tumblers for a couple of years now! Love it!

Beautiful results! I love the faux drift wood.

Very interesting, wouldn’t expect that. Not sure why you need too many new ideas, I guess being winter you can’t be rock hounding, but love the Chanel Rob. Happy new year to you Nancy and the extended family.

What a fun project to watch. It turned out nice. Thanks for sharing.

Very cool idea! All turned out pretty.

I have started tumbling broken tiles to smooth out the pieces for my mosaic floor pieces. Love that you are experimenting with other media!

Long time no see Rob! Such a cool idea! Since I'm into rocks...I'll tell you that rocks look sooo good with wood for displays! That natural wood I like the best! It would be really cool to see a piece of wood with branches tumbled! Your ornaments from last year looked great on my tree again this year!

Woodworking too!?! Your son's bed is awesome. You're talented. Love your channel.

A different topic every week is amazing, and I enjoy them all. Here some topics you might consider (if you haven't done them already): 1) take us on a tour of your polished rock hall of fame-which ones do you like the most, and why? 2) give us ideas for what to do with all those polished rocks, 3) report from a rock show (or rock concert, for that matter).

Awesome experiment! Hope you and Nancy have a Happy New Year! Thanks for sharing!

Really interesting experiment. They look pretty good.

Always interesting, Rob!!

Always cool to see new ideas, and trying different experiments. Nice work Rob!

Cool video, Rob! 😊

Cool experiment aand the wood turned pretty beautiful👍💕🇫🇮

What an awesome and fun idea! Neat experiment Rob! Hope you & your family had a wonderful holiday season! Great content, as always!

I'm currently tumbling my first batch of rocks ever in my life with a 3lb tumbler my wife picked out for my Christmas gift . I look forward to watching your channel for the great ideas . PS. Love your Stormy Kromers.

That was very interesting. Always enjoy your "out of the box" videos. Thanks. HNY!

Came out nice! I’ve seen dowels sandblasted to bring out the grain and make them look like saguaro ribs….so, sandblasting works, too. Happy New Year! Thanks.

I was wondering just this morning what wood would do in a tumbler, and there you are! Really enjoying your channel!

I never thought to do that . Pretty cool.

Love that you are trying different types of wood...a small piece of driftwood in a bowl of tumbled rocks with some sand. Your own little beach in a bowl. Remember to put it up when grandkids are around. A vignette of a beach!!!

I love that you got yourself in a position to push yourself to be creative and try new things. I have a couple channels, I understand!

What a cool idea! Makes me wonder what other things could be successfully tumbled…Have a happy new year!

Excellent video! I would've never thought to do that with wood, and they all came out great!! Thank you for the idea and great video! Have a great New Year! 🥳

This is so cool!!! Thanks!!!

Sticks and stones, looks good. I had thought dry sand might also work. Thank Rob, Happy New Year.🎉

I've tumbled glass to make faux beach glass for my wife to use for decorating and she loves it

Fun video! Hey, given that you were a math teacher and thus several orders of magnitude smarter than me, I would love to see you do a video showing how to calculate pully size increases and reductions needed to build a custom tumbler. Like, how to get from the motor shaft rmp to the barrel drive shaft rpm that would turn a 3# barrel at 40 rmp and the same for 6# and 12# barrels. There is not much on other rock tumbling channels relates to this (at least not well done), and I think your background and great teaching style make you perfect for a how-to video.

This is a great experiment! I think I might have to try this!

Unless you've done it already it seems like the next item in this series would probably be various types of ceramic items or maybe you could go wild and tumble pieces of concrete ? Thanks for the video Rob !!!

That was fun!

Very fun, thanks! 😊

Very interesting.

Lol I do enjoy your style, Rob. Surprised a chuckle out of me with your funny face around 7:00. I always have fun watching your vids, this was an interesting idea and a cool little peripheral to your usual efforts. Thanks for sharing, keep up the great work!

Wowww!!! So beautiful sharing dear friend great upload have a nice day

Video idea--We'd love a tour of your shop!

Pretty cool look. Could you make a wind chime with your wood and beach glass?

I love the color! I wonder how walnut shell grit would do? Thank you for another great video and best wishes for the the New Year.

Your site is great, always fresh and it’s great to walk along with you when I can’t get out. Cool experiment, it’s thinking outside the box… barrel. The title hooked me in. Thought you were talking about petrified wood. Petrified wood is interesting to tumble… another idea for you. I’ve been experimenting with the float I’m finding in the desert, very cool colors and it helps me to differentiate good float from not so good for tumbling… trees from the pliocene era. Thanks for all the work you put into your videos for us.

That was awesome! Did that bring out the patterns of the wood too! Way cool...(I use Lake Superior white beach sand, half and half w/Miracle Grow for my succulents..works awesome!!)

Cool. I never thought of putting wood in my tumbler

One commenter said he tumbled beach fire wood, I wonder if pre burning with a torch would help to bring out the grain. Adding holes and gouges might also make for some interesting shapes. I will definitely be trying this in the future, thanks for the idea.

Interesting.. You do come up with good ideas. Happy New Year, May it bring you Health & Happiness.. ~ Thanks for Sharing..

Probably the best opening line, ever!

I’m a woodworker and I use the vinegar and steel wool method all the time!

That was cool! What will you do with the wood now? Maybe a display with some tumbled stones?

Cool! I can see why you did this. Haooy Bew Year to you and your family!

I LOVED this video, Rob! Thanks for sharing that. I like how the one in the center came out, I think it was the maple. The natural branches look good, too. I love them all and I think any of those in certain shapes would be great in a shallow bowl or basket as decor. Of all the rock tumbling I've seen, that I also love, this is what's going to motivate me to get a tumbler. 😄 I don't think heard it if you mentioned it, but (even with the jasper in there) I would imagine that the wood tumbling would be quieter than if it were all rocks?

Weird, Rob. I was just looking at some petrified-looking wood while out walking my puppy yesterday and said to myself, "hmmmm, I wonder if I could tumble this..." Loving the new wall design, by the way 👌

I love seeing things OTHER than rocks in rock tumblers, I'm just interested to see what happens with it! (provided it doesn't hurt the tumbler of course :) ) really interesting that they all came out a gray color, I wasn't expecting that. For your questions about weathering, the checking only happens on pieces of wood that are 1. cut across the tree's trunk like those you logs you made your son's bed from, and 2. large enough. Basically, wood will expand/contract much more on the OUTSIDE of a log than on the inside. Wood is like a big bundle of very long cells. These cells are (almost) all going up and down, and they're shaped like really really REALLY stretched out footballs. The cells around the outside "ring" of the tree are swollen with sap and moisture and are growing. The cells on the inside core of the tree are shriveled up and no longer have a lot of sap or moisture, they're just structural support. (This is why you can sometimes see hollow trees with rotted out/diseased cores, but they're still alive). When you cut across a tree's trunk to make a log out of it, think of it like a pizza with a soggy crust. The middle of the pizza is the inner dryer wood, the crust would be the outer wet/growing wood. As soon as the tree is cut, it will start losing moisture and shrinking/drying. When all those stretched out football-shaped cells shrivel up, they don't do it evenly. imagine the crust of that pizza suddenly shrinking, but the middle of the pizza (heartwood) is really hard and dry. So the pizza crust/outer live wood is shrinking and tightening like a rubber band, and it has no way to release that tension aside from splitting apart. The smaller pieces of wood you have are a real piece of driftwood (probably weathered by many different things that created that unique craggley pattern of cracks, salt, wind, sun, fungi, pests, etc.) and a piece of board that doesn't look big enough to develop a check. It's only a small slice of "pizza"/log, which should deal with its crust/sapwood shrinking just fine. I hope that was a decent explanation, you should read "understanding wood" by Bruce Hoadley, the excellent illustrations/explanations were EXTREMELY informative

Look, I found a piece of driftwood that looks just like a heart! Hmm, I bet Rob was here. Lol

Fascinating! Before you showed first results I thought you would have a pulverized chowder in the barrel. I was surprised the wood held its shape, and this tells you how little I know about wood. You might consider looking at various hardnesses of hardwood and softwood. It would also be interesting to see how fatwood endures the process. Very interesting results!

Very cool, Rob! Beats sanding by hand, in my opinion. I can’t do it. Nails on a chalkboard! Ew. Happy New Year!

Interesting project. Maybe if you put wood in food dehydrator to achieve the checked/split look. Wonder if you could put leaves in there too; driftwood I find usually is darkened by tannins from leaves.

Have a great new year Friend. Still working on the jig. ( grins ) Have stories catch up then! Ohh 3000 tumbled since last comment 😇 Thanks, You had part in the process of learning...ahh but then you're a teacher..math right! And that and science was all I could ever relate to so..👍

Maybe a year ago, I had the idea to tumble halite with acetone. I don't think that's a good idea since acetone softens plastic, and that would likely ruin the barrel. Maybe instead, you could super-saturate water with salt, and then put the halite in. Since halite is soft though, I'd use sand as grit instead of aluminum oxide. Maybe you could try that since I think that's unique.

That was cool to watch. Turned out pretty.

It really looks like driftwood. I might give it a go. We have tons of driftwood on our local beaches.

I’d love to see it after about 2-4 months of tumbling.

Interesting 😮

Thanks!

Regarding the steel wool "tea", the darkening effect depends on tannins in the wood, so higher tannin woods darken more than the others. I haven't tried it, but I've heard that you can soak the wood in black tea before doing the steel wool treatment for a more pronounced color change.

I am surprised you hadn't known....Yes, I added some in lieu of ceramic tumbling media....it came out wet and mostly polished

Cool experiment. I like the color change. I was expecting the wood to be ding-ed up not polished. It'll be really interesting to see what happens as the wood dries.

That was interesting......and noone minds any rocksearching vid along the beach ever ;]

Very cool experiment! The color change surprised me at first too. I'm guessing it's not much different then staining or color washing any wood project. Any tannins left in the wood may have leached into the mix and had a part to play as well. If you cut into the dimensional stuff, I wonder if the wood has it's natural color. Not sure how long it would take the pieces to soak through. So many ideas popped into my head watching this. Maybe adding some coarse gravel would wear down the softer parts of wood adding to the weathered appearance. Throwing some steel wool and vinegar "stain" or the actual materials. Add colored acrylic paint to alter the finished color.....I need to get another tumbler😂 Thanks for the video and kick starting my imagination👍👍

Good video, fun experience. Try laser etching a rock.

An idea. Making a chess board with rock pieces. Potential for the laser etching rig, dremel, saws & tumbler

Perhaps another project-video to show.. mold some polished stones in clear expoy for a nice table top.

You're going to like that desert jasper once you get it polished. I assume that's the same stuff as polychrome jasper, which seems to go by a bunch of different names. If so, it takes a great polish, has interesting colors, and doesn't seem to have very many fractures.

Love your videos have you ever got gravel from a pit or field stone I live in southern Michigan and there are many sand and gravel pits and my property is loaded with field stones and they must be about the same kind of stones that come out of the lakes

I made my tumbler from plumbing parts, the lid has a square hollow that kept trapping rocks so I hammered a piece of 2x2 into the space. That was almost a year ago Currently it has nice rounded corners and nice polished surface So it works

Just wanting to know what kind of final polish you use? Name brand, grit size and where to get it. Thanks so much.

The closest beach to us is a Pacific Ocean beach, so I half expected you to add saltwater! I suspect the results wouldn't be much different, though. I'm not a huge driftwood fan, probably because there are such huge quantities of it on the ocean beaches. One type of driftwood I do like is driftwood that is very weathered and completely riddled with wormholes, where the holes are 3/8" to 1/2" in diameter and very convoluted. Recently I ran across a unique piece of driftwood that looked pretty cool. It was on a very large log, and I think what happened is that some time in the past the log was used as a windbreak for a beach bonfire, then got rolled around in the surf for a few years. The surface of the log was covered in deep scallops; there was no remaining hint of burning, giving it an "otherworldly" look. Ideas for videos? Currently I'm struggling with vibratory tumblers. I don't like the one I have (Raytech Tumble-Vibe) because the rocks and media mix very poorly, nothing like the mixing action you show in your videos of your Lot-O tumbler. I should probably just bite the bullet and spend the extra money for the Lot-O tumbler, but a lot of reviewers give it low marks for quality and reliability, and it ain't cheap. I have a vibration table that I bought years ago at a scrap auction (it was factory new but the speed control didn't work - turned out that it only needed a new 50-cent part to fix). Today I tried attaching the Tumble-Vibe bowls to the vibration tabletop using strong magnets; the attachment worked fine, but the tumbling action was no better than on the Tumble-Vibe base - very poor mixing. My working theory is that the mixing action in the bowl or barrel replicates the motion of the off-balance wheel used to create the vibration, which would explain why the Lot-O tumbler has such a good mixing action. (My vibration table creates vertical motion only). Anyway, if there's any advice you can add to your past videos on vibratory tumblers, I'm all ears/eyes.

👁👁 happy to drop by 👋 11:24

That gave me an idea, I have epoxy scraps. leftovers from pours How do they tumble, would be interesting to know

I think some cross shapes of wood tumbled like this might make some nice necklaces

i have some parts of concrete with bigger rocks in it i was gonna try...i need a set up like your tumble cabinet

Cool project maybe add some sharp metal objects to bang up the wood a bit?? Fair play to you for coming up with new ideas!! I love the sign you made and the petrosky stone and puddingstone rock signs why didn't you show how you did those??😮😂❤

Very interesting! Have you ever tried tumbling quartz crystals or broken pieces of them?😎

I Love this video! Thank you! Have you ever tumbled petrified wood? I have wanted to tumble petrified wood for a few years. I've been afraid to try it, because I don't want to ruin the petrified wood. Any thoughts or suggestions from you are very much appreciated! Thank you Rob!

Oooh, what a cool experiment. I thought about tumbling wood for quite a while. I have a lot of tree pearls collected over the years, some are very small. I'd love to polish them and make a rosary out of them. Do you think that is possible in a vibratory tumbler (my rotary is broken)? And if in the vibe: wet or dry? With sand or with walnuts?

Thinking about the checking: everything except the two branch chunks you cut would have been kiln dried, precisely to avoid checking. I wonder if green wood drying out for several months after tumbling might produce more of that ragged texture?

Candy tumbles? Jelly beans, candy corn, hard candies? Lol. April 1st is coming up!!

What if you used a jagged rock like lava rock with water and omit the sand. May get the worn look you’re trying to achieve. Just a suggestion.

Just got my wife the explorer series national geographic rock tumbler and it's already too small. Can you recommend a high quality, affordable rock tumbler that isn't going to be a hassle? Vevor looks like a good brand but it's all brand new 😆

Different for sure 😮

I wonder if you tumbled it with just rocks and coarser gravel if it would change how it weathered in the tumbler.

Tell us about your laser cutting device.

I wonder if the color change was the result of staining from the sand and rocks? The tumbling medium seemed to have been darker grays and your finished pieces ended up grayer than i would expect driftwood to be. Try different colored medium and see if that changes the color of the wood.

Nice experiment. I thought for sure you were going to have a barrel of wood pulp.

Very nice results! I was hoping for success, but I really thought all you'd end up with was splinters and goo. One of those situations where I am happy to be wrong. I got curious about the weight. I assume the wood that got tumbled didn't become light like driftwood. I'm guessing that natural driftwood has it's lignin dissolved by water and time-- lots of both. A quick and superficial search indicates that a fairly wide range of common solvents can dissolve lignin, alcohol being the most user friendly. Acetone, Bleach and Ammonia were also mentioned.

I could see if you were an artist that lived very far from the beach this would be a good way to get some material for a project.