Dibbler

I got a tumbler for my daughter a couple of years ago. I think I paid around $50 for it and was thinking that we'd end up with cool looking rocks in no time.

We loaded the thing up as directed. Turned it on and let the noisy buzzing thing run for a week. Poured everything out. Cleaned it up and put in the finer polishing compound in and started it up again for another week of banging and buzzing. Repeated the process again with the final polish and another week later of all the irritating noise we opened it up and had some halfway interesting rocks. Nothing near as nice as you see at the stores. I guess we could have put the rocks in for another week or two but the thing was really getting noisy and we used up all the rubber things that went on the wheel that turned it. I think we tossed the thing in the garbage after that and decided it was much easier just to buy the rocks already done. I've seen on the web where you can buy the professional models starting around $150 and up. That's probably the way to go if you really, really want to get into this kind of hobby....

Oh, and one more thing. It appeared to me that the rocks ended up about half their original size by the time they were done. To get that "wet" look I think you would need to leave them in with the really fine polish for at least 2 weeks.