I want something to harden my jewellery and polish it but not sure what the best thing to invest in. Thought I'd ask here. At the moment I have a tiny national geographic rock tumbler that I've only ever used steel shot in. It's been great but the opening is small so it's not something I can use for Bangles and the larger pieces I'm now making.
I've always used it to harden my metal before hand finishing with micro mesh. I do a lot of hand finishing as I find the tumbler leaves little pock marks on the silver. My shot has gone through the transition of mixed to being solely tiny little balls to try and minimise the damage to the surface of my silver.
I hear people using their tumblers to polish their metal and get a shiny finish but I've never had success with that so maybe I'm doing something wrong ??? I also bought a barrel tumbler from cookson a while back that totally damaged a load of my rings. I was expecting them to come out shiny and instead they came out with a frosted Matt surface and I returned it for a refund as I was so dissatisfied with it as everything got contaminated with Vaseline too. Too messy.
I've looked into magnetic and ultrasonic cleaners as I also make hollow pieces and find it impossible to clean the insides of these and thought a magnetic or ultrasonic approach would be good but I don't know enough about these techniques.
So I'm here to ask your opinions and offer advice. What do you use?
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