OT: 10,000 Pt XLIV - Guitar Things

[The Nemesis]

I get that covid made companies switch to contactless delivery and they probably realized that the speed of just doing a "dump and dash" approach was more important than getting confirmation from the customer and that there's probably a bunch of people aside from those with medically valid anxieties and phobias of interacting with people who just prefer the idea of not having to come into contact with another human being if they don't need to but I think the whole system needs some rework.

A grocery store just dumped almost $500 worth of groceries on my doorstep. They rang the bell and by the time I got to the door they were out the driveway and gone (so clearly they put all the food down and then rang the bell before immediately turning around and walking away). If not for the fact that I lucked into the actual recipient being one of the two neighbors whose phone numbers I actually have I would've had to literally go door to door to figure out whose stuff this was. and it wasn't like the time McDonalds dropped off like $15 of food in the middle of the night and it wasn't a big deal (this actually happened. I woke up one morning to a McD's bag on the porch with like a spicy McChicken and fries in it that were absolutely ice cold, so clearly they'd been out there for hours). I can't just swipe $500 of groceries in good conscience.

The grocer or the contracted delivery service (which was probably like Uber or DoorDash or Skip the Dishes or whoever else does this stuff around here) should be ashamed of themselves for being so flippant about this sort of thing.

 

[LadyStanley]

Huh

 

[landshark]

Huh

If they're doing MMA on ice it might be worth the trip to watch that spectacle.

 

[LadyStanley]

Guessing they put rubber mat on top of ice.

 

[landshark]

Guessing they put rubber mat on top of ice.

I don't think that will be nearly as amusing.

 

[The Nemesis]

I don't think that will be nearly as amusing.

Forget just putting it on the ice. Hold it during a Cuda practice with the players supplied with a big bucket of pucks.

"If you can dodge a puck you can dodge a punch."




Additional random personal thing: I checked the rock tumbler yesterday and decided to give everything a couple more days to smooth it out more.. I'll either take out the batch tomorrow or Saturday.

 

[landshark]

Forget just putting it on the ice. Hold it during a Cuda practice with the players supplied with a big bucket of pucks.

"If you can dodge a puck you can dodge a punch."




Additional random personal thing: I checked the rock tumbler yesterday and decided to give everything a couple more days to smooth it out more.. I'll either take out the batch tomorrow or Saturday.

I like it! Otherwise it's just a couple partially clothed guys sweating on each other and hugging...

 

[WTFetus]

Happy match day to the students out there.

 

[LadyStanley]

 

[slocal]

I get that covid made companies switch to contactless delivery and they probably realized that the speed of just doing a "dump and dash" approach was more important than getting confirmation from the customer and that there's probably a bunch of people aside from those with medically valid anxieties and phobias of interacting with people who just prefer the idea of not having to come into contact with another human being if they don't need to but I think the whole system needs some rework.

A grocery store just dumped almost $500 worth of groceries on my doorstep. They rang the bell and by the time I got to the door they were out the driveway and gone (so clearly they put all the food down and then rang the bell before immediately turning around and walking away). If not for the fact that I lucked into the actual recipient being one of the two neighbors whose phone numbers I actually have I would've had to literally go door to door to figure out whose stuff this was. and it wasn't like the time McDonalds dropped off like $15 of food in the middle of the night and it wasn't a big deal (this actually happened. I woke up one morning to a McD's bag on the porch with like a spicy McChicken and fries in it that were absolutely ice cold, so clearly they'd been out there for hours). I can't just swipe $500 of groceries in good conscience.

The grocer or the contracted delivery service (which was probably like Uber or DoorDash or Skip the Dishes or whoever else does this stuff around here) should be ashamed of themselves for being so flippant about this sort of thing.

My wife's coworker just had 11 bottles of wine dropped off on their doorstep instead of the groceries they ordered. They're even skipping ID checks now.

I do curbside pickup for my groceries. The only time I go into the store is when I need to stock up on meats and certain veggies (I'm not trusting them to choose broccoli or avocados). It's very nice to avoid crowds as people seem less and less aware of personal space these days.

 

[BaileyMacTavish]

I have dedicated my life to Super Earth recently

 

[LadyStanley]

RIP

 

[The Nemesis]

Help me. I don't know how or why but I've had the Fraggle Rock theme song stuck in my head all afternoon. I haven't thought about it in years and now I can't stop hearing it.


*clap-clap*

 

[LadyStanley]

Earworms R Us

 

[landshark]

Nem! What about your rocks?!!



@ ing folks not working it seems, or it's so slow to resolve name that it appears to be not functioning.



Also, is it me or is HF dog-ass slow today?!?

 

[bluefunnel]

Nem! What about your rocks?!!



@ ing folks not working it seems, or it's so slow to resolve name that it appears to be not functioning.



Also, is it me or is HF dog-ass slow today?!?

I couldn't get on for a little bit yesterday, it's been kind of slow for me since.

 

[landshark]

I couldn't get on for a little bit ye

I couldn't get on for a little bit yesterday, it's been kind of slow for me since.

It's weirdly laggy, been that way a couple days. Thanks for letting me know it's not me.

 

[The Nemesis]

It's been a couple of weeks that I've neglected these posts, but I've finally got things back on track to post pictures from the last 10-14 days or so including the finale of the documented run on the rock tumbler from the last month+

I've finished up the run on the stones that were worked on and documented since February. so now we have a MASSIVE load of pictures to show it:

Spoiler: Huge jag of rock tumbler pics

I checked a stone early in the week on the day the run was supposed to be done to see how it was going. It seemed a bit dull still so everything went back in to tumble for a few more days.

A couple of days later things looked good so into the sink to get rinsed off.

This is what everything looked like after it was cleaned up. Still seems a bit dull, yeah? We can deal with that though.

Back into the tumbler barrel it goes and then we add the secret weapon....

Yes. It's a bar of ivory soap.

It gets shaved in thin strips and a couple of tablespoons worth go into the tumbler barrel

With some water. Then it goes onto the tumbler for a few hours. Not a whole week or even a day. Just 3 or 4 hours is good enough.

A few hours later we open up and the soap has foamed up pretty good.

I should mention that the polishing beads also came out before this run. They don't need to be in there for this burnishing stage.

And now we see how things look after the burnishing run with the soap. A lot glossier, right? I don't have the old photos from this arrangement of rocks in previous stages on me, so I'll have to see if I can find those later.

The final weigh in shows that the finished stones come out to 1 lb and 5 ounces. As a reminder:

After the 3rd stage they weighed 1 lb, 5 7/8 oz
After the 2nd stage they were 1 lb, 8 3/4 oz
After the 1st stage they were 1 lb, 12 3/4 oz
And prior to any tumbling they were 1 lb, 14 5/8 oz

So all told the tumbling process removed about 9 ounces of material or almost 1/3rd of the total mass of the stones.

This post has made me discover that HF limits to 18 pictures per post, so I have to break things up here and separate this into two posts.

 

[The Nemesis]

Thanks to HF requiring me to split this into two posts, now we go into the even more self-indulgent portion where I take photos of varying artistic quality. And sometimes they're even in focus!

Spoiler: even more rocks

The weird jagged bit/seam on the bottom left rock is not actually there. I tried to use the panorama photo mode to take a closer, wider pic without zooming in or standing back farther and it didn't stitch together 100% correctly.

This one came out nice, good sheen and nice and egg shaped.

Here's the one stone that was quite rough the whole way through. you can see it's still very pitted but it ended up reasonably smooth

This one was fairly rough for most of the run but in the end has a nice faint set of spiraling white/gray lines that run the whole body. It's surprisingly nice.

There's still a big set of pits and divots on the back side, but the band is nice and vibrant and overall it looks good even if it still has some green streaks that I always thought were algae.

This is the big flat stone that I put in. It's one of the smoothest ones and that vein that runs around the corner is neat. The flat shape is nice to handle and play with like a fidget toy :lol

This dark one is probably the coolest in terms of how uniformly smooth it got and its slightly matte finish. It's not as glossy as the others but it almost looks like smoky glass even though it's not translucent. The only shame is that you can see running vertically down the middle there's a fracture. It encircles the whole stone and if I took a chisel to it it'd probably crack right along there and split in two.

The veins and streaks in this one are nice even if it quite pitted.

I don't know why but the one in the middle looks a bit like a shark tooth. Fate?

the granite bits look pretty nice overall.

the speckles on this one are kind of interesting though it's lost some of its color as we've gone along.

The disappointment of the batch. I thought that depression in the middle would grind out but instead it disintegrated and seems like it's barely held together. Maybe eventually I'll split this one and re-tumble it.

I tried to get a closer shot of that glossy black one but it went blurry.

Close granites.

More fun close ups because I was trying to pretend I was artistic :lol It's a good view of the particular sheen on that black one as it's pretty in focus at the back.

more granites and stuff.

Geez, I have to split this again. I guess I need to cut down how many rock photos I take,

 

[The Nemesis]

Last post tonight, I swear

Spoiler: Even more rocks

Another close up of the flat stone.

And that dark one with light veins.

the spiraly one.

and the banded one.

I also have pictures from the pre-tumble and 1st-to-2nd stage of my next round but they're not 100% ready. I'm not going to show nearly as much this time since the process has been documented. It might just be befores and afters from each stage or other things of note.

Or I can stop hijacking the thread to talk about rocks, lol. :p

 

[Shark Finn]

hi

 

[landshark]

hi

High!

Last post tonight, I swear

Spoiler: Even more rocks

Another close up of the flat stone.

And that dark one with light veins.

the spiraly one.

and the banded one.

I also have pictures from the pre-tumble and 1st-to-2nd stage of my next round but they're not 100% ready. I'm not going to show nearly as much this time since the process has been documented. It might just be befores and afters from each stage or other things of note.

Or I can stop hijacking the thread to talk about rocks, lol. :p

The spiraly one with the white stripe still my fave. Although, that dark one with the light veins came out tight!

 

[LadyStanley]

Caitlin Clark invited to U.S. national team training camp during Final Four

Clark may not be able to attend if Iowa reaches the Final Four.

sports.yahoo.com

Clark may not be able to attend if Iowa reaches the Final Four.

Iowa star invited to Team USA camp for summer Olympics.

 

[The Nemesis]

I forgot the most important thing about the batch of rocks:

I needed to find something to put them in after taking them out of the tumbler. but I didn't bring my jar for polished stones out to the garage with me that afternoon and was too lazy to go back in the house to get it. So I rummaged through the recycling bin and found a discarded frosting container and used that.

Now all the stones smell like vanilla frosting

hi

Hi!

 

[The Nemesis]

In brief (relatively speaking), the new batch of rocks, initial prep and post-stage-1:

Spoiler: New Rocks

I decided to label everything this time to make it easier to keep track of. Obviously not keeping individual track of each piece of granite but the larger rocks (which are mostly my excess supply of wide, flat stones) get a letter to better replace them on a photo display like this.:

It also turns out the "quartz" isn't that. But we'll get there in a bit.

It's almost 2 pounds of stuff to start with. That probably means I'm eking close to the normal 3 lb limit once the grit and water go in, though most people say that I shouldn't worry about it as long as I'm not cramming the barrel so full that nothing can move around and grind at all.

But it's ready to go. And it did for a week.


1 week later:

This was by far the thickest, soupiest, goopiest muck of slurry I've had so far. That's the ceramic beads that are stuck around the rim of the tumbler and held up by the tackiness of the slurry.

But I washed them out.

The white stones (the not-quartz) really got ground down significantly. This was partially by design and partially as a test.

Before I did this batch I took my whole collection and did some really sketchy/basic hardness scratch testing to get a feel for about how hard everything is so that I can judge what stones should or shouldn't go together.

Granite apparently is usually around a hardness of 6 or 7 Mohs. It's the hardest thing I have in reasonable quantities in my collection of gravel and landscaping stones. Meanwhile the "quartz" here clearly wasn't quartz (which should have a hardness of 7. I have an actual quartz crystal that bares this out). It was scratched by everything I was testing with except the pre-1970s penny (which is like 95% copper) so its hardness is like 3-4 Mohs. This lines up with doing some research about it and its origin (it was from a bucket of stones from a landscape center that my dad had sitting around outside his workshop because he used to work for a landscaping supplier and kept batches of product on hand as samples) and discovering what mineral it most likley is. And I swear I'm not making this up:


Dolomite


That's not a joke. That's what it's named. Like the movie except spelled slightly differently

So this is where we are after a week:

It's maybe sad to lose so much of those big, beautiful, pure white stones but this is a good test for whether I can use Granite as a sort of "resizing medium" to really work down big stones.

So back into the tumbler we go to be measured:

We lost 6 ounces in that first run. Comparatively the previous batch didn't lose that much until after their second stage. I think that's partially because of the granite.

Anyway into the tumbler it goes:

I have replaced the paper with the sharpie note with a white board.

Ignore the "Leftovers" bit at the top. The board used to be on my fridge to mark, obviously, what leftovers were in there by date so I could make sure I didn't leave things too long before eating them. But eventually I found that every time I opened the fridge door and it hit the cupboard beside it, the weak magnets on this whiteboard would fail and it would fall off. So I replaced it with a flexible magnet with whiteboard coating and this is now being repurposed. But I wrote the "leftovers" bit in permanent marker because I didn't envision using it elsewhere. So for now it goes outside for this and retains the random title up top.

The bucket behind it is my sorted collection of rocks in yogurt containers, ice cream containers and whatever. Each bucket has a label with what sort of stones are in it and a rough idea of the hardness. I thought I could actually identify the stone/mineral of everything I had but that's a lot harder than you'd expect so I gave up after identifying the dolomite