I need advice on tunbling wood.

[Steve knight]

I have a customer I am making wooden rings for. if he can tumble them to finish them it would work great. any idea's on media and times?

[Thomas Stephenson]

Walnut or Pecan Shells

[Floyd Mah]

Oops. Thought this was a thread on the pickup truck gate opening up on a hill and dumping a load of wood. Actually reminds me of the time that the kids dropped a box of buns out of the car when we lived on a hill. But seriously, do you think that this will work? When you tumble spent brass or rocks in a tumbler, the abrasive media gives you a good polish because the objects you are hoping to polish are of uniform density. Wood has that wonderful property called grain and that seems to be material of different densities which alternate. I wonder if you would end up more of a sandblasted effect from the abrasive media selectively going to work on the softer parts of the wood. Maybe bits of sandpaper confetti may be more effective since it duplicates what you would do manually. Just a thought, since I don't have any experience on tumbling wood. Only pork buns.

[george wilson]

Wooden objects have been tumbled with small sheets of sandpaper,but they probably wouldn't get the insides of the rings. The sandpaper will nicely soften edges of the likes of wooden toys.

[Bob Vavricka]

Steve,
In a former life as an industrial arts teacher, I used a materials processing program developed by Nelson Parke from a school in Springfield Missouri. One of the projects included some wooden checkers which were cut using a special cutter on the drill press and then tumbled to finish them. The tumber was "homemade" and consisted of three compartments filled with short (approx 3/4") wooden pegs that were about wooden matchstick size with a point on one end. The abrasive media use for tumbing included a "dry cut" material in the first compartment that looked like course sawdust, but I'm not sure what the composition was. The other two compartments used a thin paste type abrasive used sparingly. The checkers came out of the last compartment looking pretty shiny and like they had been finished. I'll see if I am able to find any specifics, but this was going on 20 years ago and a quick Google search didn't locate what I was looking for.
Bob V.

[Steve knight]

if it works it would save a lot of work but it may only work to polish them.

[Barry Vabeach]

Steve, This Old House was working on a post and beam farmhouse recently and they went to watch the pegs being manufactured. The last step was that hundreds of pegs were put in octoganal boxes and turned for quite some time, sorry I can't recall whether they used a special media, or whether they just added a hard wax. You might be able to find the episode on line.

[Steve Garrison]

A few years ago I had a bunch of small wooden parts I had made that had a little fuzz on the edges. Rather than sanding hundreds of small parts individually by hand I put them all in a 3.5 gallon plastic bucket along with 80 grit garnet sandblast media to fill the bucket about halfway. I taped the lid down with duct tape to make sure it would not come off during the tumbling. I don't have a dedicated tumbler so I used my clothes dryer:)! I used pillows and blankets all around to hold the bucket in the center of the dryer and set the controls to tumble without heat for 30 minutes. All the parts were perfectly de-burred and very slightly rounded edges. Worked great!

Just make sure you hang around nearby to stop the dryer if the support comes undone, it makes a helluva racket when this happens. Make sure you use lots of duct tape too. :rolleyes:

[Mitchell Andrus]

I don't have a dedicated tumbler so I used my clothes dryer:)!


Buy this man a beer!
.

[Dan Gill]

You might try one or two in walnut shells or corncobs. A vibratory brass tumbler might be pretty quick. If you have a friend who reloads rifle or pistol ammo, you might have access to one.

[Bill White]

Heat treating in the oven, deburring in the dryer, cleaning small parts with the water pic. Dang!! My bride would KILL me. ;)
Bill