Oceanside rocks

Brian and I got one rock-hunting trip in before winter ended. We went to three beaches on the north Oregon coast. The first two were up near Highway 26 and didn't yield much in the way of rocks. And we got rained on a lot. Luckily I had my new Columbia rain coat on. We almost gave up but then decided to drive down to Oceanside beach, where we had better weather and found a ton of great rocks. 

Oceanside rock hunt prizes.

That's about 7 lbs of rocks. My tumbler only holds 3 lb so I picked the agates (the white pile on the right and the center pile) and added a few of the green guys and the black rocks with embedded agates. I skipped the coarse grind step and added a third polish step with 1000 grit alumina to hopefully get a higher shine more quickly. Here is the polishing progression:

As-found beach rocks.

After 1 week of medium grind (180/220 grit SiC).

After 1 week of pre-polish (500 grit SiC).

After 1 week of mid-polish (1000 grit alumina).

After 1 week of polish (1200 grit alumina) plus burnished 1 day with Ivory soap.

This is a pretty small subset of the batch, the whole pile looks like this:

Oceanside rocks before tumbling.

Rocks after tumbling.