Making SEA GLASS with a rock tumbler
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- čas přidán 27. 02. 2023
- I used rock tumblers to make sea glass. Tumbling glass in a rock tumbler allows you to make your own sea glass in just 3-5 days.
This is the best low cost rock tumbler i found after trying 3 different brands.
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This pack of different abrasive grits worked well:
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I have collected sea glass for most of my adult life. I love this concept, especially the green glass. I swear that I am going to make a concrete filled bench with sea glass as the aggregate and grind it down smooth to show off the polished glass.
This might work best in a mosaic style, since the hazy sea glass texture is just on the surface. But wow that really would be a beautiful bench!
Me too! I look for the blue green colored glass when I go to the shore
Looks similar to terrazzo technic
Careful with glass powder when unloading the tumbler. That stuff can ruin your lungs fast if it's fine enough to inhale.
So would you recommend using water for glass?
@@iainchurchillabsolutely always use water.
Good point. Just the thought of what it can do to your inside is painful!!
@@iainchurchillyes but don't listen to ruminatingwizard unless you want to be average. If you don't try new things and remain open minded you'll never come up with anything special. Just be very careful!
How wonderful of u to mention it. This tumbling is totally new for me but now I finally have something to do with all the glass bottles I have saved.
The wind powered tumbler is pretty cool!
Wow, a wind farm to make sea glass. What a novel idea. Sea glass is great for crafting jewelry and in cement projects.
Sea glass is so ethereal looking. Can't wait to see what you come up with.
Heck yes.
I have a huuuuuge farmers dump I discovered on my property. The original house is from 1886, and the dump appears to sprawl across a small hill. Where the main dump was atop the hill, but overtime it has all started to slowly move down the hill.
There are amazing fully intact pieces of glassware. From a shampoo bottle, and various alcoholic bottles.
But the main point for this comment. Making all the shattered shards into something new rather then just throwing them out.
I fully plan on picking up all I can, tumbling it, and then reselling it at a farmers market. (For like maybe a dollar each in all honesty. With various pictures taken of the process and history behind them.)
If you are finding intact bottles they could be valuable.
I am so glad you are making sea glass at a large scale.
I am from Mendocino County, CA, where we have a rocky beach near the town Fort Bragg called Glass Beach. It is famous for its sea glass, all over the beach. Really beautiful. But years of collectors, especially recently people gathering for crafting, have reduced the amount of glass there by a huge amount. It’s really sad. When previously most everyone could visit and not feel bad leaving with a small pocket of sea glass (maybe 10 pieces), even though it’s against the rules of taking stuff from parks, now the people repeatedly visiting to gather it, or leaving with buckets, are destroying the beautiful experience for everyone.
It’s even less understandable to me than gathering shells, because sea glass can easily be manufactured at home by crafters, and it looks as authentic (or even better, if you have access to more colors) as sea glass made by the ocean.
I wonder if there’s something affordable and harmless you could add to the water to keep it from turning into sludge. Is it evaporating? Maybe a wetting agent or an oil? Then you could get the speed from using water but not the dry sludge problem?
64 yrs old. Lived there in the mid 1960's. Horrible, but the town dump consisted of backing up to the bluffs edge over the surf and heaving one's trash into the ocean. That's how glass beach came to be.
Noteworthy...fort Bragg was hit particularly hard with tuberculosis way back and most bottle dumps were filled with cough syrup bottles
Perhaps we should create more sea glass beaches by dumping all that recycled glass that recyclers can't sell just off the coastline.
I have always loved sea glass. Can't wait to see the video on the wind power tumbler!
I like your outro "Bye!"
I love using sea glass in my aquarium instead of gravel. It looks amazing when lit by the aquarium lights
Using sea glass for landscaping is pretty cool. Curious on your test results, keep up the good work. 👍
I would love to see a video for a rain collection system that is actually aestheticly pleasing like the other projects on this channel and dont need to be hidden like regular plastic bins.
Beautiful. The glass would make nice necklaces and bracelets.
This is so cool, I’m excited to see what kinds of projects you utilize these in and how. Thanks for sharing the experimental phases as well, I mainly work in woods and soft metals, but cross-functional knowledge is always valuable. Thanks again and good luck !
I used sea glass to produce a faux stain glass window, after my old window cracked. It came out beautifully !
Teach us about the wind powered one. Sweet
I think a lampshade might be a fun use for this. There's the Tiffany route of formal custom-fit soldered edge banding, but I bet you could find a much cheaper & lower-effort method that looks more chaotic, for example twisting together a few strands of thin wire above and below each piece of glass.
I also expect you could set these into the top layer of a concrete lounge chair, then scrub to expose them before the cement has set fully. A pebbled finish would probably be comfier anyhow.
Since you're into in-situ resource use, I believe it's possible to react the ground glass (after filtering out the abrasive grit, or letting it settle) with wood ash to make water glass (sodium silicate), one of the better concrete sealers. This is traditionally done at high temperature, but the high surface area might potentially allow it to happen rapidly enough in just boiling water...be careful not to try it in an aluminum vessel though!
This is so cool! I totally want to see more videos from you about sea glass.
I've tumbled glass in my Lortone, initially using stainless steel mixed shot and abrasive. I used the pieces in an outdoor concrete walkway repair.
can you use the stainless shot on glass?
I loved this!!!! I would definitely use these for making jewelry with🤯❤️🤍
Fantastic video!! Thank you so much for the explanation on why you don’t want to wash in the sink. I’m looking into getting a tumbler and was wondering if washing in the sink would work because it’s too cold outside during the winter, so I’m so glad I got my answer! Also, didn’t even dawn on me to tumble glass so this will be just so much fun! Thank you again!!
Very interesting!Thank you for sharing this!
I just use aquarium gravel as a medium.
It's cheap, found everywhere, and can be used over and over.
I'm collecting sea glasses from several years now, and one day I hope I'll be able to create something inspired to Tiffany technique. Super-curious to see what you will build with your pieces :)
Really nice
Love it
Would love to see your project you going to do.
Sounds amazing
This calls for a huge homemade tumbler project :D
I love the windmill rock tumbler idea. I think you need to go big with it, though, and get a water pump windmill for the extra torque.
great videos enjoyed watching
5 gallon food safe bucket might make a good larger scale tumbler. Food safe has the better rubber seals. Wind only has a low amount of power. Get a large fan, with a small shaft for leverage. A big plywood wheel attached to the bucket would give a larger diameter for more leverage, but would block part of the fan. Instead of a solid piece of wood, use a piece of large gap pet fencing or similar to make the wheel, whatever is cheapest, then you can make it not overlap the fan.
Still, just use a correctly sized motor. Long term you'll probably spend more keeping the wind power running than you'll save in electricity with the 'free' wind. Electricity is cheap for mechanical energy, heating/cooling is what uses most energy..
This is genuinely interesting. More of this.
Very interesting! ❤
Glad you think so!
I love the idea of a wind tumbler. will have to hunt down that video!
a guy i met that was doing paper/fiber concrete built a rig that pulled behind a truck to mix and slurry the paper etc.
it was built using a diff and rear axle from an old pickup, but turned up instead of forward, so instead of taking engine rotation and turning it into wheel rotation, it took wheel rotation and turned it into mixing platform rotation inside of a tub on a trailer. anyway..
depending on how fast you're trying to get it to rotate, and how much you want to scale the windpowered version up, you could have an upright turbine rotating 2 tanks pretty easily. welding a 50 gallon drum to a 5 lug scrap wheel... hell, in theory it could be automated for the downtime/static to have an electric motor kick on from the other side of the axle, making a wind/electric hybrid setup... or hell, if you want a whole whole lot of it, the axle could be left in an old salvage yard rear-ended pickup and just keep the engine at idle... it'd probably last 2-3 days idling on a tank of gas.
I'm curious to see what happens if you put pieces of smashed tempered glass in there, will it get the same effect or will the pieces continue to disintegrate into dust?
I always thought using a cement mixer would work for larger batch. Never tried though.
It works well. There are a few videos on CZcams where a small cement mixer is used to produce large amounts of landscaping glass.
Awesome ❤
Thanks 🤗
I tumble glass a lot and it comes out beautiful! I let people know it's tumbled glass and not sea glass, they still buy it...
I live near a beach called glass beach because way back in the day it was used as a dump. When I was a kid there were like car engines embedded in huge rusty rocks and tons of other old metallic stuff but it was later removed for safety reasons(for tourism reasons). But it’s cool cause there’s just beaches made out of sea glass, used to be a whole lot more glass but people come and collect bucket loads to take home as souvenirs. Probably make a good way to recycle glass bottles, just break them, tumble them, drop them on the beach.
You're the top❤
Would love to see the art you’ve made 😊
Sea glass looks nice. You Could ise it arond plants in large potts, you can make wall/mosaic art with it.
I have tried the tumbler method with the two stages of grit for making beach glass, but a side by side comparison I could still tell a difference, the beach glass isn't as uniform as the tumbled glass but I've collected beach glass for a while, I'm just curious if you've made a side by side comparison. I had thought of maybe using some kind of stone after stage 2 to create some of the importations that you naturally see vs the uniform tumbled glass
Can I use this same concept and use an old concrete mixer to do bigger rocks and pieces of glass?
Bladesmiths use WD 40 when they want to give a blade a stonewashed look. Try that instead of water.
Use as an epoxy pour filler. Nice diffusion.
I'm looking to do some glass in poured concrete countertops. Sounds like I should've got the tumbler running all winter sweat😅
I want to create an exercise-bike powered tumbler. It would be super inefficient, but would actually motivate me to use an exercise bike! 😅
Wonder if using a cement mixer could help scale up your process.
I like this because you can reuse broken glass that is not recyclable
concrete mixer
safe to touch now but is it safe after walking on it and snapping some like in last clip u show a long peace that will snap
This was so popular in the 60s
I'm curious to know what effect sea glass has on ambient heat from heat reflection and the potential for causing wildfires when used as a landscaping material. I have no idea if it would be any different from stone.
I've been finding that letting my rock tumbler go with grit 1 for 11 days gets me something that looks grit 2 or even grit 3. It's a little hard to tell via video. Did you try letting grit 1 run for as long as you would run rocks? I'd love to know more about the difference.
Can these be used for stained glass applications.
i would modify the design of the wind tumbler and make one that had a moving wind axis joint but then movement has to transferred through cogs which complicates matters but can also multiply power in order to use a much bigger container that revolves on slow speed. this would have the advantage of being able to turn a big container with soft wind. If you want to really complicate matters more, then you can add an electric motor that turns the barrel and this motor works on a battery that charges from a dynamo that is turned by the propeller.
Have you considered something on the order of a cement mixer?
How about a solar panel and a concrete mixer
try polishing for 5-6 days to fully fog the nicks and crevases if you dont have porcelyn medium
I assume it would be more difficult with a smaller cyclinder, like what was being used in your video to polish the rocks. However, would it make sense to modify the process with just rocks, if you were looking to create sand, without having to have to purchase some sort of hammer mill. Apologies if it is a little off topic, but I originally found your video looking for ideas about turning glass into a fine sand texture. Your video has given me ideas, since I was not previously aware of rock tumbling. Although, it would be quite versatile, if I could adapt the process for both polishing glass and conversion to sand alternative.
Have you thought about doing it in 55 gallon drums? Probably better for bulk than many small tumblers..
Can you let me know how you break the bottles before use in the tumbler? It is a messy job and the pieces are pretty big.
What about using wind to power a battery and then use the electric tumblers?
Do these tumblers come with a cycle counter? That way you can tell exactly how long they've been active in case they stop.
A wind farm using local sand/soil to tumble glass is an amazing concept, looking forward to seeing it!
I have seen large tumblers made using old tires as the drum, now I'm imagining a windmill driving an old car differential going out to two timber discs with large 4x4 tires bolted on for large scale production...
Time to make a glass beach hehe
lol it will take a long time
This just takes away the fun and excitement of finding sea glass on a beach.
I need about 2 tons of it and I can get bottles from local restaurants
Is there a problem with the broken glass damaging the inside of the tumbler?
Any risk of glass chipping and making sharp glass flakes over time?
It’s not sea glass if it’s never been in the ocean, it’s just tumbled glass.
how about a cement mixer to make mass quantities of tumbled glass.
Too rough, and way too noisy.
Some of that glass looks like it started life as a cathode ray tube. From what I have read, the back of the CRT contains lead, for X-ray protection. The front does not, because it is thick enough to block X-rays on its own. The frit (the seam between the front and back) contains about 80% lead. So if you tumble CRT glass, avoid anything other than the front of the tube.
I’ve heard that true sea glass is also a chemical process due to the salt water and soda ash reacting… love the look and it’s better this way for your use!
I'm in Canada, in an area near lakes, but not close to the sea. We call it "beach glass" where I live, because it washes up on the beach after being formed from the tides washing it back and forth against the rocks at the bottom of the lakes near the shore.
It can certainly form without salt water! I found this video very interesting as well 😊
If you havnt already, you should make a video on how to did your wind power tumbler.
just posted it
@@HomeMadeModern awesomesauce 😁🤘
Шикарный метод, только бочка маленькая.
What happens if you put in a spoonful of different stage grit all at once? 1 of each grit?
That’s just a waste of the finer grits.
you should put them in a 14 foot Pipe to tumble.
Damn, Dan Bilzerian is in a whole different business nowadays.
a sea glass chandelier and "beaded" curtains 😃
Wind tumbler!?!!🤯. Awesome! 🧡👊🏻🇨🇦
How large can you scale up the barrel?
You can make the barrel as big as you want, if you have the steel to build it, the power to spin it, and the stuff to feed it.
How would shape the sea glass with a sander?
I have done that to make drinking glasses out of bottles cut in half in previous videos
Love the environmentally conscious approach; glass found on property, grit found on property, move from grid to off-grid energy.
You're using a smartphone or a computer. Shush up.
No idea what to use them for. I find the look and texture of a piece of sea glass therapeutic
Has anyone used old candle jars? I try to use up candles, melt them down into a new candle, and reuse the jars as planters. I'd cricut some cute designs for the jars, but I'm reaching max capacity. I thought about breaking up old candle jars and seeing if they'd work in a rock tumbler.
could you use sand as the compound
I tried that in a previous video link in the description.
I want to tumble China pieces. Can anyone recommend a good tumbler that won’t break the bank?
Cement Mixer, 24 wine bottles, Two gallons Vinger, 1 lb water softener salt, four hours of mixing = Sea Glass. On a large scale!
We have an old large cement mixer. It only takes 4 hours?
Next how to make dragon glass
I wouldn't do this a whole lot if you have a rubber tumbler canister, I made beach glass about 4 times and after the 2nd time it started rubbing a hole in the rubber seal of my tumbler lid.
How do I find a person in my area? I google rock tumblers and I get the machines. I have green glass I want to give them.
I’m wondering why you can’t use sand from the beach?
I have tried using the desert sand out here. it works but you have to change it out often as it quickly breaks down from sand to dust. the grits are like sand but made of harder materials.
@@HomeMadeModern maybe beach sand is different? I dont know. I’m on the east coast and the sand also has small rocks in it too. I love sea glass and I actually kayaked to a deserted island by me and was thrilled to see the beach covered in glass.
I agree that this is not sea glass, but the idea could work well in improving the texture of sea glass that has been collected on the beach but may still have a rough edge or two.
Can we use sea water?
needs grit or sand to sand down the glass
So you can make 'some things' look like 'some things' but it doesn't mean they are the 'same thing'. I have collected glass from various beaches and it takes a long time in the ocean to turn the sharp to dull . It has been places... through time... Fun but not delivered by nature and unable to carry that energy.
Much gratitude ❣️
That’s not sea glass, that’s desert glass 😊
love the wind farm idea, otherwise it just looks like a lot of energy and waste material to me
Did similar to you. I decided it took way to long and stopped
w are you disposing of the waste? You’re scaling up operations, but literally how are you meant to dispose of the waste products on mass? Do you just keep dumping it in your yard? What’re the long term effects of that? I know metal shops used to do that but because they used lead and mercury the land they worked on is unusable now, that’s why I’m asking.
Abrasives won't be made of lead and mercury which are soft. It's probably fine ceramics, which aren't good to breathe in either.
@@H0mework I know they’re not lead and murmurs, those were examples. My point was the waste products might be dangerous and cause the spaces they work in to become uninhabitable. Are they sure that this is safe and the byproducts they’re making are being disposed of properly or aren’t an issue? Like, if the byproducts is just soft sand then whatever, but if it just looks like sand but in reality is like, fiberglass, super tiny shards, then it would be super dangerous!
Glass in epoxy experiment Where's that video
I saw a guy on youtube one time take a large tire, and put the media and material in the bottom of the tire and used that as a big tumbler. czcams.com/video/nf8S30EOZfw/video.html Other than that you could always get a lowes plastic cement mixer. Might even consider hooking it up to a solar panel/inverter setup.