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Comment by jackbeck | Hacker News Reader

I have strongly negative connotations with rock tumblers. When I was about 8 I saw one in a store and thought it would turn regular rocks into precious stones. One of the biggest disappointments of my childhood.

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I hope you didn't buy Sea Monkeys next.

Or XRay Specs

Fun fact: Both were invented by the same guy, Harold Nathan Braunhut.

Wow, that guy is a piece of work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_von_Braunhut

Rather abrupt shift in topic in that article

While we are on the topic of famous and bad inventions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

Nothing compared to the 6-foot glow-in-the-dark skeleton (actually a folded plastic poster) or the Submarine! (ditto).

The claims made on that kind of hobby tool, in that era, serve as a fantastic argument for truth-in-advertising laws. Looking at you, the perpetual ad for (plans for) time machines and force fields in the back of Boy's Life.

Me, just the opposite, but my dad was a jeweler, so my context was much better informed. I was positively surprised by how cool rocks looked after smoothing and then polishing.

Slightly older, I graduated to polishing cabachons on a grinder system.

Teenage me learned to solder gold rings to new sizes, which benefitted young electrical engineering me - gold and lead solder very similarly.

All of this, I now realize, was more-or-less a planned arc/quasi-apprenticeship training for the family store.

I was lucky to live in an area with a lot of interesting semi-precious stones that you could just find by looking around.

I wasn’t aware that there were places that had semi-precious stones just lying around. Where are you from?

Anywhere with granite will have lots of quartz of various types

Yeah, I dug up a bunch of quartz crystals, some granite containng small fossils (tiny clams, small spiral shells etc), and a few pieces of turqoise in the backyard as a kid. How interesting the rocks in your own backyard are depends a lot on the geological history of the area though.

If it contained fossils, it wasn't granite.

Herkimer in upstate NY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herkimer_diamond

Precious/semi-precious stones are rather arbitrarily defined. Various forms of chalcedony (agates, jasper, chert, etc) can often be called such, and are very common sometimes.

I’ve buckets of agates and jasper, among other things (like petrified wood) that I’ve found in fields while doing my ag job here in the willamette valley of Oregon. Oregon as a whole is amazing for rockhounding. There are some spots where I can’t go a several feet without seeing a 1cm or larger agate just laying there. Makes it hard to concentrate. I’ve mostly got it out of my system now though.

Cleaned up a bunch thanks to an ultrasonic cleaner, and one day will tumble a bunch to give away.

https://www.blm.gov/visit/sunstone-collection-area

Among others, but this one is one that is well known among gemhounds/lapidarists.

Oh, of course. The Bureau of Land Management.

What does your comment mean? Of course what?

Same. I also had one when the school mail-order book fair offered a diary with a padlock on it. I wasn't even into writing, but I thought a locking book was so cool. 8 weeks later it shows up and turns out to be just a regular hardcover diary with the cover printed to look like a padlock.

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