Water is cheaper than sand

[Packard]

I bought. 50 pound bag of play sand (Sackrete).  I intended it to be used as tumbling media for small wood parts.

Trying it out has been delayed.

Unlike most of the other Sackrete products, the play sand is packed in plastic bags.

When I opened the bag the content was wet through and through.  I’m guessing that 50 pound bag has 5 to 10 pounds of water in it.

I’m drying out the sand now in my oven.  So, instead of trying out the technique tonight, I will have to wait until tomorrow.

Bags of top soil are even worse.  I cut them open and water drains out.

Enough complaining for tonight.

 

[RJNeal]

It happens more often, especially in the winter time.
The project I’m currently working on went to pour the concrete slab for a 1200 sq ft. Shop. Poured after the first rain
Three people calculated the yardage. Even tack on an extra yard on . Still short by half a yard.
You ask for so many yards and they load the truck by weight. Go figure
You would think they would adjust their calibration a bit.

 

[Cheese]

I've found that to be pretty typical of plastic bagged sand. The plastic bag retains a ton of moisture and the sand needs to be spread out on an elevated screen for at least a day to dry the sand out.

 

[Packard]

I baked some sand last night, but miscalculated and I am baking some more this morning.  Baking rather quickly (30 minute to bake and 30 minutes to cool off) accomplishes the drying out process.

I do recall buying some top soil in plastic bags, and when I cut the bags open, the water would run out.  The 80 pound bag probably had 10 or more pounds of water.

I wondered what the effect desiccating the top soil would have.

It would reduce the weight significantly, so it would have to be sold by the cubic inches instead of weight.

It would reduce shipping charges.

It would have saved my back from hefting all those bags.

It could be packaged in cube shaped plastic bags, reducing the space required in the warehouse and the store.

But it would require that there be a major educational project convincing the public that 3 cubic feed of desiccated top soil equals 80 pounds of the wet stuff.

As an aside, there was a local trash hauling facility across from our place of work.  The town shut them down because of the offensive odors.

So they decided to go into the top soil manufacturing business. 

They obtained anything that could be ground up into sand.  In the beginning it was just pebbles, rocks and boulders.  (The equipment they used was impressive.)

Later they were grinding up large cast chunks of concrete.  I was thinking that the concrete might look like sand, but it was going to ba far too alkaline.

Their crowning achievement was when they received the detritus of a torn up roadway.  Bit chunks of black top which was ground up into “sand”, and had the advantage of being nicely tinted black.

They also ground up chunks if what I guessed was a building.  Concrete with embedded rebar.  Is that the stuff of top soil?

Anyway, drifting off topic.  So I will shut up now.

 

[Ron B]

Top soil will have sand and other minerals in it but what makes it top soil is the organic matter.  If  you drive across  the flat lands of the midwest (Say ILLinois or Indiana) it is flat because of glaciers. The last glacier carved out the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Think of a bulldozer of ice over 1 mile high slowly grinding the landscape flat.  Then 10,000 years of prairie grass made this into very rich soil.  So topsoil is subsoil with organic matter in it.  If you go to Southern Illinois you will get into a lot of clay soil-lots of mineral and little organic matter.

I would not want soil made out of ground up blacktop-too much petroleum chemicals in it.  I Just finished buried my coffee grounds and vegetable peelings in my leaf pile-makes great top dressing.

The glaciers were so heavy that the area around the Great Lakes is still decompressing-slowly rising after all of those years-the glaciers were so heavy they compressed the magna down and it is slowly expanding back.

 

[Packard]

It took the county about 2 years to shut down the operation. Among other issues, they failed to obtain the needed environmental certifications.  They did add organic matter gleaned from their trash hauling.  Between the odors and the airborne dust, they were never going to get approval to operate.

(Every evening, every car on our lot was covered in dust.  Most of it blew off on the ride home.  But breathing that dust was problematic.

 

[Packard]

The tumbling experiment was a complete bust.  The sand did remove some of the wood.

But parts of the wood was softer than the rest, so the parts look like they have deep gouges in them.  Also, it is difficult to remove the residual sand from the wood.

And, the end grain appears much rougher.

And, the wood now looks dirty.

So, overall, a really bad idea.  Back to hand sanding.

 

[Ron B]

Well, Edison was not successful his first time. 
If you are using play sand, that sand has very rounded edges and does not cut very well  You probably cannot buy silica sand anymore but it has much sharper edges and cuts better.  However, it would still eat out the soft spots.  There are other products too, like walnut shells, but I really do not know if anything would work on wood.

THe problem with silica sand is breathing the dust-but sounds like you were forced to do that on an daily basis.  I am no fan of the EPA, but this sounds like an operation that needed shut down.  I am not an EPA fan because I have out-of-state farm property that someone started a dump on without my knowledge.  I found out about it when I received a warning from the EPA.  MY choices were to clean it up with all the documentation and paperwork and prevention safeguards that they required for their records, or they would clean it up for me and charge me triple.  Even though it was my 40th wedding anniversary, I cleaned it up using all my vacation and money on that project.  Next year I took my wife to Peru so I could stay married.

 

[Cheese]

The tumbling experiment was a complete bust.  The sand did remove some of the wood.

But parts of the wood was softer than the rest, so the parts look like they have deep gouges in them.  Also, it is difficult to remove the residual sand from the wood.

I think your results are more a function of the wood you used rather than the process you used. It'd be interesting to try the tumbling thing on some maple, cherry or walnut scraps.  [smile]

 

[Packard]

I was using poplar.  I will try maple.

The second problem was that the wood is light enough that it mostly floats on the surface.  This will probably work better with a barrel that rotates.  Those are more expensive in the size I would need.  So I will probably drop this.

I would note that I used to have a customer that produced cheap wood hangers, like you might see a retailer use to display coats.

He applied a wax finish (paraffin based) and applied it in a huge tumbler barrel.  The wax was in the form of pellets and it adhered by the impact of the wax to the wood and metal.

I handled the wax pellets and they were extremely hard.  Much harder than candle wax.  The application was extremely uniform, and the impact smoothed out the wood.

That is where I got the idea for tumbling for this failed experiment.

 

[Cheese]

That is where I got the idea for tumbling for this failed experiment.

I wouldn't consider it to be a failed experiment yet, just some fine tuning needs to be applied.  [big grin]  Like you mentioned, it worked with wooden hangers. Do you recall what wood those hangers were manufactured from?

 

[Michael Kellough]

The machine is a vibratory “tumbler” instead of a rotating tumbler?

 

[Packard]

The tumbler is a vibratory one.  The rotation ones would undoubtedly work better, but to get the needed barrel diameter, I would have to spend at least $300.00.

We had an ideal sized one at work.  But back 20 years ago it was about $600.00. 

The rotation versions can typically accept both dry and wet media. 

There are typically three functions a tumbler provides.  It an remove the top layer of material using an abrasive media.

It can “peen” down sharp edges using stainless steel ball bearings.  This will more slowly smooth out edges, but it has the advantage of not removing material from the flat surfaces.

And finally, it can clean the parts typically with media like dried corn cob husks.  That will absorb oil and wax.

But the above apply to tumbling for metals.  I have no experience in tumbling for wood.

An additional issue is that the wood is so light that it tends to float to the surface and only the down-surface was burnished.  I am less confident that a different media or a different species of wood can overcome that issue.

I will try some maple.  I’ll report my findings.

This tumbler is probably intended for ammunition reloaded to clean the bullet casings prior to re-loading with powder, primer and projectile.