How to Polish Rocks By Hand

Polishing Rocks by Hand
How to Polish Petoskey Stones

Rocks can be polished by hand using progressively finer grades of sandpaper.

• Start by selecting a soft stone such as onyx, wonderstone rhyolite, a petoskey stone, a concretion, calcite, limestone, dolomite, flourite, or a similar stone with a hardness of about 3-4 on the Mohs hardness scale. Harder stones can be polished by hand, but it will be a longer process.
• Use a small hammer and/or chisel to remove any large protrusions from the stone, and form it into the approximate final shape. It is hard to polish inside indentations, so you are better off using a stone without indentations. (Gloves and safety glasses highly recommended.)
• Rub the stone on a slab of concrete to break off any small protrusions.
• Round the rock further by rubbing it on about a 50 grain sandpaper, until it is the shape that you would like it to be when finished.
• Use a finer grade of sandpaper, about a 150, to remove the scratches left by the coarse sandpaper.
• Use a finer grade of sandpaper, about a 300 to 600, to remove the scratches left by the previous stage.
• Rub the rock on about a 1500 grit sandpaper or some leather or denim with a little bit of polish and water on it until it has a high lustre shine. Any powdered polish should work fine. You may get a small tube of polish at most any hardware store that sells dremel tools. The stone may take on the color of the polish so a red rougue might color the stone red.

If I have tumbled a rock in my tumbler and it just won't take a good shine because it is too soft. It can often be shined up really nicely with the polish on leather or the finest sandpaper.

I highly recommend that the sandpaper and polish be damp so that dust will not fly all over the place. Rock dust can be hazardous.