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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
