Complete Rock Tumbler Kit with Rough Gemstones and Polishing Grits for Kids and Beginners

**updated review below— we got shiny rocks!** We bought this for our son as a 7th birthday gift. It’s the perfect mid-range rock tumbler! It’s sturdy and doesn’t seem like it will break. It’s been running now for over 2 weeks. It’s definitely not silent, but with its rubber barrel, I suspect it’s tougher and quieter than one with a plastic barrel. We keep it in the basement, but can see it’d be annoying if it was somewhere in the house. It has a handy feature where you can set it for up to 7 days and it’ll tell you how many days are left- great for a kid! It includes a nice little instruction manual with information about the history of rock tumbling and description of the rocks included. It’s a nice, reasonably-priced kit that includes everything you need to start tumbling rocks right away! Update: now that we’ve completed a batch, I figured I’d add some info. We still think it’s a nice kit! The little sieve that comes with the kit is very handy! Our final stones were smooth and lovely. However, they weren’t really shiny. After some reading, we learned that there is a bit of an art to this and we need to be a little more meticulous in the cleaning of the tumbler between grits. Overall, though, our 7-year-old is quite pleased with the kit. We bought the jasper set and will try that next! Update #2– SHINY ROCKS! We did a few batches and couldn’t get shiny rocks and we lost interest. My kiddo is now almost 9 but just started becoming interested in geology a lot more. We decided to try again. After reading some about it, I decided to try a better brand of grit and IT WORKED! We bought Rock Tumbler Grit for 3 Pound Tumbler by Professional Grade Rock Polishing Grit And followed the instructions **carefully,** making sure to clean the tumbler tub very meticulously after each tumble. We also purchased tumbling pellets (Rock Tumbler “Sinking” Plastic Pellets / Beads Used For Final Polishing & Burnishing Stages) for the final two stages. The new grit had an additional stage which made all the difference. The jade set came out mostly lovely and shiny. They were not all consistently shiny, but I see promise! I added a picture using the flash to show off the polish. We’re going to try the nee grit with a different set of stones now.