Polished vs. unpolished for Newbies

[Fire1981]

These are examples for the Newbies. I got this group for $100 in the early EBay days. I was curious if they could be polished because I couldn’t tell what they looked like unless they were in a jar of water. I did some research and found Leroy Johnson in York Nebraska and dropped these off and got to see his polishing machines. He also turned me on to the marble Boards. He was the man!!!! So he polished this group and I learned a lot from him. Here are the examples of marbles I couldn’t even see what was in the Matrix. The thing that is lost in having a hand made polished is the texture of the pontils. He said he’d do his best but it will open up the marble and the pontils will be smooth. I was lucky to have a lot of different examples of hand mades. I just thought I’d post these showing what they looked like when the pontils are smooth and gone.🔥

RAR

 

[Fire1981]

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RAR

[Fire1981]

🔥

RAR

[Fire1981]

Unpolished 🔥

RAR

[Fire1981]

Unpolished 🔥

RAR

[Fire1981]

Tapped the Moons off the surface glass and burnished it with fine 1000 grind black sand paper and a sanding sponge for sanding and smoothing out dry wall spackle. Fun Zen therapy when sh!t went sideways in my life. I worked on it for at least 3 or 4 months. It’s a honk’n 2 and 5/8 buster. I just thought I’d post these🔥

RAR

[Ric]

Leroy was a master polisher, for sure - they look great. The inner core on that Onionskin is very cool, you may not even have known it was there without polishing. Billy polished these for me, most of them just had really bad pocket-wear, so while the pontils are gone they didn't open up as much as some of yours did. I've had them on a shelf with my shaving mirror for years - that way, I can enjoy them from close up. Now that I've retired, that has gone from once a day to like once every couple of weeks.

And for the newbies, the key to a marble with good polishing potential is that none of the damage is too deep. If it gets into the embellishments and you want to remove it all, you'll wind up with something that doesn't look anything like the original marble. It's the same with machine-mades, often times you will completely remove the pattern or alter it beyond recognition, depending on the type of marble, and colors can be affected quite a bit to. Fractures pretty much rule out machine polishing, since the marble may well explode during the process or big chunks of glass might come off, depending on the nature of the fracture.

The bottom line is that the results of polishing depend a whole lot on what you start with and choosing marbles with the best potential for a good outcome is probably more important than the polishing process itself.

 

[disco005]

These are great polished/not polished pictures! It's always good to know what you're buying or looking at, I will bookmark this page  

I bought these two as polished so I could have a reference on hand, one Limeade and one Green and Yellow Popeye. My favorite thing about these two is that the seller was up front about them being polished. What's interesting to me is that you can see where the wispy white is supposed to end and it just doesn't, the wispy ends look scraggly or sometimes end in a flat line which is not normal either like in this first photo of the Popeye. In the Limeade the end of the cork looks feathered and doesn't end along a seam. It's hard to describe and show in a photo, it's probably easier to see in hand.

Thank you for posting those handmades!

[Parmcat]

It's funny this topic was just posted, because I've been thinking about this.  I saw some videos with the guy with the polishing machine, and that's crazy.

Just wondering what others have done to polish/refurbish marbles?

I have a Dremel tool with all sorts of soft buffing tips and buffing compound.  I may find a very damaged marble, and see what that can do

 

Thanks