Has anyone used a tumbler to smooth bamboo pieces?

[Mark Meckes]

I have a large collection of bamboo offcuts and cut-outs from my bamboo tinkerings that I've been accumulating for some time, and many of them are interesting shapes that I woulda never dreamed of making.
The biggest task is smoothing the edges, which I do by hand and with a 1" belt-sander, but with so many pieces, many just sit around in boxes.
So I've wondered many a time if the rock tumblers that are widely available would work on bamboo.

Curious too if anyone has made their own tumbler, ie from metal drums?

In theory, one could make a long tumbler, and fill it with bamboo poles and course sand or whatever, to remove the waxy surface skin, (cutin) off of the bamboo so that stain would absorb or paint could adhere better.
In practice, there's a few challanges involved to get a heavy tumbler rotating at the optimum speed, and not to be so noisey that it drives your neighbors insane!
Mark

[TribalWind]

Hi mark, hey that's a cool idea.

ya know, my friend rachel is a blacksmith/artist and she uses a big ole cement mixer with some sand and iron shavings (from the shop) to remove rust on old stock and also to Polish finished pieces. she just tosses the piece in there and lets it run slowly overnight, seems to work great.

i'm thinking for larger pieces or LOTS of pieces of bamboo, this might be worth checking out? maybe could find cheap old used/fixable ones.
another idea would be similar to my 55 gal steel drum "composter" set it up with a crank, or attach a motor to it with a belt somehow, cut a little door in the side or make the top removable, put in some fine grit sand, there ya have it.

i just might have to try this myself~! wonder if using courser grit sand or longer time would work for removing the whole outer "skin", i imagine it'd have to be in there for days possibly, but would sure beat hand scraping!

[Mark Meckes]

There's a type of metal lath used to put on walls that are to have stucco or plaster applied. The laths are sheets of sheet metal that have been machine stamped into a design of small about 1/2" (1cm) diamond shaped patterns.
The edges on the patterns are quite sharp, leading to the thought of the tumbler walls made with a similar type of material for initial smoothing of edges.

Generally tumblers rely on adding pellets, grit or some kind of medium to the items in the tumbler to de-burr, smooth and polish them.

The above theory is that the the walls of a cage type tumbler could provide the abrasive material...

Mark