Tumbling barrel beads cracking

[Aszerlip]

Does anyone have the problem of barrel beads cracking on the ends after tumbling them? This started fairly recently - I have been tumbling almost all of my beads for some time and tend to put 60 or 70 beads of all shapes and sizes in the tumbler at the same time (which might be my problem - too many beads at once?)P

[Eileen]

And these are annealed beads? How thick are they? Maybe if they are thick, they need longer anneal time?

[artwhim]

When you say tumbling, do you mean to etch the beads? If so, I’ve had a few beads crack, then I discovered it was because I had some small seed beads in the mix to aid in the tumbling. Apparently on occasion a seed bead would get caught in the hole and cause the bead to crack, similar to how we intentionally force a bead to crack in half.