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Pumice Stone for Drill: Rebuilt to Hold More Water — Here’s the Test
What makes a TurboStone pumice stone for a drill different from a conventional pumice block? We tested dry weight and water retention using the same 5-second submersion and 5-second drip protocol.
Sam Miller — Founder & Inventor, TurboStone.
8/31/20264 min read
A pumice stone for a drill has a different job than a lightweight block of conventional pumice used by hand.
That sounds obvious, but it gets to the reason I created TurboStone in the first place.
Traditional pumice is naturally full of voids. That makes it lightweight and useful for plenty of hand-cleaning applications, but simply sticking a conventional pumice block on a drill doesn’t suddenly turn it into a material engineered for powered use.
TurboStone takes a different approach.
Instead of shaping a naturally formed chunk of pumice and calling it done, I rebuild selected pumice particle sizes into a denser, interconnected porous abrasive body. That reconstructed material is formed around a reinforcement system designed for rotation, and its wear behavior can be adjusted through the TurboStone StoneLife system.
But rather than just explaining that TurboStone is different, I wanted to measure something you can actually see.
So I grabbed a scale, a stopwatch, a conventional pumice grill block and a reconstructed TurboStone SL3 pumice block and ran a simple comparison.
First: approximately the same external size
The two blocks were selected because they occupy approximately the same external space.
I lined them up directly and also used the same mold cavity as a simple physical size comparison. This was not intended to establish that the blocks have perfectly identical dimensions. It was a practical comparison between two pumice bodies of roughly the same external size.
That matters because their dry weights were nowhere near the same.
Why does dry weight matter?
Dry weight by itself does not tell us that something will clean 3.909 times better or last 3.909 times longer.
Those would be different claims requiring different tests.
What the weight comparison does demonstrate is that these are materially different pumice structures.
The lightweight conventional block contains a great deal of naturally occurring pore space. TurboStone instead reconstructs selected pumice grain sizes into a considerably denser porous body specifically intended for wet powered use.
In plain English: approximately the same amount of external space contains substantially more pumice-based material.
And TurboStone adds another variable that a conventional block doesn’t provide: StoneLife.
StoneLife changes how readily the reconstructed abrasive body wears and renews its working surface. A user can choose a faster-renewing stone that produces more working paste or move toward firmer formulations intended to preserve their shape and working life longer.
Harder is not automatically better. Different buildup and different jobs can benefit from different wear behavior.
That tunability is part of what makes a reconstructed pumice stone for a drill possible in the first place.
Then I tested water retention
Pumice is intended to be used wet on appropriate surfaces, so the next question was simple:
How much water would each material retain after exactly the same short exposure to water?
I used the same protocol for both blocks:
5-second submersion + 5-second gravity drip
No blotting.
Each block was weighed dry, submerged for five seconds, removed from the water, allowed to drip freely for another five seconds, and then immediately weighed again.
The conventional pumice block went from:
2.619 oz dry
to
2.850 oz wet
Water retained after the test:
0.231 oz
Then I repeated the same process with the TurboStone SL3 reconstructed pumice material.
It went from:
10.237 oz dry
to
14.161 oz wet
Water retained after the test:
3.924 oz
The result: 17× as much retained water
Using the measured weight gain from each block:
TurboStone SL3 retained 3.924 oz of water.
The conventional pumice block retained 0.231 oz.
Under this specific 5-second submersion + 5-second drip test, the TurboStone SL3 material retained:
17× as much water
That works out to approximately 1,599% more retained water than the conventional block in this test.
That does not mean TurboStone cleans 17 times better.
It does not mean every TurboStone formulation, every conventional pumice block, or every cleaning situation will produce this exact ratio.
What this test demonstrates is narrower—and I think more useful:
The reconstructed TurboStone SL3 body carried a substantially larger reservoir of water after the same short submersion and drip period.
That matters because TurboStone is designed around powered wet use. Its interconnected porous structure can store water within the body while the stone is being used, rather than depending only on water sitting on the outside surface at one particular moment.
Why rebuild pumice at all?
This experiment gets at the bigger question behind TurboStone.
If all I wanted was pumice spinning on a drill, putting a shaft into an ordinary lightweight pumice block would be a much easier product to make.
But I wanted control over more than shape.
I wanted to control the particle structure.
I wanted substantially more material inside a useful working shape.
I wanted a porous body capable of carrying significant water.
I wanted internal reinforcement intended for rotation.
And I wanted the wear rate to be selectable instead of leaving everything up to, as I occasionally put it, whatever the pumice gods feel like giving you that day.
That became TurboStone and the StoneLife system.
What StoneLife changes
TurboStone is currently available in five StoneLife behaviors ranging from faster renewal and more paste production through increasingly firm, slower-wearing formulations.
The SL3 material used in this comparison sits in the middle of that range.
That means this test isn't even demonstrating “the hardest TurboStone.” It is demonstrating the water behavior of the middle StoneLife formulation used in a reconstructed block.
StoneLife is not a quality ranking where a higher number automatically means a better product. It is a way of choosing how the abrasive body behaves as you use it.
For ordinary work, a balanced or firm formulation may be ideal. For sustained mineral or pool-scale work, a user may prefer greater shape retention.
Choose your shape. Choose your StoneLife.
