Vintage Le Bourget 'Ezy Lap' lapidary stone lapping machine, $10.

The term lapidary is defined as 'the art of cutting, shaping, polishing and creating jewelry from stones.' As you may imagine, anything having to do with the craft of working with stones and rocks will have plenty of potential eBay buyers looking for it on eBay.

I found this machine on the floor at one of those estate sales where the heirs had swooped in and picked the place clean before the 'official' estate sale began, meaning that there was little there worth a darn right from the start. The old guy was apparently really into lapidary work, because there were still lots of odds and ends related to his hobby all over the work room. Unfortunately, there wasn't really anything worth any money left there, besides this Ezy Lap.

The Ezy Lap lapping machine is known as a 'vibratory flat lap,' and is designed to polish the edges of stones by moving the round flat platter around in a tight circle, much like one of those little vibrating sanders popular with carpenters. An abrasive is placed in the platter and as the platter moves around, it polishes the exposed stone surface. The rock's mass effectively prevents it from moving along with the platter, so you get a constant polishing action. As you can imagine, this machine works best with rocks that already have relatively flat surfaces, like those left by saw cuts. An example of where this lap would be handy is in preparing 'geodes,' which are those beautiful rocks you're sure to have seen around. Geodes look like regular old rocks on the outside, but are hollow and reveal beautiful crystalline structures when they're cut in half. A saw is used to cut the geode in half, and a flat lap polishes the saw-cut surfaces to a high gloss, enhancing the geode's beauty.

As you can see, this is a specialty machine of interest to a relatively small segment of the lapidary market. But within this small segment, there's a very strong interest in this type of machine.

This Le Bourget Ezy Lap lapidary machine sold on eBay for $57.