How to cut gemstones: 5 Polishing Pavilion & Transferring

Okay, so next is polishing this down and for that we're going to use these cerium cerium oxide spectra labs that come from 3m available at your lapidary supply. For that you need a master lap. This was an old 1200 lap or you can use a master lap that's for sale. So these have no sticky on them and a dull side is the side you're going to be polishing on. So to start with you have to add water. That's what's going to hold this to the scrape it to get anything pouring off it ultra lap on or spectra lap. Put your nut on and make sure it's flat. So now that I'm polishing I can get rid of the visor because it's not enough power to really look at the polish. I shut the water way down just so it's dripping sporadically. Now this is not how 3m tells you to use these labs but I found it to be effective when I add cerium oxide to the lap. This extends the life of the lap and increases how quickly it polishes but you can't have much water going on it because it's just washing. So I'm going to start back where we finished up with the main facets at the culet at 43 degrees. Now the height of this lap compared to what I had on there before will be different so we want to raise it and then lower it to the lap close and check the knee back close to zero exactly where we need to be but once you've touched it down you take a look and try and see where it's polishing. At 43 degrees and so far I can't see where it's polishing. Now this is a real critical point trying to decide what's polished and what's not. It's very difficult to see and it takes many novices some time to find the point between the light and your eye that you can actually see the surface. Notice the twilight zone it's that point between light and dark where you can see things that you normally wouldn't see and if you turn it you kind of see it's bright white and then it goes dark and then somewhere in between there is where you can actually see what's polished and what's not. Many cutters have a very difficult time telling that something is finally polished. What you're looking for are your dots or scratch lines that run across the facet and those are the things you've got to get rid of. So I can see that I'm cutting towards the girdle and to the left slightly. So two things I've got to do I'm cutting towards the girdle so I need to raise the mast so it will go down further and cut further towards the culet because I'm cutting to the left side now I've got to use the cheater and this is the cheater and I'm gonna cheat towards the right just a little bit doesn't take much usually ever so slightly too far it's very fine adjustments usually quite a few scratches and you may find that you get scratches and you can't get rid of them so sometimes it's a problem with the ultra lap and you have to move to a different you're getting scratches you know to move away from that area in quartz sometimes you'll see what's called orange peel it's it's hard to describe until you've seen it but orange peel is and sometimes when you're cutting on this side of the lap if you turn to this side of lap carefully it will tend to get rid of the orange and sometimes scratches problem with scratches I've got one more facet to polish and once I found a good place on the lap that worked well they all went very quickly it is a again a difficulty polishing the quartz anybody that has suggestions of other things to try I would like to review those in the future this is the best polishing quartz that I've found so far so I'm going to continue finish this last show you a picture of how nice the polish is on those and from there we're going to go to the one on this design which is the pavilion brake facets and finish up this pavilion so now we're going to polish the girdle brake facets and according to the design we have to go to 44.1 so this is on 40 it's currently on three we move to four and one more line on this machine these numbers can vary on your machine how many divisions you have but this is now set for 44.1 as the design asks for and on so I have to do 93 87 81 so on my machine it's all these red marks which are six apart six index indices apart so I'm set on three currently and I should take this to zero that's what we cut it to somewhere close so I've got a slow drip on the machine so it doesn't wash away all the material started up not running too fast don't want the cerium oxide to to be thrown off and we want the we want this set to somewhere close to zero and check see where we're at so currently I'm cutting towards the girdle of the stone so what I need to do is raise the mass slightly it doesn't take much this will take me down more towards the culet and it seems to be right where I need to be so in case you're if it was polishing or or if you are not getting a polish to the right side of the stone you'll take the cheater and you'll move it right this is the indicator and you would move it towards the right and if it's polishing not polishing to the left side and you need to polish further left you move the cheater to the left all right so I'm trying to keep a good charge of cerium on on the lamb these laps can last you anywhere from oh one stone to five stones they do wear off fairly quickly it's one of the problems with the spectra laps so now I've finished the first facet I'm going to move on to the next one which on this machine it's this next red line it's six indices away other machines are set up with different markers but you'll get used to to where to set the where to set it in this case it's uh moved to number nine and when you're going if you get used to going one direction all the time either clockwise or counterclockwise it'll be easier for you to keep track of things so on the second facet as meat point faceting states you're trying to make two points meet so in this case we're not only trying to get a good polish but you're trying to get the points of the two facets you've polished up towards the hewitt you're trying to get those to match accurately and you also want them to match between the two facets at the girdle you've got a line on the girdle and these two all match up at that time so one one thing I do when I'm polishing is I tend to count I get used to trying to predict how long it's going to take to do a facet and I'll count and then the next facet I kind of know how long it's going to take and if I count to 50 and hopefully the facets polish that I know the next facet then do the same sometimes it works but it's always an aid and keeping you on the lap longer so you're not looking at the stone too much so sometimes when you're polishing a facet you have lots of problems with it and polish it so much that its length grows more than the others so now you have to decide do I go back and redo all the facets or can I accept a not perfect meet of facets it kind of depends how far you overcut and generally I'm willing to accept the facet so we're all finished polishing the pavilion of this stone now you want to take a closer look at it now I haven't polished the girdle of the stone you can decide whether you want to do that or not I don't know I don't believe it affects the brilliance of the stone and because I've had a lot of issues where I just go and finally get the stone done and start polishing the girdle and I've had more than one valuable stone actually have issues with that polishing and break a chip out of it and then you're kind of starting over again so I choose not to polish girdles so now that we've finished cutting the pavilion of the gem we're going to transfer it we can cut the crown first thing I do is make sure everything is clean this is 91% alcohol just make sure the grease is off the stone and then I usually scrape the dops just to get all the old wax off get a nice clean surface to attach to and the size dop you use you actually have two you can use for this round stone either a cone dop or a v-dop and the difference is the cone dop is going to take you a long time to soak the glue off it because after we're done we will soak the glue rather than heating it loose just for safety purposes and a cone dop is going to take several days to come off whereas the v-dop will be off overnight so I generally choose the v-dop but in this case I don't have a real good size for this stone so I'm going to use the cone dop so you put the dop in one side of the transfer block and the other stone in the stone inside the other mix equal proportions of the glue so we've got our glue mixed up and the first thing I'll do is kind of rub it on the surface of the stone just to make sure it gets a good contact partially fill the cone dop put them together and again you don't want anything hanging over the edge of the stone so one way to do that is just to put it vertical and it'll drip down the dop and help it out just so we don't have glue in the way when we're cutting so we're going to let this set for probably at least three hours preferably longer and then we'll show you how to remove the original dop so now it's time to remove the dop in preparation for cutting the crown of the stone make sure I'm going to release the right side because we've used epoxy on the stone I am going to use heat to remove it but I'm not going to heat the dop because that transfers so much heat to the stone that it can cause fractures in the stone so we heat up an exacto blade you don't have to get it red hot don't want to transfer too much heat and then we start cutting the wax away from the dop I press down on the stone occasionally I get little chips in the top I adjusted there but usually it doesn't go far enough to cause any problems heat it one more time and go around the stone not staying in one place too long and hopefully that's enough to break it free which it's it's not broken free yet try that one more time occasionally you do have to heat up the dop stick but once you remove most of this because I have no epoxy between the stone itself and the dop it's only around the edge this will usually break free this one's going to be stubborn so we do this one more shot with the blade and if that doesn't work we're going to have to heat the dop I do try to avoid this because I once lost 100 karat tanzanite heating the dop up so this epoxy method usually works but sometimes there's a gap and the epoxy seeps underneath between the dop so you do have to heat it and maybe one in 10 stones I have to do this but it doesn't take much heat because there's not much epoxy holding the stone just put a little hold the stone tightly and put a little pressure on the on the dop and it'll pop right off if you put too much pressure on this side of the dop and don't hold the stone while you're doing it you may break this side free and when you're holding the stone you can feel just how hot it's getting if it's getting too hot you can quit heating it so that's how we remove it and now we're on to cutting the crown thanks for watching if you have any questions leave them in the comment section below and I'm Steve Moriarty from Moriarty's Gem Art