Faceting a 1.3 carat Yogo sapphire (& breaking gem cutting rules)

Welcome to my channel and welcome to my gem cutting studio. Today I'm going to be faceting this Montana Sapphire. It's my first one from the Yoko Mine and I'm very excited. Let me show you a bit closer up. This piece is a gorgeous color. I don't think I've cut anything quite like it before but it's also extraordinarily thin. I measured with calipers a few minutes ago and it was 1.9 millimeters thick. I'm pretty confident that I can cut a gem out of that. A lot of the material from the Yoko deposit in Montana is either small or thin. It's very hard to come across big pieces of this stuff and honestly I'm excited I got this piece. Let me see if I can weigh it for you guys and give you a starting weight and then show you what the process is like to facet a gem like this. 1.9 carats. Not bad at all. Hopefully I'll get about a half carat piece out of this. Maybe a bit bigger since I'll be doing a tablet cut. I won't lose nearly as much weight as normal. A normal yield for a gem is about 20% I would say. It depends on whether it's a commercial cut or a more precision cut but 20% is a pretty good average. Sometimes I get 40 to 50 out of stones like this though so we'll see. Fingers crossed. Here's the calipers reading 1.9 millimeters and that's honestly being generous because it looks thinner in some places. I'm excited to see what I can do with this. I love a challenge. Let's get started. All right let's get the faceting machine set up and ready to go. Step one is going to be putting a flat face on this stone so that I'm able to attach it to a dop and actually attach it to the machine. For a stone like this I'm going to start with my 600 grit lap. This thing is heavy. It's a solid steel disc with 600 grit diamond mesh. Attach that um wherever I decided to put the stone down and start flattening it. This may be tough to film but I'm gonna do my best and I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to yell over the machine once it starts going so yeah check it out. It's starting to get there. This probably will take a layer off my fingers if you're wondering. I'm gonna speed this up. This might take a minute because these stones are very gemmy and hard. Well I dropped it so now I have to go digging in here. This happens a lot cutting small gems thin gems but it's right there. It usually doesn't go too far. All right back to shaping it up. All right here she is. We got a nice flat face to dop on. Um I shaped up a tiny bit. I'm gonna try to stick as close to the natural shape as I can and yeah it didn't take too much off of the depth thankfully. So next up is attaching it to a dop. My dop station is so ugly right now. YouTube is gonna hold me accountable because I have to clean it. Be right back. It was never filthy at all so let's get to doping. These are brass dops. These ones are for flat stones and they're keyed at the bottom so they'll fit in the machine. Um you can get a dop for a stone like this. You want to go around 50% of the size. So I might like that one or I might like one smaller just to give myself some wiggle room. Yeah I like that. That looks nice. Next I get out my acetone and a little paper towel and I clean off both components. This is important because it gets the oils uh from your fingers off of both pieces so that the wax will stick to it better and you won't risk the stone popping off while fastening. I like to do one wipe to make sure it's clean and then one more dip and just let it dry without getting anything else on it. We actually start doping. I got the little wax nub out of here. It was a lot bigger about a year and a half ago. I put the dop into the dop jig and then I cover that top part with wax. I'll get right back to you. Now that I got the wax on there the next step is to use this ratty little sticky dop to attach my stone to here. Um I'm going to time lapse this whole process because it can be painful. Sometimes it's five minutes sometimes it's 30. Um hopefully this time it'll be five but I'll get back to you as soon as we're ready to actually stick that dop in the machine. So I got it doped and I'm pretty happy with this for now. You can see the dop inside and it's pretty evenly spaced between all the sides. I'll have to go line it up on the machine and see what I think but I like that so far. Before I start fastening I actually have to pick a pattern and I've gotten a lot of questions about these binders with all my different patterns in them. Um it's not a book or anything I bought online. I got all these patterns from anyfacetdiagrams.org. I'm not sure if it's still up and running. I know there were some issues with it but I found them edited them into sapphire refractive index and then printed them all out and organized them and I have three binders by now because I have changed my fastening style I guess and needed new patterns but this is what I'm thinking for my current stone. One of these two actually. I might get both of them out just to consider but this one always turns out gorgeous. It's so simple but so brilliant. Whatever it is we'll pretty much only be able to see the crown facets since it's going to be a thin tablet cut. We'll let you know what I decide. In the meantime I'm going to cut the girdle with the same 600 grit lap that I was using to pre-shape and I'll show you when that's done. The girdle is cut and that is looking beautiful. I honestly I adopt it very well because it's measuring 8.6 millimeters from one point to the other side right now so I am very encouraged with what my yield is going to be. I decided to do a mix of the two patterns that I was between. I used the side angles for this first pattern and then decided to cut the corners too because I was missing some material there and I thought that this would let me keep the final piece a bit bigger. The shape is super cool too. So next up I'm going to keep using my 600 diamond mesh wheel and I'm going to cut the bottom facets. I'll cut those I think at 40 degrees. That should give us the right refractive index for the sapphire. I'll show you when that's done. I just finished cutting the pavilion facets and it looks beautiful. They're small but I'm impressed I was able to get anything on there with how thin this stone is. I have just enough left to finish it up it looks like. Since I got the rough faceting done I'm going to remove the 600 grit wheel and switch over to this. My bat lap with 3000 grit diamond paste embedded into it. This will pre-polish the stone and then all I have to do afterwards is polish. My pre-polish and polishing supplies are pretty simple. I've got two of these grit chapsticks. This one is polished at 60,000 and then this one is pre-polished which is 3000 and that's what I'm going to start with. I have this oil that I use to help blend the grit into the lap and then I have this little guy which is actually a synthetic ruby and that's what I use to help embed the grit in there. I'm going to start by pre-polishing the girdle or sides of the stone and I'll show you a little bit about how I get into that process. Take my 3000 grit chapstick. I get a strip of paper towel and some of this oil and blend it into one so I'm going to go ahead and do 12 swipes on the rest. This half of the gem is now pre-polished. It's shining up nicely and the next step is to polish it with my 60,000 grit bamboo paste. Well, I got the pavilion polished and now I'm trying to decide how I want to finish this piece. I usually, you know, grind down all of the little bumps on the back and make a flat polished table but since this piece is so thin I kind of want to leave the natural texture. I've wanted to try that out for a while and see how it looked and I can always go back and add a table I guess. Well, I'm going to think on it for a second and I'll let you know when I make a decision but it's looking beautiful already. I think I'm going to leave the natural texture side on this stone. I think it's so cool. I think that a couple facets I got on the pavilion will kind of frame the texture. I think it'll almost make it look like a like painting of ripples or a river or something and I can always go back and add a table if I hate it but I can't go back and put that back on so I'm gonna see how it turns out. I'm too curious. The stone is too perfect. Let's give it a shot. The only thing that worries me a little bit about doing this is that you're supposed to dop on a flat surface so that the contact is the best and the stone doesn't fall off while dopping or anything. I don't know. I might just try to use a bunch of wax and like really stick it on there and hope for the best. I think I just have to try this out though. Yeah I'll give it a go. Well the stone is transferred to second dot and it's time to cut the crown facets or the top of the stone. I've got literally just enough room to stick these on and I am super excited to see how it turns out. So I'm going to follow the same step progression I did with cutting the pavilion which is going to be 600 grit diamond mesh lap, 3,000 grit bat lap, 60,000 grit polish, and then I am going to add a polished table to the top of the stone. So I won't quite film as much of this part but I'll update you throughout. I will actually demonstrate how I realign the stone first because this is a pretty crucial part of the process if you want the facets on the top and the bottom to actually match up. So I put on a blank lap. It's just a base lap. There's no grit or anything on it. I take a sticky note and level out one of the facets on this gem with the girdle and then I'm going to take this sharpie and color on that facet and then wipe it off on this sticky note until I get a completely clear facet and that means it's perfectly realigned. It's kind of hard to see but I got it. One of the facets wiped off perfectly and it's time to start cutting the crown. This is after cutting the crown with 600. This is after pre-polishing with 3,000 grit. I added my second tier of crown facets here and now all that's left is to polish. This is after the crown facets have been polished with 60,000 grit and now I'm gonna get those last few little divots out, polish the table and take it off. The table is cut and polished and this stone is ready to be removed. All that's left is to wait for the acetone to soak that wax off and you can see how this guy looks. So remember when I said the starting weight of this stone was 1.9 carats and I was hoping for about a half carat? I'm gonna stick with 1.3 because that's what it said first but that is crazy. That is a 68% yield. This is how it turned out. That is even cooler than I thought that idea would be. It's still pretty much just as thick as when it started. Oh, it even looks cool from that side. I could wear that either way. It looks like a mountain range from this side and then it looks exactly like I hoped, like water in a plane. Look at that. Beautiful. Does it look like a dragon scale? Am I right or does it look like something else? Leave a comment and let me know what you think this looks like. This piece was 1.9 millimeters thick to start, if you remember. So I want to measure it one more time and see where it ended at. 1.7 millimeters. That's wild. I don't think I could have done a better job with this stone. I'll take a few clips of this in the sun hopefully in a day or two but I'm so excited. I don't know what I'll do with it but I'm thrilled. It's a very cool first yoga sapphire. Let me know what you think.