Could $10,000 Be Hiding Inside This Black Opal?

Could this be the one that breaks us? We got a great cut for you. We're cutting this beautiful Australian Lightning Ridge opal and what's cool about this opal is it has a bunch of different patterns on it and color spots so it could become a pretty unique opal when we're finished and we do have a giveaway later on in the video so you'll have a chance to win your very own opal. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go around the outside of the opal and just try to make a get a clearer picture of what we're working with. You can see the beautiful greens here and the blues. We're going to just even out this side a little bit and see that kind of you see the separation in color spots. Hopefully we can capture all that and get it like a nice little mix of different patterns and colors. We do have the sand over here, so I'm going to try to grind this away, see how deep the sand goes. Then we do have this spot on this side. Hopefully this opal is not riddled with sand, but I don't think so. When I look through the gem torch, it seems pretty clean. Pick at it a little bit here. See, that's not too bad on this side. I'm just going to grind this down until that sand's gone. And then basically, we're just trying to capture these different colored pattern spots. And mix them together and get a unique stone. Let's see how far this sand goes. Fairly deep. I think I'm going to grind down this side. We'll see exactly how deep it goes. I am on the 600 steel wheel. It's a worn down 600. I like using the worn down 600 because you can be aggressive with it by giving it more pressure. Or you can be less aggressive and not put as much pressure on it. Whereas the soft 600. You can press as hard as you want. It'll take off a little bit more by being more aggressive on a soft wheel, but not like a steel wheel. See, we just broke into another little color patch, a nice green. So that'll look pretty cool if we can keep all this in one stone. I do not want to slice this stone today. I want to make one large stone. It may be a free form. I'm not sure what we're going to do yet. So let's just keep going down on the face here. And we'll clean it up, and that'll give us a real good idea of what we can expect to get from this opal. We've still got this sand issue. I'm going to just kind of roll it up a little bit. Unfortunately, that's where our nice green was showing. So if that goes too deep, we may lose that. And it's almost out, a tiny bit more, but that green goes down quite a bit. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to make sure that this stone is completely clean. We'll get all the sand bits off. And then we'll decide what shape we're going to make the stone. Look at the blues in that, though. It does have some excellent color. It looks like it's going to end up being a dark crystal. But we'll see. We don't run into anything else, any more problems. Work these little sand spots off. Oh, look at the green there. See how it's all mixed up? Actually, I think I may make this into a double. We'll see if we can get a double-sided stone. So I'll start working it like in the... Thought of getting a double-sided stone. Now one of our biggest obstacles is hoping that that sand doesn't go all the way through. And also trying to work out that gray potch. But I do believe we can get a double-sided stone. We may lose that green, I'm not sure. Let's just keep working the face down. So basically now we're just rubbing it into a pre-shape. And then we'll get it onto a dopping stick. And, uh, that's when we finish our work and, uh, turn it into a gem. Um, we're going to get all the sand out of it. We'll leave a, there may be a little bit of sand left in it and we'll get that out on the next wheel once we get it onto the dopping stick. And I do want to give a shout out to a young lady. Her name is Lily and she's a big fan of the channel and she's also an opal enthusiast. Now we just got to figure out what shape we're going to do here. And I think I'm just gonna freeform it up. I don't want to just do a long oval or a teardrop, so we'll do something unique. Now we'll start working the second face, see what this looks like. I think we can get, we've got plenty of stone, so we can hopefully get through that gray potch. If not, I'll uh... Maybe we won't, maybe I'll have to come in. If you look in the left hand corner of the screen you'll see the beautiful piece of opal rough that we are giving away in this video and all you need to do to be entered into winning that beautiful piece of rough is to leave a comment in the comments section of this video saying what shape would you have made this opal at this point in the cut? Would you have made it an oval, a heart? A teardrop? Also just give the video a hype and a like and make sure you're subscribed to the channel and you will be entered into winning that beautiful opal that will be given away in our next live. All you need to do is come to the live. You can watch the rerun and it's drawn through random comment picker to see if you win that beautiful opal. Good luck everyone. We are coming to the last stages of getting this opal rubbed up and I'm still deciding on the shape. Let's see if we can roll some of the sand out of the edges. What shape? Almost look like we could get a heart out of it. We'll just keep working it down a little bit more. And this is basically the shape I decided on. I just got to work a little bit more. I'm not sure what I want the main face to be. I think it may be this side. So maybe I'll roll a little dome on here. And then we'll start with this side on the dopping stick. It'll take it off the dopping stick. Flip it over. And finish the other side. So we will get a double sided stone. We are almost finished. All we got to do is just button it up a little bit here. We got most of the sand off of it. That wasn't too bad of a cut. We had a nice clean area in there. It should polish up nice. And it looks like we're going to get a nice dark crystal. Beautiful stone. It should pop a little bit more when we polish it up. And let's get her on a stick. One of the most important things about when you're purchasing your dopping wax, make sure you get it at the 150 degree Fahrenheit melting point. Don't go higher than that because if you do and that wax drops on you, you're going to get some serious burns. And you never know when those higher degrees could actually affect the opal. So I would go with the 150 degree green dopping wax. Let's get her polished up. We're using cerium oxide on a felt polishing pad. We're going to do this first side. Then we're going to flip the stone and we'll do the second side. Flip her around. We'll polish the other side here and we'll look at the completed opal. And here's the completed opal. It weighs in at 6.27 carats. Took on a great polish. We'll take a look at the other side too. And here's the other side of the double-sided stone. So overall, the opal, I think, came out pretty nice. It's got a great polish, and it's got some amazing green blues in it. And a little bit, it's just sparks of yellow and orange. And a little side note, we are working on live sales through our website. I have the whole dashboard all set up. It's going to be user-friendly. You'll just come to the website, sign in, and you'll be able to join live sales. Our initial live sale, we're going to have minerals, amethyst, citrine, facet rough, turquoise, opals, Australian opals. We have a ton of high-quality stuff for you guys. Click on the QR code. It'll take you to our website. Sign up for the newsletter. You'll get a notification of the date of our first live sales. There'll be a ton of giveaways and great deals to be had. You can check out the auctions that we have running now. We also are, for two weeks, having special deals that will pop up every day. There's probably a couple up there right now. I'll show... Thanks for coming to watch. Make sure you enter in for the giveaway. And like always, we are Global Prospecting. Keep chasing color.