First Time Heat Treating Rubies

hello everybody today we are going to be exploring the heat treatment of rubies I've got a batch of rubies here of rather low quality um I don't expect we're going to get any amazing results out of these just due to their quality but I want to see if we can get results so as you can see these are pretty bad nothing but cracks um very purplish um a lot of purples and blues and some like these are barely even recognizable as rubies one of the characteristic things you'll see out of a ruby is their shape they come in hexagons um you know that's part of a much larger Crystal that gets bigger another thing is that they fluoresce under a UV light I could turn out the light here when you put a UV light on them they fluores some of these fluoresce much better than others using a UV light is one of the fastest ways to find rubies in a whole group of rocks just for the simple fact that most rocks don't fluoresce under UV and these are really easy to pick out when you're looking amongst essentially a bunch of gravel [Music] so we have rubies of all different sizes you can see this one was part of a much bigger hexagon so what I'm going to do is pick out rubies of a few different sizes a few different qualities well they're pretty much all low quality but I'm gonna pick a few out of various sizes and then I'm going to clean them off with a with a brush as best as I can to give us the best best chances once I get them clean we'll throw them in the Kiln and see how they do so I picked out the ones I want to try to treat and they're all still a little damp for me washing them but I'm going to get a before look this is the one I have the highest hopes for you can still see it's still in its hexagon and it's a pretty long length of Crystal and it has some sort of rock around it some sort of other substrate but I'm hoping that doesn't affect it too much we'll uh we'll throw it in and try it out we're going to take a look at each one of these so we can get it before and after some of these are really small but I wanted to see how that affects things this is a really pretty one as well that milkiness that you see in this that is what's referred to as silk it can be desirable in some instances especially if you have a star ruby but the heat treatment at two powder temperatures will remove that so they I say they rubies are often heat treated first at around 1600 degrees Fahrenheit so that it can remove a lot of the dirt and impurities without removing that silk but once you start getting hotter into the like 2300 degree range that Silk goes away as well and here's what the cleaned rocks look like under UV I had to remove it off that paper towel uh the UV light and that paper towel is blowing out the camera but as you can see even this big rock this big Ruby flesh is pretty well so here we are at the Kiln I have a brand new clean crucible that we're going to use um we'll put the rocks in there no not gonna use any sort of flux or anything like that um I'll Crank It Up unfortunately the thermometer on the pyrometer on this had quit working years and years ago um I mean it moves the needle but it's essentially just to tell if it's on at this point so we're just gonna have to check it periodically and see how they're doing this is what they look like going in okay now we wait okay so this is after about an hour and a half if I had to guess it is probably sitting at around the 22 to 2300 range so it's been three hours since we put these rubies into the Kiln uh it is looking quite toasty in there um what we're gonna do is turn this off and let it sit and we're going to let it cool down nice and slow in here so they don't crack or anything further so here are the rubies after they're taken out of the Kiln they have cooled off and uh they certainly have changed colors these set at about 23 to 2400 degrees for a few hours it wasn't quite enough to fuse the cracks as you can see I don't think I'll be able to do that in that furnace or in that kiln but it did make some of these weaker as you can see this this is falling apart [Music] um most of these though got much lighter with this one and it did clean them up it it took a lot of the uh impurities off the surface this one kept a nice color one thing to note after sitting at that temperature they fluoresce significantly more I'm not sure how well this camera's picking it up but they are much much brighter the next thing I'd like to try is either getting a furnace that can get hot enough to fuse these cracks or get some leaded glass and put these in the cruise pop these back in The Crucible and see if we can get rid of these cracks like this thing is just Fallen apart now I mean it structurally this thing is about done I bet you I can break it oh maybe not oh yeah so that's something to keep an eye out if you take it up to those temperatures and you're not doing a glass fill this thing could just fall right apart on you and it is all ruby if you trying to the light on it it all fluoresces so now we know what happens whenever you heat treat rubies at about 23 to 2400 degrees for a few hours it certainly does treat the color and does remove a lot of impurities it does make them weaker however and the colors get much lighter if you're relying on those blues and purples to to deepen them up

Channel: Puddin

Views: 73,925

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Id: HmcDTRsQDAI

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023