How to facet tiny gems.

[Music] the day their viewers are welcome to my channel called vintage time my name is cliff and I'm a gem cutter from southern Australia for all my regular subscribers and viewers I'm certainly glad that you can join me once again for another episode of gem cutting and for anyone who is new to my channel and this is your very first episode but won't show you every little detail of how to cut a gem but hopefully this video will inspire you to want to learn how to cut gems so there are plenty of videos out there and plenty of books that you can read about how to cut gemstones and often these are larger gems but how do you cut a tiny teeny weeny small gem so for many fasteners gem cutters out there who have been fascinating maybe for quite a while or you're quite new to the Hobby hopefully this video will show you and answer some of those questions on how to cut a tiny gem so this little purple rhodolite garnet was cherry picked out of a 230 gram bulb pack of garnets already pre tumbled which was purchased on eBay from a Chinese dealer so the size of these garnets in the description read as one to ten millimeters it costs me sixteen dollars Australian because I had a bit of an ebay discount and that also included postage out of a total package I've managed to get 15 carats of quality garnets that would cuttable and a weight about 3 grams approximately so with the rest of the garnets I couldn't use because they were too small or couldn't be faceted I sold back for Half Price eight dollars to a gentleman in my gem club who also sells gems and I also got a couple other gems to facet from him so it wasn't too bad a deal so let's get started now normally I use a transfer jig and two-part epoxy however in this case I'll be using superglue I feel that super glue is a lot better when faceting smaller gems like this the gem just holds better onto the table stick so use a high quality superglue place a drop with into Konev adopt now I use star bond superglue but you could use any high quality superglue that you come across now once it loses into top stick I've got the gem orientated on a very flat surface and there is a small crack in one corner so I'm gonna try to avoid that and just plant the top stick away from that crack now I'm going to use an accelerator from Star bond and literally within seconds this glue is already starting to dry on the gem and I highly recommend this product because it is a wonderful product if anything try to get an accelerator so now the gem is load onto the top stick so I'll drop in a link for the glue and the accelerator in the description area and from my experience with super glue the less you mess around with it the better off you'll be so here's a close up after the gem has been glued onto the top stick and incidentally I use a little bit more glue on the base of the gem and of course I use accelerant and you also notice that there is a high point on the gem where it bulges out and you'll notice a little crack in that high point now that will be ground off later on so the type of design I'll be fastening today is called the standard round brilliant and this is what it looks like [Music] so let's get started now I'm going to talk about the free golden rules that I apply to when I'm cutting small gems and that is torque friction and pressure so the first thing I'm going to do is work out the high points of the gem and which indexes those high points are on so to do this I've got the protractor set at 90 degrees and I'm not even running the motor I'm gently grinding on a free thousand grit disc so I'm going to start off by faceting the girdle outline there are several reasons why a faceted girdle outline on very tiny gems are better than a continuous rounded girdle so the first reason is on faceting individual facets as I move through each index so this means there is no gripping going on whatsoever if I were to round out this gem first usually you have high points on the gem and you'll notice when you're rounding out a gym you get sections where the gem wants to grip onto the disc and then you'll move on to the flat point and then you'll rotate and or grip once again and that could likely tear the gem off the dot particularly with a small gem the second reason is particularly on small gems by doing a round of girdle first and then faceting it means that I've got to spend a lot more time so I've got two steps in this process and the less time I spend messing around on the girdle outline particularly on a small gem the better off you'll be you will find quite often that the gem will usually tear off while cutting a girdle and the third reason is is that a faceted girdle always looks a lot classier than a continuous girdle yeah I've cut continuous girdles before and they never look near as good as a faceted girdle and you look at any tiny gem whether they're two millimeters three millimeters or four millimeters the faceted girdle looks so much better so as I'm cutting the girdle outline the first thing I'm going to mention is how much torque do you need from your motor to cut a small jam and the answer is not a lot in point of fact you could literally cut a gem without the motor running and just rubbing the gem on the surface of the disc so here you can see I've got the faceted outline of the gem and I used the lowest amount of power that I have from my motor to do this and also I use the least amount of friction by using a 3000 Prix polish disc I'd like to say that there is a misconception out there with a lot of people who facet that they think if they're cutting a very hard gem that is small like a sapphire and it has a hardness of 9 on the Mohs scale then you need to use a coarse grit disc to cut that facet because of the hardness and that is far from the truth what will happen if you're cutting a small gem of 3 or 4 millimeters that happens to be a sapphire if you're using a coarse grit disc you will tear it off within a heartbeat because of the size and nature of the grit on that disc it'll just hit that little stone so hard and it will just fly off so it goes back to the second golden rule once again friction because that grit was too coarse it created way too much friction and detaches a gem so the third golden rule when you're cutting very tiny gemstones is pressure how much hand pressure do you use when you're faceting such tiny little gems and the answer is virtually none at all although I'm holding the quill but I'm using no hand pressure in point of fact I'm using the downward force of gravity from the weight of my quill and my quill is reasonably heavy so I do need to move the gem side-to-side because you do get low and high points on the disc so you still want an even surface on the facet so you still need to be able to swipe so I decide and as you can see here the pavilion facets have been cut so to polish small gems I'm using the same method as you would polish in a larger gem using sewing machine oil and 50 thousand grit diamond compound don't go too heavy with a sewing machine oil we just need what half a drop one drop because you don't want to smear too much grease onto the lap [Music] so all the girdle facets are now polished and once again do not use too much pressure allowable weight of the quill to do the work for you so here's an interesting segment within the video how much power do you need from that motor to cut those tiny little facets but are only about maybe 1/4 the size of a match head or even less so we go back to the first golden rule torque we do not need any power from that motor to cut those tiny little facets so I'm going to cut the second tier of pavilion facets just without the disk spinning using plenty of water on a 3,000 grit diamond-plated lab so this technique will apply more to the small facets but mainly to of a pavilion because literally this gem is just hanging on by Fred with that Lou so here you can see that I've cut the second tier of pavilion facets down to depth [Music] so I'm on to the next step of polishing for a remainder of the pavilion facets and once again not using hardly any pressure just using the downward weight of the quill the polish bows facets so in these scenes you'll see the stages of with pavilion has been polished so we're getting closer to completing the pavilion with for polish and then we facet the crown and you're probably thinking to yourself well I've been fascinating for a long time while I like gemstones and what is the whole point of fastening small gems because they're too tiny well the reality is also that there are so many gems out there that you won't have any other option but to facet them in a small size for example here is a range of gems but I usually only match head size when you buy them so here's a selection of small gems that will cost the king's ransom to buy if you're a gem cutter but most of these gems are less than the size of a match head and if you want to cut a variety of different gems in your life there will come a time when you have no option but to learn how to facet such small gems so at this point we do a transfer of the top stick and normally we use heat to remove the original top stick but I pulled it off gently by hand so it goes to show you that if you can detach a jam gently by hand that the glue is just barely holding it onto the top stick and that's why particularly when faceting the pavilion you need to go gently and slow and take time and take care so we're faceting the crown now as you can see and it's a whole different ballgame because of attachment now on the top stick is a lot more secure but you still need to go slow and easy but you can use a bit more pressure from now on so I've just cut the first set of crown facets now I've cut the second set of crown facets and incidentally I use superglue once again and I allowed the glue to set for about an hour and I'm using the 3000 grit disc from now on to cut all the other facets so even though you have a better attachment with the gem on the DAF stick and greater ahijon from the glue you still want to be running your motor at a lower speed using less torque because potentially the gem would still come off if you're a little bit heavy-handed and rough in the following scenes you'll see that of Cup the remainder of the crown facets and then you'll see all the scenes of the polished facets so we're getting closer to the end of another video and hopefully those people who are learning how the facet have learned something and got a little bit more information out of this video if you're not a gem cutter hopefully it's inspired you to want to facet gems and of course this method of cutting small gems is my way of doing it and I'm sure there are other little techniques that other people would use also as a reminder before I finish up to remove for completed gem from the top stick you will need to soak for gem top stick and all in acetone overnight I wouldn't recommend that you heat the gem off because trying to heat a gem that's been glued on with superglue can be quite difficult you don't want to stress the gym by heat and cracking it so in closing I would like to thank all my regular subscribers and viewers and if you're new to my channel and you've made it this far into the video we have what we call the final reveal where you see the gym come off the top stick and we'll be sitting on a rotator and you'll get to see it in all its glory so until next time everybody stay tuned for the next video and take care and it's bye for now [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Vintage Time

Views: 184,775

Keywords: gems, facet, faceting, garnet, gemstones, how to cut gemstones, gem cutting

Id: kWo3rpZNCMw

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2020