Hello again...?, Been hounding small streams near hillsides in central-southern Indiana for the last year or so. Found a few pieces of diamond and hope to find more larger pieces soon. Going to be getting out there soon before it gets cold. I got some neoprene wader in case I'm a little late, or early, too. LOL I finally broke down and got a thermal tester last year and a lot of pieces turned out positive on the low setting of 1-2 on the diamond selector II cheapo tester. I've seen a lot of videos online of people testing with them set really high on large pieces, so it makes me think they're just hyping what they have to be something it is not. Most my pieces are really glassy with inclusions and small, some are larger, but clarity isn't all that great in most. Brown, to yellow, to clear. Finding them in my 'spot' along with green chromium kimberlite pieces. Most the crystal pieces are on the industrial side, but they are diamonds... Well at least I believe they are. All signs point to it other than spectrometry. I plan to invest in lapidary soon too to begin learning to craft my own jewels. I will get a couple pics up here to show in a while. But, I'm glad to be back on here!
A hardness test would be a very quick and efficient way to test them. Try a piece of corundum, or topaz in a pinch. You're quite unlikely to have accidentally come across something that's harder than 7 but not diamond.
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
I prefer a thermal tester. Diamonds can cleave easily if you put too much pressure in the wrong direction, but more importantly for me is time and reliability.....a reliable thermal will get accurate results immediately. Slam dunk. One certainly does not have to worry about stumbling on an alluvial deposit of moissanite.
Well, with an industrial-grade diamond it's less likely to be as catastrophic as with a clean crystal. Generally my thinking was that it's much more likely that he has a chunk of topaz or corundum lying around than a thermal tester, and it would be a very quick and reliable way to tell if he should investigate further.
Those would be good for a larger sample; for testing a small grain I'd rub the grain against the topaz crystal rather than trying to scratch the grain. But of course if he has the time and to buy a set of hardness points he should do a thermal tester instead.
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