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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2017 7:40 pm 
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Sidebar: I have never known Gene at Precision Gem to give unsound advice. Just sayin'.


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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 9:07 am 
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CoreyB wrote:
Precision Gem wrote:
I think buying cheap included rough is a waste of money. To start cutting and learn the mechanics of it, you are actually better off cutting lab created sapphire or spinel.


I do have some synthetic material, but I also want to learn how to work around things like flaws and inclusions. Very few of the natural stones I have are of such poor quality that I can't make a good product from it. There are a couple, of course, that are unsalvageable, but considering what I've spent, it's surprisingly little. There are actually quite a few stones that I'm incredibly excited about. With patience and a discerning eye, it's amazing what one can get via auction.


I have been doing this for quite some time now, and have cut and more importantly SOLD thousands of stone. When I first started out, I too was tempted by eBay auctions. Those $0.99 deals or $1.99 deals look so good. The reality is, they are not. NO ONE selling high quality rough sells stones for less than they are really worth, they will sell them for more, but never less. Good rough is expensive, and difficult to come by. And like everything else in this world, you get what you pay for.

New cutters (and I was one too) have this dream of buying some piece of rough for a few dollars and turning it into a gemstone worth thousands. This is however, just a dream.

The mechanics of cutting is not the hard part, it's the sourcing and purchasing high quality rough. After 5 stones you should have the mechanics down, your speed will come with more stones, and you will overcome the stupid things that happen in time, but the actual mechanics of cutting is really pretty simple.

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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 9:42 am 
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Barbra,

You are correct re Precision Gems. However, pertinent advice for a professional in most any endeavor may not be pertinent for a newbie.

For example, many here strongly recommend sintered laps. For someone who is new and/or is a hobbyist that advise and $ cost is less pertinent.

The advice a coach would give to a professional baseball player versus one who is in a church league would be different in most cases.

A person who cuts a few stones a year is not depending on selling what they cut. It is not their profession, but their pleasure.

IIRC, syn spinel has a reputation of being difficult in some aspects. At least there have been multiple times when syn spinel was specified as the required material for the yearly USFG cutting competitions with the explanation that that material was selected because of it's difficulties. So should a newbie try cutting it when it is the specified material for master level competition? Is learning through failure versus success the best way to encourage someone to take up a hobby?

Consider how Gearloose has addressed this. The BATT came out and was very very good. But folks had to charge it. Some folks did quite well while others could not make it work. Jon put up a video, then another video and then a third video, and more people were successful, but still some were not. Then came the Darkside. Suddenly, a newbie on their first stone could charge the lap and get a great polish. But some also got big scratches. All the recommendations about charging a polishing lap did not apply to this new product -- too much polishing media balled up and scratched. Adding more, as one might with a tin lap, just made it worse. Jon created the Battstiks and solved this problem.

Did professional faceters need a Darkside? Others did. And then Jon produced the Matrix and it got even better (though it's my experience that the two are equally easy to use and equally effective, but some stones polish a bit better on one or the other).

I will always read Gene's postings, and continue to learn from what he says. But we need to remember that many folks here, especially those who are just starting need advice more tailored to their knowledge and experience level.

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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:31 am 
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Just noticed the comment that Oil of Wintergreen is toxic. Well, it might be if you were thinking of drinking it, but as an immersion fluid it is fine. It is also good as a rub in cases of cramp or muscle sprain and as a drill lubricant it is excellent.


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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 4:07 pm 
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Precision Gem wrote:

I have been doing this for quite some time now, and have cut and more importantly SOLD thousands of stone. When I first started out, I too was tempted by eBay auctions. Those $0.99 deals or $1.99 deals look so good. The reality is, they are not. NO ONE selling high quality rough sells stones for less than they are really worth, they will sell them for more, but never less. Good rough is expensive, and difficult to come by. And like everything else in this world, you get what you pay for.

New cutters (and I was one too) have this dream of buying some piece of rough for a few dollars and turning it into a gemstone worth thousands. This is however, just a dream.


I'm not contesting that you're right. I'm impressed with the quality of what I got for the price I got it. I'd be shocked to find that I had a single piece of what a professional would consider high-quality rough.

I also hold no delusions about selling something for thousands out of my starting collection. If I can get $1000 total for everything, I'd be thrilled and it would be more than a 5x profit margin.

The thing I want to emphasize is that this is a hobby for me. I'm going for a Ph.D in biology, and scientific research is going to be my career, assuming something doesn't go horribly wrong. I'm a millennial who grew up in the age of video games who is now losing all interest in such things as a pastime. I've been getting natural rough because the idea of taking a cracked, dirty lump of sparkly rock and coaxing something beautiful out of it appeals to me. I don't get the same thrill at the prospect of cutting something that looks like a homogeneous colored glass cylinder. It may be that as my skills improve and demand for my work increases, I'll be more pragmatic in my choice of rough, but for now, I want to make art out of rocks. Please don't think that I don't respect your knowledge and experience. I'm just in this for different things right now.


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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 1:52 pm 
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CoreyB wrote:
Precision Gem wrote:

I have been doing this for quite some time now, and have cut and more importantly SOLD thousands of stone. When I first started out, I too was tempted by eBay auctions. Those $0.99 deals or $1.99 deals look so good. The reality is, they are not. NO ONE selling high quality rough sells stones for less than they are really worth, they will sell them for more, but never less. Good rough is expensive, and difficult to come by. And like everything else in this world, you get what you pay for.

New cutters (and I was one too) have this dream of buying some piece of rough for a few dollars and turning it into a gemstone worth thousands. This is however, just a dream.


I'm not contesting that you're right. I'm impressed with the quality of what I got for the price I got it. I'd be shocked to find that I had a single piece of what a professional would consider high-quality rough.

I also hold no delusions about selling something for thousands out of my starting collection. If I can get $1000 total for everything, I'd be thrilled and it would be more than a 5x profit margin.

The thing I want to emphasize is that this is a hobby for me. I'm going for a Ph.D in biology, and scientific research is going to be my career, assuming something doesn't go horribly wrong. I'm a millennial who grew up in the age of video games who is now losing all interest in such things as a pastime. I've been getting natural rough because the idea of taking a cracked, dirty lump of sparkly rock and coaxing something beautiful out of it appeals to me. I don't get the same thrill at the prospect of cutting something that looks like a homogeneous colored glass cylinder. It may be that as my skills improve and demand for my work increases, I'll be more pragmatic in my choice of rough, but for now, I want to make art out of rocks. Please don't think that I don't respect your knowledge and experience. I'm just in this for different things right now.


^ This - I'm in exactly the same boat (down to pursuing a career in molecular biology).


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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 4:15 pm 
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Just for reference, it't kind of difficult to make a 5x profit from the purchase price of the rough, unless you are talking about $0.15 per ct lab created material.
I would think most things you are buying from eBay and sawing up, it would be hard to realize a 5x profit. This is way if you are looking to make money, it makes more sense to cut expensive material. Then if you can double your what you paid for the rough, and you paid say $500 for a stone, you make $500 for you time.
No if you bought 200 stones from ebay at $0.99 each, I guess it's possible to cut the 200 stones and make $800 profit, but then you working for slave labor rates. Figure 200 stones take you (being new) 5 hours each, you have 1000 hours of cutting to make $800. I guess thats around $0.80 per hour.

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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 6:14 pm 
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Ok, here is an example.

This first one is a $9.99 buy from eBay of 50 ct. pour of Amethyst. The add doesn't list the size of the stones, but they look around 10 ct each, so expect 5 stones. They claim there is some clarity issues, and the color doesn't look at that good, but heck it's cheap at $0.20 per ct.

Image

So you cut 5 stones, get around 25% yield = (5) 2.5 ct stones. Anything more than $10 per ct would be highway robbery for this material, so $25 per stone for a total of $125. Wait this sounds great! But you spent 5 hours per stone so 25 hours to make $125 - $10 = $115/25 hours = $4.60 per hour.

Or you could have taken this one stone for $707. Get maybe 32% yield to get a 1.734 ct stone. Tsavorite this size and color could fetch $1000 per ct so you have a $1734 stone. $1734 - 707 = $1027 return on the stone. If you cut this one in 5 hours too, you made $205 per hour.

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$200 per hour is a hell of lot better than $4.60 per hour.

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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 7:31 pm 
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For the record, deals do exist, but they take a lot of work to find and separate from the garbage, and require a fairly broad knowledge to recognize. I can understand how many cutters would not want the hassle.

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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 7:47 pm 
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Yeah, I'm aware of all that. If there was any hobby or profession that could take a $10 piece of material and turn it into a $500 product with 8 hours of work, everyone would do it. I said I'd be thrilled if I could get $1000 for everything. The implication there is that $1000 is far above my expectations, though still within the realm of possibility. My primary intention for most of this first batch of material is things like birthday gifts, possible charity drives at my school, etc. Profit is really not a major concern.

Another factor is that expensive rough is an investment. I could theoretically buy a $200 piece of rough and turn it into a $600 stone with 5 hours of work, but the amazing $80/hr labor rate doesn't help much if it takes 6 months to sell the stone. I know nothing about the gemstone market, where or how to sell, how to accurately appraise and price a gem so I'm not wasting my time while simultaneously not overcharging and preventing the sale. Lacking all that, investing hundreds of dollars that one in my financial situation has trouble keeping bound up for an extended period into high-quality rough seems foolish.

As I said before, this is just a hobby for me right now. Eventually, I want it to be able to at least pay for itself, but initially, thinking myself in circles about profit margin, dollars per hour, quality of rough, time to sell, and so on would just take away from the fun of cutting gems. If I was intending to turn this into my career, or even make it my primary source of income through college, then naturally these would all be paramount concerns. As it stands now, adding a second job on top of my main job and full-time classes would probably burn me out. Once summer comes around and school is out, I'll probably knuckle down and start searching for a profit margin, but right now, I want faceting to be an escape from stress, not a source of it.


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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 8:31 pm 
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Corey your story is very like my beginning and probably many others. I too wanted nothing but to prise a sparkly gem from a piece of rough quartz, scapolite or some other natural (hopefully) stone to reveal the inner beauty. But I found after about hundred stones that I had nothing more than some cool looking quartz, scapolite, dark garnet worth very little (admit ably a sprinkling of some dark sapphires included). I then did the undiscovered eBay bargain bin routine. That ended when I needed a bigger fish tank. I wanted a different challenge, money would be good too.

But over that time, I had also acquired about 30 cts synthetic orange corundum worth about $7 which I, like you, loathed the idea of cutting the man-made blob.
It was about that then a thread on GOL, very like this, came up and ‘Precision Gem’ (?) posted pretty much what he has here although he mentioned a price (if I remember correctly) that he was getting $60 a carat for synthetic blue corundum cut in a standard brilliant. And to be honest I was a little bit skeptical. But I thought I would give it a shot. I cut this 5ct stone. I set up an etsy account with one other stone (the smallest etsy shop I’d think) and within 8 weeks I got $120 even with a bad photo (now the photography is the hard part). I could not believe it. I had converted $7 to $120. Incredible and so easy and all with out any real effort. So, thank you ‘Precision Gem’ =D> . It opened my eyes and yet I still managed to challenge myself with polish and meets. I’m now eyeing up some, not dark, garnet as Precision mentioned in that earlier post.

Image

I guess what I’m trying to say is enjoy the journey and I’m sure the view will change in its own good time. You will go down all the same alleys and avenues we all have or are going down now (Dr Zeus, ‘Oh the places we go’?). And you can enjoy it and make a dollar without big fancy websites and investments in rough.
It’s a great hobby with many facets and angles. And it brings out some great enthusiasm in people. I’ll stop now. Enjoy. :)


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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 9:03 pm 
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Magoo glad to hear things are starting to work out for you. I still thing the best material to cut, if you don't want to spend much is lab sapphire, as there is a market for it. Any time I cut a lab ruby it sells right away.
As you are finding, the marketing of the stones is one of the more difficult. Taking pictures, setting up a website, record keeping, packaging and shipping, taxes etc all ends up taking a lot of time. So in the example above, the real $/hr ends up being less. Also, as we all know, crap happens and somestones end up going down the drain and selling for less than you paid for the rough.

Generally, I find that low quality rough, will cut stones that are the most difficult to sell. I have a lot of stones I cut when first starting out that I don't even try to sell, as it would be a total waste of time. (Turns out cutting them was a total waste of time too)

I'm just trying to save some of you guys just starting out these learning pains. I too years ago tried the eBay route for rough, and most things I got turned out to be junk, so if even 1 out of 4 buys is ok, you have to factor that in the price, then factor in your time cutting this junk and it gets even worse.

Today I looked through a few pages of eBay stones under "Faceting Rough" and saw nothing that I would think would be worth cutting.

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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 11:27 pm 
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CoreyB wrote:
The thing I want to emphasize is that this is a hobby for me.


Right on, Corey. It seems difficult for many professional cutters to understand that many (probably most) faceters don't really give a damn about turning a profit. There are other reasons. I cut for my own enjoyment and (selfishly) the kudos from friends and family who appreciate my efforts. I don't need it to make a living.


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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 11:07 am 
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In the original post he did say "I have a lot of cheap rough that I plan on using to practice and get comfortable faceting before I move on to more valuable gems."

I started cutting as a hobby too, and would swank around the office stuff I cut. I always found the better stones got a lot more ooohs and aaaahs than showing well cut junk. People typically would say stuff like "wow.... what's that worth?"

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 Post subject: Re: I have a few questions
PostPosted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:24 pm 
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There are a few in-between options of course. Stones like aquamarine and sunstone are both relatively easy and relatively affordable to source rough for and can produce some nice mid-tier stones.

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