I was advised to keep the specimen as it is since this stuff from the Stayish mine is not easy to work with and usually ends up breaking into a few pieces. should i just leave it as it is? its got good color, (hard to photograph) so im not sure what to do with it, any opinions? should i just polish? its about 100 carats, would be nice to get a nice natural untreated black opal out of this tho.
They gave you good advise. When they do cut, they are unique opals and colour play is fantastic but they are troublesome to cut. Because its opaque you cant see the interior so you cant see any cracks or deep sand pits until you cut into it. And the sand pits can go deep and be plentiful in the interior, often theres no way around them. Cracks seem to just appear out of nowhere. One minute theres no visible cracks, the next they just appear after a bit of cutting.
It can be a pain in the ass. Ive cut quite a few of these and regreted it, some just broke apart in my hand during cutting : /
A real shame.
Im now selling the parcel off as specimens and sporadically attempting to cut smaller ones.
I completed a few succesfully though, one can be seen in the off the dop thread.
Some of them Ive just polished a window on the suface and they do look stunning.
also, colour wise its very similar to ozzie opal, just because theres great colour on top, that in no way means the colour will be present throughout the opal, it is a true gamble.
In my experience I wouldn't call the material unstable per se--it's more like they are already fractured through and just held together by the matrix. They don't craze like some opals, they just immediately fall apart in your hands as you remove supporting material. So there isn't really any trick to it beyond buying it cheap, being very selective and even then knowing most of it will fall apart on you. I've had limited success cutting these myself, maybe one in three of carefully selected pieces didn't fall apart. But when they didn't the results were really nice and the resultant pendants sold very quickly, even the ones where I just left the sandy matrix in where it popped up. Also as Raj mentioned once they've fallen apart the smaller pieces are often stable which can sometimes be workable. If I only had one nice big one I don't think I'd cut it. Maybe a face polish like Raj mentioned.
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