January 24 Through February 4—TUCSON, ARIZONA: Annual show
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 19, 2007 11:49 pm 
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Of Course! Corona...now I remember.

Gotta love those Texas ladies.

The trillion looks good. That cut looks familiar...is it Graham's Signature #4?


jdowney wrote:
I like that one too...nice looking cut, very unusual and looks like a good one optically. I'm gonna guess its either amethyst or sapphire, just to cover both ends of the lavender spectrum.

BTW, I'm not in Texas (I'm the one a few hours north of you, who never seems to fill out his profile :roll: ), but the lady who bought the huge aqua was from Texas. She was replacing a 12ct blue topaz that just wasn't big enough! :shock:

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 7:32 am 
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Thanks to everyone for the warm welcome and kind words! MGC: I did take the pic myself. Coincidentally, photography is one of my hobbies, so I had most of the parts and pieces for a decent setup already. I use an extension tube / teleconverter / lens combo on a Canon XTi for all my shots. However, this is by no means the ideal setup. I just happened to have all these pieces already and cobbled together a macro setup with the proper combination of magnification and lens-to-subject distance. Ideally, a good macro lens in an adequate mm range would be better (and cheaper than my setup if you're buying from scratch).

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 8:42 am 
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Jeff, just opened the 'Gem Cutting Process' pages on www.whitesgems.com and noticed the raytracing examples... that look oddly familiar. Are they made with DiamCalc by any chance?


And... does anyone ask "Where are the white gems?" when they see the website first ? 8)


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 9:09 am 
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HME wrote:
That cut looks familiar...is it Graham's Signature #4?


I can't remember the name of it now, its from some newsletter or another. Its just a standard trillion pavillion, with a fairly small tabled crown with some large low angle facets. That seems to make a good combination.

John


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 11:49 am 
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valeria102 wrote:
Jeff, just opened the 'Gem Cutting Process' pages on www.whitesgems.com and noticed the raytracing examples... that look oddly familiar. Are they made with DiamCalc by any chance?


And... does anyone ask "Where are the white gems?" when they see the website first ? 8)


Good eye! Yes, they were generated with the Octonus software. I find it a very good (albeit expensive) tool.

Ha! Funny you should ask about the "white gems." I run stats on search terms that people use to find my site, and "white gems" has quite a few hits every month. I've never gotten an email inquiring about them though...

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:14 pm 
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.
.
Well I finished this yesterday and I think someone asked for a step-by-step kind of thing so here is an attempt at that. I took some pictures of the girdle process, and pavilion roughing but I forgot to take pics of anything after that, oops!

OK here on the left are some girdle facets... And on the right, after grinding off the girdle meets I guess you could call them, semi-polishing the girdle on cerium ultralap.

ImageImage

Here are some pavilion facets being roughed in (emphasis on rough.)

Image

Skipping any crown work, here we have her, in all her regrettably synthetic glory:
Image

Good light return for such a simple cut, 31 facets or so.
Image
Image
Image

This weird non-symmetrical pattern at the bottom (only shows up in pictures, not to the eye.) shows that my cutting has a ways to go. Great dispersion, hard to get it in the picture but there is a slice.
Image



Well there we have it, a huge 19mm synthetic spinel, Approx 25cts, cut from a horizontal slice of a full boule. I guess you could call it a modified round brilliant, kind of my signature cut as this time as you may have noticed. If only it was natural aqua... or natural anything...

On to the next one! Moldavite? Tourmaline? Arizona Amethyst? Tsavorite? Rhodolite? decisions, decisions...

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Last edited by MaineGemCutter on Tue Aug 21, 2007 2:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:24 pm 
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Brilliant presentation!
Thank you so much for sharing that!


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 7:23 pm 
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Outstanding! I love that blue color. Thanks for the photos.

I have a lot of trouble getting good photos looking straight down at the table like you did. I always get camera shadow, head shadow, etc. Any tips?

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 10:08 pm 
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WOW! Thanks for sharing that with us!!!! The Lapidary Corner is my new favorite forum!

MaineGemCutter1 wrote:
On to the next one! Moldavite? Tourmaline? Arizona Amethyst? Tsavorite? Rhodolite? decisions, decisions...


I have a suggestion.... I want a 7 mm trillion Tsavorite :wink:


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 10:09 pm 
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This one is an "Umbalite" Garnet.
1.68 ct. 7.2 mm.
If any of the cutters are interested in the design, email me, and I'll send it to you. It requires an 80 index gear however. This a new design that I worked up a month or so ago, only the second stone cut in this pattern.

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 10:50 pm 
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Thanks everyone for your kind words, it helps the confidence a lot. I just have to find some other shapes to work on. Trillion seems pretty easy, but emeralds, squares, and ovals are harder than I thought, one emerald shape and a Strickland OMNI oval almost drove me to madness. I want to cut the fun stuff so going back to quartz to test new designs isn't supremely exciting. Part of the game though.

Snizzy, I have been contemplating a 7mm trillion out of the one decent sized piece of Tsavorite rough I have since you mentioned it, it will be a tight squeeze though!

Gene, awesome Garnet, awesome cut design and cutting as usual.

HME, took a lot of reading up on macro photography and experimenting with hack, shoddy equipment. The best method I have come up on yet is so simple it makes me crazy that I wasted all that time and hard drive space on horrible pics. Basically what it comes down to is an out of date 4mp digital camera you could probably get for $100 now on the macro or close up setting, and believe it or not, an old yogurt container with a hole in it. There's my secret! An old yogurt container!!! haha.

I couldn't afford a light box or $300 light dome, which would be ideal, so I found an old translucent plastic yogurt container and cut a hole in the top perfect for the lens of the camera. Ideally a more translucent, taller container would be in order, anything taller than a gemstone is too close to the camera. Although some camera's have a macro range of as close as one inch, so unless you want to photograph mineral specimens or something it might not be an issue. I am looking for a more translucent, taller, wider vessel like a large frosted plastic mixing bowl maybe 12 inches deep or more. I was thinking a tupperware pitcher might be perfect.

Strong sunlight is best, most of the pictures of the spinel are in sunlight, some with a 1 million candlepower spotlight from various angles. I also cut a small rectangular hole for the flash and viewfinder and experimented with that, but I found that the diffuse light works best.

So there you have it, I will report on any new "advancements" in my hack job macro gem system!

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 2:17 am 
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MGC, you're my new hero today. I've long been a fan of do-it -yourself solutions.

Anything involving a million candlepower light has to be good! Yogurt cups...priceless. The best equipment I have on any of my work benches is makeshift, and I'm glad I'm not the only one. Thanks for the tip.

Also;

Gene- great garnet as usual! thanks for posting and hope you'll post more.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 2:55 am 
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HME, thanks! Same here, I'm sure there would be some advantage to the $300 light dome set-up, but I doubt its $297.11 better... (2.89 for the yogurt, already had the spotlight and the sun* is free!!!)

It was one of those big 2lb yogurt jobs (my dogs love it, not too much though) so its about 7 inches tall maybe, with the lens sticking down through the hole that gives me maybe a six inch focal length. That's is why I think a taller vessel would be good, you can always zoom a bit or just crop, or cut the vessel down an inch at a time if that doesn't work.

As you can see most of those photos the stone is just on a standard gem case, but the ones where the stone appears to be floating is another little trick I read about. Take a semi rigid, thin piece of clear plastic and cut a small hole, rest the pavilion in the hole and there you have it, floating gem. Rest the plastic on a black, white, or clear box and put the makeshift light cone over it.

If anyone tries it let me know how it works out, or what systems you use.


*Just for fun I roughly figured that the sun is 75 sextillion** times brighter than my 1 million candlepower spotlight.

**A sextillion is 1,000 trillions or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. I'm no math major nor astronomy major so if anyone out there is and any of my "computations" are slightly or obscenely off, take it easy on me.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:12 am 
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Another one hot off the dop. This is Afghan Tourmaline 1.99 cts.

Image

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:58 am 
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Wow, what a nice color!


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