So i just started faceting today, I got tired of waiting for my larger stones and tried a tiny little color change garnet. Anyway I think I may have been mistaken on what I should use to polish. I have an aluminum master lap with diamond paste, it did not seem to work very well. It was only 8k grit so I knew it wouldn't be perfect but it seemed like it should have been better than what it was. I feel like I might be going about this the wrong way though. Is a master lap used for polishing?
No, the master lap is just there to give thickness to thin topper laps. Aluminum is a poor metal for polishing on, just doesn't work very well. 8k is in the prepolish range anyway so you wouldn't expect a great polish anyway.
Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2008 4:01 pm Posts: 1902 Location: Pine City, NY and Dothan, AL
You've got a lot to learn. We've all been there My personal recommendation is to get a metal-bonded 600 grit lap from a supplier like Kingsley North, https://www.kingsleynorth.com/skshop/pr ... &catID=109 and one of the Gearloose starter kits. https://gearloose.co/shop/highest-perfo ... arter-kit/ In addition, the cheapest and very important tool is knowledge. Get Tom Herbst's book "Amateur Gemstone Faceting Volume 1: The Essentials", available from Amazon. Volume 2 can come later.
Hi Al, these laps to me look like a 600 grit topper on a steel base lap. Or is there any difference in durability compared to the toppers I use on an aluminium base lap ?
Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2008 4:01 pm Posts: 1902 Location: Pine City, NY and Dothan, AL
There's a difference in flatness over time, which is more important to me. I havn't used toppers for very long, but I've heard they are shorter lived (but cheaper). You can also get the solid steel laps, of course, which I like even better.
I was ordering a couple more dops from graves and saw those, I thought it was worth a shot for 17 dollars so I ordered the multi pack. I also just got my cerium oxide so I'll have to get one of the batt laps too.
Off topic, but I just got the first real stone I wanted to cut and it's pretty big 116 cts. I was looking it over for inclusions and saw what looked like a hair-line fracture on what only seems to be the outside but it curves around the stone and back up. I've never seen anything like it and I don't know what to do about it? Any ideas? It's a heat treated zircon.
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That's not a zircon unfortunately. (You can't really identify a stone from a picture, but it's sometimes possible to tell what it isn't--the color, form and size all exclude zircon). It looks more like cubic zirconia (in which case it could have been broken off of a much larger chunk, hence these larger fractures).
Can't trust anyone these days.. I'll get my money back at least. I really need to pay more attention the fake cert they sent with it says SR for the optic char. thanks Stephen. Well I guess it will be a good practice piece.
I went back through and reported every one of the stones they had. And these guys are tricky I noticed some of the listings said egl certified earth mined... Which is the name of the company so technically not lying, but misleading for sure. eBay... There was no picture of the certificate on the listing.
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