g'day and welcome to black opal direct my name's justin well firstly i have to apologize for not
putting out a video last week i was away on a fishing trip and it was a well worth
fishing trip it was just i just needed it so much um and you can see some of the
sites here that we um that i went on up to the great barrier reef and um had a good time so
i brought back a little bit of fish for my family i don't like to bring too much back
but um yeah i and we're enjoying eating beautiful fish at the moment also um my son got his license
just on a side note the other day so now he's driving around terrorizing the world
but anyway all good today we're going to cut this beautiful knobby and
it has some really stunning stunning color in it looks like flagstone pattern as well and the
color bar is quite thick so what i'm going to do is just take you through it and talk through it
instead of music today just talking my way through cutting this piece so let's get to it oh yeah so
this is called a knobby opal um comes from lightning ridge and it has some color inside there
but it also has some potch here and some potch there and we have to decide
how we want to attack that color so i want to make sure that inside there is pretty clean
and i'll have to turn that light off to have a good look
so it looks it looks like it's okay but that still doesn't mean it's totally clean um there
could be potch in there and the potch could just have the light be shining straight through it um
there's quite a few factors that uh that could be
making this piece not as good as it looks right now so what i'm going to start by doing is
because the color bar runs this way i'm going to grind around the edges to see how far
and how clean that color bar can get so let's get on the wheel and start that
process
so so i do i push on the wheel bit by bit um just to keep making sure what i'm grinding
is not just color but um or not just sand it could turn into solid color and then if it does
i'll start wasting a nice opal so i do it slowly bit by bit
so to me so far it looks to me like the stone might be sitting
just there this may be too messed up with sand and pit holes so let's see what happens
you can see that color faces quite well but which way should we take it
all right so
the color bar seems to be very very wavy which doesn't doesn't ensure confidence that there's
going to be a nice stone so i'm just going to give it a little bit of a grind there so
this is how it's going to face you can see that color there but i'm it may face better this way
with um the potch so i'm just going to take a little bit off the edge there
down to the color bar and have a look at the color on this side
and it looks to me like it faces better this way
so it looks like we're going to have to take that side off
before i do let's stick the light through there see how clean it is
and turn that that light back off it does look pretty good actually
we may get lucky and get a stone out of
this
all right so decided i'm taking that side off i'm going in
so so nothing's really showing through just yet except for where i took the little telltale
side off we're almost down to the color now there we go little bits popping up on the side
as well as some sand there which the sand could
cause some havoc all right so this color is starting to come through
i really am hoping that this color is going to be so bright
all right so it's really starting to show up now and that's quite nice it's quite nice color there
oh yeah oh yeah that's really nice let's have a close look
so we do have very pretty color
play of color and now it for me it is a matter of just shaping shaping the piece to
a pleasing shape which is mostly for me ovals ovals are not for everyone
but most people like ovals when it comes to
jewelry making jewelry or opal
jewelry
all right so that's ready for the dot stick
so because um i have cut so many stones for you guys and i'm showing you the process
i'm gonna really quickly cut this one um i have run out a little bit of time
to get your video this week so um i am trying to get it a little bit shorter
uh this one we've just gone through the process of taking it out of the
rough which is gorgeous and it's a beautiful stone and i'm going to polish it up right now
that
so i'm quite happy with this stone um it's cut bigger than i uh than i expected it's
a weighs 3.85 carats nice color right across the stone so um decent cabochon there's a little bit
of sand from the back that comes up the sides just a little bit but i've i've rolled up that
back just to make it hide under the setting edge so once it's set into a piece of jewelry
you won't actually see anything so you can only see it if you hold it up and you look from the
sides you can actually see it but you can't from the top so 3.85 we're looking at around about a
three and a half to four thousand dollar stone so i'm clearly quite happy with that
um she cut beautiful i nearly dropped her on the ground again
and um i'm surprised with this one this is quite a nice stone so short video this week
hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you next week with something really cool thanks for watching
you