hi I'm Steve Moriarty from Moriarty's Gem Art we represent ourselves online
as MoreGems.com and today I'm gonna show you my techniques for dopping
stones and this technique is particularly good for heat sensitive
stones although I use it for everything I do and the process I use is with
epoxies okay today I'll be dopping up this opal with that we're going facet
this is Ethiopian opal I don't know it to be real heat sensitive but not a
stone I'd like to eat up a lot so to do this on this dop we have some clay and I
just press it into the clay and then I select a dop that's about the size of
the stone I'm topping up put it in center of the stone and this size of
adapt allows me to Center it fairly accurately you can also use a millimeter
gauge like this I find dops themselves
so just try and center it on this top both directions push it down into the
the clay so it stays in place
because this is probably a very very important part of the process because if
you don't get it centered you lose a lot of material in cutting so once I feel it
centered and I remove this dop pick a dop that's half the size of the stone or
a little bigger than that you need enough gluing surface around it because
I'm not going to glue between the dop and the stone this will aid in removing
it later so again make sure it's flat you can double check up this time with a
millimeter gauge to see that that is
centered although I do find that that the dots do end up quite accurate so now
what I'm using is a two-part epoxy use equal amounts
just mix them really good
you probably have about a minute and a half two minutes to work with this and
before this you want to make sure that your stones clean and the tops cleaned
you can use a little alcohol or acetone to wipe them off keep all that the oils
off and all you're gonna want to do is kind of put it in the crease all the way
around the stone
and then I generally try and work it in a little bit
you don't want to drooping down over the edge because when you're working with
epoxies and you start cutting on it if after its dried you start cutting
into the epoxy it tends to break the seal so you want to make sure that the
epoxy doesn't flow over the edge and if it does you need to cut it off because
this lap tends to pull on the epoxies and you'll break loose the dop which is
the worst thing that can happen to you in faceting so you just manipulated it a
little bit for a couple minutes till it gets a little tack here just trying to
keep enough on the stone but not too much that it flows over the edge
and then after a short while just leave it set you'll want to leave this set
overnight 24 hours you know fry at least eight hours you get a much much tougher
seal on it and I've lost a lot of stones trying to rush it so best is to take
your time and and let this epoxy seal real well so now I'm going to show you
how to remove the Dop after it's been transferred once once you're done with
the stone and you can just put it in acetone to remove the dop during the
transfer you do have to use a little heat
but because we did not put food between the dop and the stone itself we can
just remove the glue that's around the stone and this is a tanzanite and this
is the the reason that I started doing this process was a tanzanite but
unfortunately it was a hundred carat tanzanite that I'd opt up with wax and
just in heating the dop to remove it i shattered a hundred carat tanzanite so
that got me looking for ways to use less heat less risk of damage in a stone that
tanzanite was probably just a fluke something in it
but it was a bad day so now we just kinda heat this blade up
and then run it once quickly around the stone between the top and the stone
itself try not to put any pressure on the stone because you can chip the edge
of the stone easily
and if you're lucky it pops off
there we go so because there was no epoxy right on the face of the top all
we had to do was remove the glue around the edge and it popped off easily so
occasionally with the epoxy it does seep under the top a little bit then you will
have problems just picking the glue away so you will have to heat the dop
slightly to get it to remove so if you have any questions leave it in the
comment section below and I want to thank you for viewing this video
I'm Steve Moriarty from MoreGems.com