hey everybody welcome back i'm going to show you how to dop rocks and here's all the supplies that
you're going to need to start dopping your stones a dopping station dopping wax dopping sticks
stones that you want dopped some water and unofficial dopping tools that help with the
dopping process so the first step is to get your dopping station filled with wax and turned on and
luckily i have that going on right now and it's heating up the next step is to take the stones
that you want dopped and place them on the top of the dopping station so that they can warm up
and a very helpful tip is to put the side of the stone that you want polished
face down onto the pot and while your stones are heating up and getting ready to be dopped
the next thing you can do is pick out the size of sticks that you want to get this dopping station
comes with this size dowel sticks for dopping i bought these separately and cut them to size so
let's see one two three for the small and two larger ones and i should be good
and now that our dopping wax is heated up and at a good runny consistency
we can get some onto one of our sticks and i like to get it on there by swirling it
getting a good old goop on there
just like that then plop it on one of our stones now that we have it here i'm gonna set it on my
table here and this is where the water comes in because i'm gonna take some water on my fingers
here get a little wet and i can start pushing the wax in and into the stone and the reason
i wet my fingers is because the wax is hot and the stone is hot you're kind of pushing it into
the stone into the stick and hopes that makes a really good connection there
and after we got that on there we'll let it cool
so i'm going to grab another stick get some more wax on it swirl it around get a nice good heap
on there it is an art i will say that getting it on there i'll plop it under this guy right here
set it down here and sometimes when the stones are a little hard to handle
i'll use these to get them off so my fingers wet here and again i'll just work it into the stone
the other thing i'm doing while i'm working this in is making sure that my stick
is straight up and down so that i have a good handle on it when it cools
you don't want it to be all cattywampus on there so there's another dopped stone
that's not too bad looks pretty good i'll get the rest of these dopped here real quick
so while i finish dopping the rest of those stones i wanted to say if you are new to
lapidary and you're not sure why we're dopping these stones it's because sometimes the stones
are a little small or they're a little thin and by adding a dopping stick to it it gives us a
better grip on it while we are polishing them so that is why we're putting all these sticks with
wax on them on these stones so that during the polishing process it makes things a lot easier
for us but it looks like i just finished dopping my last stone let's check it out so here's all
the stones that we've adopted and i think it went really well didn't take too long and i am
really looking forward to polishing this stuff in the future and i also want to say real quick
not every time you dop a stone is it gonna take you're gonna get cracks they're gonna pop off
you just gotta start over it's happened to me a bunch of times it'll happen to you too and if
you have any questions about dopping or anything like that leave a comment in the comment section
i'll get back to you and we'll try to help you in any way that we can and if you're wondering
what kind of dopping station i'm using i'll also have that in the description box below
it's been a pretty good unit i'm really happy with it thanks for watching and happy dopping