Goo-day and welcome!
I'm Justin from Black Opal Direct.
Today I want to show you all about slicing opal.
When we're cutting opal from the rough state a lot of the time you can wear your diamond
wheels out very quickly if you use the wheels just to rough all the excess off your opal.
The easiest way to do it is to get a slicer and slice the excess off the opal.
So you are only using a little diamond blade rather than a big wheel and wasting all that
diamond.
And especially, if you don't have enough water on that diamond wheel you wear it away extra
fast.
Which is not good.
So I'm going to show you how to slice the safest and best way possible so that you can
do it at home at your slicer nice and safely as well.
Now there's a few things you need to know about slicers.
Slicers are very dangerous machines.
If you slip you can cut your finger very easily.
So you must have your hands or your arms firmly attached to something so that you are not
moving around and wobbling.
Cause it's very important that you keep your hands absolutely steady.
There another thing that can happen is, when you're slicing through a piece, and you wobble
the piece, it can buckle the wheel and the wheel can catch on the piece and break the
piece apart.
So it's really really, you have to be really careful about keeping a steady hand.
Steady hands are the key.
So safety first with your slicer.
You want to make sure it has all the right guards so that there's not water flying in
your eyes or debris flying off the wheel and hitting you in the face.
I would not want anything like that to happen.
Now you can see all the guards are in the right places.
If something flies out here it will hit this guard and not you.
If something flies up here it will hit this guard and come down.
So you're keeping your whole body safe and away from that blade.
Now when you're going to slice always keep your hands or your wrists safely attached
to something so that they don't wobble around like this because if you wobble like this
you will break the blade and you will break your opal too.
So you make sure that when you're slicing that you're slicing while you're leaning on
the edge so you can get a really nice, straight cut.
Okay I have lots of water running on the wheel so it doesn't burn out or break.
We line up and keep our hands steady.
We line up the stone right on the edge of where the sand and the color is.
And I need to concentrate here for a second because there is some good color in it.
Here we go.
Alright, so we're done!
I've sliced it into two pieces and as you can see there's two sides to the color.
One's just about hit sand, and the other piece has quite a nice back on it.
So now, as you can see, that's the opal sliced in half.
Now I've got the chance to make two stones instead of one if I wanted to.
But what has happened is, you see the sand.
You see the sand?
The sand, I've ground all that sand off so you did not have to grind that off on the
diamond wheel.
It just got sliced off.
So now there's a small stone here and there's another stone just underneath this sand here.
The color bar travels just underneath.
So I'll grind that down and I'll make my stone there.
Beautiful color.
So there you have it!
The slicing process explained to you.
Hopefully you can do it safely like I've learned to do and I still don't get it perfect 100%
of the time.
But it does take practice, that's for sure.
So thanks for watching and see you next time.