hey everyone welcome back for another lapidary polishing video today we're going to be polishing
a little lake superior agate that I have dopped i'm going to be polishing it on my camera 6
cabbing machine it's got some really beautiful bands and i nicknamed this little beauty the maple
agate let me show you why so here it is and the reason why i call it the maple agate is because
i think the bands make it look like a maple tree and uh just a fun fact in
the fall when all the leaves start changing colors maples are my absolute favorite tree
they're really really beautiful in fall so what we're going to be doing today is giving this
a very light rounded dome convex polish because i don't want to risk losing these beautiful bands
right here so we're just going to take a a little bit off the sides here and rotate it on the wheels
and give it a rounded top for a very beautiful polish and we can maintain that maple banding
so we're gonna get started on the 80 grit wheel start taking some of the material off the sides
it should be pretty good let's fire it up
let me take my respirator off here it's looking really good we're gonna go really light on the
first two wheels the 80 and the 220 because i want to preserve these bands right here
but so far you can kind of see where we're going with it it's got a very light in every stage
we're going to take a little bit more off and make it a little more rounded
so let's move on to the 220 turn some water on for that one there we go
so
that was easy work and i know you guys always ask how long it takes to get through some of
these stages first two stages it was about a minute each i'm going real light at the beginning
to like i've said a few times preserve this face i got caught a little bit right here
so i'm going to have to make sure that on this side i don't go down too far
but so far it's looking really good these are soft back wheels from here on over the next four wheels
so we can put a little more pressure into them and it'll be good so we'll move on from the 280 next
is the 600 and 1200 and we'll meet back up with you after we finish up with the 1200 grit wheel
we have gone through all the stages except
the 3000 grit wheel and the cerium oxide infused disc and this thing is looking great i was a
little hung up right here you probably won't be able to see it because of the glare right there
right there where the light is on my finger right there i thought that was a scratch
but what it actually is is a little fracture that runs down so there's nothing we can do
about that but as is so far this is looking fantastic the bands are great in the little
trunk the flow channel is fantastic so i'm going to be doing a little macro to show off some more
of these bands at the end and i also want to say too that even though this is turning out really
great i am still a little stressed out about polishing this because i was actually gifted
this agate from somebody i respect a lot and admire and i want it to turn out really well so
um yeah it's going great though so the stress is going down each stage that we get through we only
got two more stages to go i'm not worried at all i'm happy that it has stayed on the top the dop
stick i'm still new at dopping and i actually have a question for you guys about dopping if
any of you could help me so one of the things i haven't done yet with dapping is put these in
the freezer and try to crack the dopping wax from the agate afterwards but when i was dopping this
last night i accidentally dropped this one and got wax on it and then this is one that i've polished
in the past and i cannot seem to get this green um let's see if i can get the light on it here
this green dopping wax off of it so if anybody has any tips to get the dapping wax off
the stones please leave a comment i definitely need your help with that because this stuff
is on there so anyways um we will move on to the 3000 grit wheel and then the last stage
so this beautiful little maple agate is looking great we got one last stage
and uh the last time i used the cerium oxide disc i got soaked so
um i think i got enough room here to just do this so i'm gonna turn the water on and then put the um
put the guard back on and then we'll turn it on and that should be fine won't get as wet
you get it turned on
yeah that's much better still a little wet but what do you do
ah
so we ran her through the cerium oxide pad and look at those bands and look at the light
play on that beautifully i think we did a perfect job on the dome not too much off the top
you can see right there where the light is flashing
right there there's that fracture that's probably the only
imperfection in this beautiful agate let me throw my macro lens on and take a closer look at it
look at the beautiful bands going on on this awesome maple egg it
a beautiful flow channel on the bottom oh that is awesome
the white bands the light orange on the outer rim
you can see that fracture there catching with the light a little bit of a bummer but
this is uh better than most i'd say
lake superior agates have a lot of fractures so this is pretty cool well i'm super happy with
how this turned out and i'm gonna go stick this in the freezer and see if that is a good method
for popping the stones off the dopping stick and next time we do a polishing video which will be
very very soon because using this cabbing machine is extremely fun i'll let you know
how that turned out if you guys liked today's video please leave a thumbs up if
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