hi I'm Steve Ariary from Moriarty's Gem Art, we represent ourselves online as
OpalLust.com - today I'm going to show you my
techniques for capping wheel which comes from just dark here in Ethiopia now this
is really a beautiful piece of Welo opal weighs 32 carats as you can see there's
a lot of matrix on the outside and and sometimes this matrix goes deep into the
stone and deep pockets so hoping that we don't have that issue so I can cab this
stone today sometimes when it goes very deep either you lose a lot of material
or you've got to sculpt
you
so now we've got the the matrix off the stone and we've lost about 24% we've
gone from 32 carat to 24 carat so the next step is to go to one of the coarser
wheels these diamond wheels this is pray about a 180 and I'll take the bulges off
of it and and then look see what kind of shape I can finally get
Thunder picking the rough edges off and try and get some of the simple rabbit
the rest of the matrix I don't miss anything what about the kid could be
got some deep holes here here that create problems forgiving unreal
so I've still got a
depressions here to get out shapes getting better
so I've got the basic shape now all the holes and divots are out of it so now
the shape smoothness okay so even though this is a pretty soft material instead
of going to 12
so I'm going through 400 the Bell
I'm using very light pressure just to try and get some of it
from the course
so now I'm on a 1200 felt like use a little more pressure right even off the
lines that are in it
and we quickly
as people shake
wife a drag so I can see the surface of the stone make sure I got
perfections out it's looking pretty smooth
on the back
finalized by the shape
and it's looking pretty good now the last thing I do to help the center is
try and bevel this edge here
and now we can move on to 8,000
9,000 I even use a loom or pressure funny water
if that Apple that you can
so now is when you've got to get a completely smooth because the final
polish is not going to take outlines it's looking pretty good I think we're
ready to polish all right so I finished this on eight thousand and the finish is
very good on it very few lines the lines are very small now we're going to go to
a final polish on leather I use cerium oxide for the final finish
in the lab
good God
one safety issue
both cerium and
I'm pretty the Deb know this
not showing its color because it's wet
get wet very transparent
I think this is going to be a great ok this is our finished stone and it came
out just a little over 12 carat so we only got 37 percent yield out of it a
little lower than normal but did all this material is bad yield just because
of those deep pockets that are in it so the couple days we'll see what this
stone really looks like