this week I do something I don't enjoy
g'day and welcome to Black Opal direct my name's Justin well today we're doing
something that I'm not the greatest at and that is carving some opal with a Dremel now
I've chosen a Dremel that is pretty much the the Box standard that you can buy from the hardware
store and we're going to see if we can actually carve opal with just a basic rechargeable Dremel
um this piece here is a knobby opal it's got some nice skin to it that I can take off and possibly
polish all the way around and create kind of like a nice nugget I'm also trialling these
um Dremel bits I've been told that they are packed full of diamonds more than any other tips on the
market so we'll see how long they last and and how well they go so this is a good test as well
also I'm using um scented Diamond tips as well so these are not coated these are scented and
there's a big difference these will last you a lot longer than the normal cheap coated Diamond tips
the coated Diamond tips usually once you push a little bit hard the diamonds rip out of the metal
and you're just pretty much grinding opal with bare metal and it it's not good for the open it
actually doesn't grind much away while these tips have diamond right into the center of the piece
where the uh where the shaft hits so they will last you a lot longer so let's get into it see if
we can get some carving going right so I've got a little water supply of water dripping out so that
I can keep this Stone wet as I work and I'll give you a good close look at this piece so you can see
it's quite a nice knobby it's got a lot of color to it and a lot of skin with sand spots and stuff
so I'm going to work on trying to get that stone nice and clean of all the sand spots and um yeah
we'll just turn the Dremel right down to the lower settings
just then as I said that the lower setting was too
low and it cut out so I had to turn it up a little bit
the Dremel tip I'm using is 120 grit so it's quite rough and probably a little bit too rough for what
I'm working on now so when I go to polish it it's going to be a little bit more difficult
for me but I have left sand spots in it so that I can still work down and get them out so I'm not
losing too much cutting opal with a Dremel as opposed to cutting with a conventional machine
can take so much longer to get your piece to be polished really nicely so you've got to be
really patient when it comes to this because sand spots and all sorts of nooks and crannies
all over the piece will annoy you when you're trying to polish or you're trying to get sand
spots out and then the shape starts to get a little bit out it can get kind of frustrating
so pretty much uh all of the sand he's out and that only took really five minutes um so the
Dremel is working well so far I do need to get all this out at first before I can really start
to give it a shape and a Polish but that seems to go in quite deep so I've got to be careful there
when I talk about a shape and a Polish I don't mean an actual conventional shape I'm just talking
about an organic shape that the opal is actually telling me how to cut so you can see here that um
most of the sand spots are now out of the Stone and um I can start to Now work on smoothening
those edges all those surfaces and getting it to a fine polish so probably will take a little
while but that color's beautiful what gorgeous color I really am happy with that beautiful color
foreign
has been one of those days where you just want to get a film done
and there's noises and interruptions coming from everywhere thank you
well it just goes to show that carving is just not one of my strong points when it comes to opal
cutting give me a lapidary wheel any day you know I did have to go back many times to get scratches
out that I thought I had already got out and while the work done on it is okay it's not perfect by
any means and you know if I had cut a nice oval out of it I would have created quite a beautiful
salable gem around about the four carats but instead I cut this 8.75-carat carving which will
still take longer to sell and is not as desirable as an oval it took me 10 times longer to cut so
I'll think I'll stick to my conventional way of opal cutting and polishing thanks for watching