this week I take my life's work and put it into an opal table
opal's been a passion of mine for the last 30 years
and my father before it and i used to watch him create the most beautiful pieces of art whether
it was oil painting or carving an elephant out of marble or he carved a frog out of solid opal a
green tree frog I mean those kind of things really inspired me throughout my life to create as well
so I thought I'd create something that means a lot to me
and to my family and create a beautiful opal table with all this beautiful color embedded into it
I've had a vision of making a beautiful expensive table like this
for a long time now and I believe I've collected enough pieces to make it worthwhile
this table is a representation of everything I know about opal where it comes from how it's found
how it's processed all the way to the end-user
and at the end of this video I'll explain to you the whole story but I think you're going to enjoy
so my plan is to create spaces in the table or the wood where I can place these beautiful pieces
of opal that get cased pretty much forever and I'm really excited to share this story with you
so the resonant part of this table is something that I don't claim to be an expert on so
I'm getting the experts in and I've gone to visit
Aussie camphor to visit dave and dave is has been in wood for a very very long time
and he's figured out what we need to do to really show off these opals
when there's over 40 000 worth of vocal going into a table you want to get it right you want to make
sure that everything is done right you don't want bubbles you don't want you know cloudy parts so
there we're taking our time to make sure that this turns out right and it's pretty exciting
so today is the day everything coming together day and let's pray that these opals actually show up
in the table and really look at you because it's been three months of hard work trying to get this
table together and um I don't actually know if the opal is going to kick when it's in the table
or not there was a kind of a risk that I wanted I was willing to take but I just am not sure
yes
the colours are popping I am so happy with the way it turned out yes oh yes
wow what a result this has been three months of working on
a project that i've been keeping quite a secret so i'm really sorry for that but
all of the beaten by sand pieces um they're all in this project and some many more pieces that that i
chose to put in it and the tables turned out way better than i actually imagined and it was a risk
to see whether the opals were going to pop through the resin and i'm i'm so happy so happy but this
whole table it tells a story it tells a story of the whole opal industry and let me explain
it to you so over here we have um in the knot in the wood is like a pocket of opal underground so
when a miner's mining knobby opal they usually find a pocket and it's a cluster of opals together
and that's what we call a pocket and around the outside of that pocket is what we call floaters
which is a the odd knobby opal just sitting there by itself for some unknown reason we don't know
why and they can have colour or they could have just be plain potch but anyway without this area
here we have the mining section without the miners we don't have an opal industry so this is a very
very important part of the industry as we move along we get to the beaten by sand pieces which is
where i come in this is what i do i find out whether opal actually cuts or not and
the pieces in here some of them are beaten by sand some of them probably could cut stones
out of but i wanted to leave them in there to make the table just a little bit extra special
so this is where the pieces that don't quite make it it's like the beaten by sand graveyard
when we get some opals that do make it they make a preform and the preforms or rubs as we call them
are pieces of opal that are ready to go to the polish and you can see here i've
got dot sticks here with stones on them and that's where i start polishing the opals so
this is a little bit of a track that goes along the table tells the story
once i've cut these stones we come to the polished area and the polished area
is all types of opal that i've put in this table and it's probably the most expensive
part because there's a lot of really nice gems in here and this is the the wholesale and retail
part of the whole opal industry which is really important as well as the mining because without
the miners and people who buy the opal there'd still be no industry so we all need each other
and from these these beautiful gems there's some absolute crackers look at the color of that one in
there and the blue in that one there's some red in there so there's some really nice gems i've i've
chosen but uh there's another couple of little facets that shoot off around the end product of
opal and some of it is in the form of fossils we like to see fossils that have been um or that
animals and and all sorts of things that had been opalized over years like we've got an opalized
piece of wood here there's a piece of coral there's an uh there's an opalized bone a piece of
bone from some creature and there's a yabby button so a yabby button is a part of the yabby tail
and that's also been opalized here's a carving this is a carving that my father did many years
ago and shows you that you can also carve opal and make it into beautiful settings through carvings
there's also a couple of things here like there's a youtube video piece that i made an opal carving
of myself there's the hand polished opal that i polished by hand is also in here down on the
corner here is three stones there's my sons my wife's and my dad's first opal they ever cut
so that's quite important down there and the lucky last end of the food chain is the opal ring at the
end and that's where opal eventually ends up in somebody's collection or into a beautiful
piece of jewelry to be worn and loved so i love this that this whole table came out as a story
and this is now going to be the feature of my workshop right here so excited the legs are
coming in about two weeks time so happy for that but for now we can just enjoy the table
you