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 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