About the service
I am a lapidary, and I work with the rough you send me. The first thing I do is not switch on the saw but sit with the specimen under a lamp and turn it in my hands, wet it, look at where the pattern runs. An agate has one plane that shows the banding and a dozen that waste it; a jasper may hide a scene half a centimetre under the skin. I mark the cut line with a pencil on wet stone and tell you what I expect to see before I take the diamond off the shelf. If the piece is fractured, riddled with hairline cracks or has a healed seam through the middle, I say so first: such stones split on the blade or come apart in the tumbler, and that is a risk you accept before I start, not a surprise afterwards.
Everything is cut wet. The diamond blade runs with water or coolant flooding the kerf, and the reason is not the blade but my lungs and yours. Dry cutting of quartz, agate, jasper and most silicates throws respirable crystalline silica, and silicosis does not heal. I cut wet, I wear a fitted respirator when I dress wheels or handle dry grit, and I hose the bench down rather than sweep it. The blade itself eats stone: a slab saw takes roughly a millimetre and a half to two millimetres per cut, so if you want six-millimetre plates from a fist-sized nodule, count the losses into the plan with me. Thin plates for light work, thicker ones for standing pieces.
After the saw comes the patient part. Flat work goes through stepped grinding from coarse grit to fine, each step removing the scratches of the one before, and skipping a step only hides them until the polish reveals them. Then felt, oxide, and a slow hand until the face is a mirror and the pattern reads from across a room. Small stones go into the barrel and stay there for weeks: coarse, medium, fine, burnish, each stage a full run with fresh grit and a washed barrel. A cabochon is shaped to your template, domed by eye and thumb, girdle kept even, and the dome checked against the light so it does not look flat when set.
One boundary I keep firmly: I cut, I do not identify or value. What the stone actually is, and what it is worth, is the work of a gemmologist with the right instruments, and I will tell you to take it to one rather than guess. You supply the rough; I return it worked, dried, labelled and packed in foam with the offcuts, because the offcuts are yours too.
What the work includes:
— inspection of the rough and an agreed cutting plan with the pattern in mind
— wet sawing with a diamond blade, slabs to a thickness you choose
— stepped grinding and felt polishing to a mirror finish
— tumbling of small stones through the full multi-week cycle
— cabochons to your template, with even girdle and checked dome
— honest warning on fractured material before any cut is made
— packing in foam, offcuts returned with the finished pieces
Everything is cut wet. The diamond blade runs with water or coolant flooding the kerf, and the reason is not the blade but my lungs and yours. Dry cutting of quartz, agate, jasper and most silicates throws respirable crystalline silica, and silicosis does not heal. I cut wet, I wear a fitted respirator when I dress wheels or handle dry grit, and I hose the bench down rather than sweep it. The blade itself eats stone: a slab saw takes roughly a millimetre and a half to two millimetres per cut, so if you want six-millimetre plates from a fist-sized nodule, count the losses into the plan with me. Thin plates for light work, thicker ones for standing pieces.
After the saw comes the patient part. Flat work goes through stepped grinding from coarse grit to fine, each step removing the scratches of the one before, and skipping a step only hides them until the polish reveals them. Then felt, oxide, and a slow hand until the face is a mirror and the pattern reads from across a room. Small stones go into the barrel and stay there for weeks: coarse, medium, fine, burnish, each stage a full run with fresh grit and a washed barrel. A cabochon is shaped to your template, domed by eye and thumb, girdle kept even, and the dome checked against the light so it does not look flat when set.
One boundary I keep firmly: I cut, I do not identify or value. What the stone actually is, and what it is worth, is the work of a gemmologist with the right instruments, and I will tell you to take it to one rather than guess. You supply the rough; I return it worked, dried, labelled and packed in foam with the offcuts, because the offcuts are yours too.
What the work includes:
— inspection of the rough and an agreed cutting plan with the pattern in mind
— wet sawing with a diamond blade, slabs to a thickness you choose
— stepped grinding and felt polishing to a mirror finish
— tumbling of small stones through the full multi-week cycle
— cabochons to your template, with even girdle and checked dome
— honest warning on fractured material before any cut is made
— packing in foam, offcuts returned with the finished pieces
