How to Cut Rocks Step Three

Sorry it took so long to get back to this, the holidays were a bit crazy and since we are now short one person at work (with absolutely no plans to replace him for at least a year) I have been working more too. This is tough because even though I like my job I would rather be designing and making jewelry so having less time to spend doing that and promoting my store does not really thrill me. Although the extra money is always a good thing lol!

So we left off at the trim saw. The next step is cabbing the stone. This takes a little more skill and time although there are some tricks to make it easier. This step requires lots of water instead of oil to avoid heat. You do want to make sure all of the oil is off of your stone. We use a bucket of kitty litter and a brush. Then wash well with warm, soapy water. (The large round object in the picture is a vibratory tumbler. We use this for all of the odds and ends left over from the trim saw . After several weeks it gives us highly polished stones that the kids at the gem show go nuts over). So we have our lovely almost oval trim sawed stone and we are going to start grinding it to a 15 degree angle with the machine on the left. This machine does not have removable belts, the grinding wheel has tiny diamond pieces embedded in it. This spins at a high rate of speed. A plastic apron is a good idea with this machine as the water you use to keep it from getting too hot sprays in the direction of your body not the wall. Also eye protection is a must. Here is one of the tricks of the trade. The grinding wheel has a natural 15 degree angle so that you really don't have to do any fancy calculations to get it right. Remember that oval we drew on here with the magnesium stick? This is where you want to grind it to. This is the back of your piece and the angled portion is the front. When you have it to the right size and before you begin to grind your dome you need to put it on a dap stick. I am going to leave off here because I need to take pictures of the dap stick and how it is done before I can continue. (Remembering the camera is always an issue for me. When I head for the rock club I usually have two toolboxes and my purse, and since it is winter my coat, gloves etc. I'm lucky I remember my name on some days much less the camera lol!). This is a good stopping point as I will be able to finish hoe to cut rocks with my next post on this subject in a couple of weeks.

How To Cut Rocks (Step Two)

The second step to making a cabochon from raw rock is to use a template and decide which portion of the rock you want to use for your finished masterpiece. This particular template is two-sided which I prefer as I like to make my mark on both sides. I then mark a "b" on the side that is the back with a magnesium wire. That way I don't make any mistakes when I am forming the stone. Sometimes the back and the front can be very similar and as much work as goes into forming these cabochons, I don't want to make a mistake on which side I am working on. Templates com in mm sizes and you can also get squares, hearts, crosses and many more. I am still a beginner so I generally use the medium sized oval. At this point it is time to fire up the trim saw. Make sure that you wear safety glasses at all times because I can guarantee small pieces of rocks are going to chip off and go flying. Basically the idea here is to trim as close to your oval (or square or whatever you choose) as possible without going over the line. There are of course rules for using this kind of equipment safely. Cut slabs only, not chunks or nodules, Cut straight lines only, let the saw do the work, forcing the saw tears out the diamonds (this is bad. The blades are expensive). If saw is running dry add oil (duh, but you'd be surprised), If the you see sparks STOP! your pushing too hard or the saw needs more oil. (see rule number three and four). Clean up after yourself. So to the right is a picture of Ohio flint (beautiful rock by the way. As you can see flint is not necessarily all grey). You can see the magnesium template mark and you can also see that I got a hair too close to the line and also managed to ship a corner off. (What can I say it was my first attempt.) I am saving this for when I have practiced a bit more so I can salvage it because this is one beautiful piece of rock. That pretty much covers step number two. I will post again next week on step number three.

How to Cut Rocks (The first step to making a cabochan)

Okay so I have joined my local lapidary club also know as the Summit County Lapidary and Gem Society. (in conjunction with the Akron Mineral Society they are holding a huge rock and gem show the last weekend in October. If you are in town and interested in this kind of thing you should definitely check it out. Just leave me a comment and I will be happy to give the details. If I have time I will blog the details sometime next week This is in Akron, Ohio)

Anyway I am learning to take the raw form of the rock and turn

it into a finished cabochon. This is what you start out with. Actually first you have to go to the quarry or mine (This one is quartz from a quarry about 20 minutes from my house) and find the stones that you want to use. Be prepared, bring LOTS of water, not only is it hot, thirsty work but you need several bottles of water to squirt on your rocks to get rid of dirt and see what they might look like when they have a shine.

This particular stone on the left is a fossil stone that one of the more experienced rock club members pointed out to me. (Okay he pretty much gave it to me because I would have stepped right over it even with him giving me lots of hints lol!) Any way I am pretty excited about this one and hope to get many good pieces to work with out of it.

So once you have your stones (did I mention how heavy they are to carry back to the car? I ended up with a laundry basket full of them) you need to wash them off and decide which ones to start with. Then it is time to start cutting them up. This is one

of the slabbers at the rock club. Pretty simple to use. You do have to make sure that the rock is clamped down extremely well because it would be a VERY BAD THING if one came loose while being sawed. They have templates that allow you to measure how thick you want each piece (not computerized or anything you hold the template up to the saw and move the rock over to match lol). Any way you set your chain so it stops automatically and you close the lid and turn it on. That's all there is to it. Oh and you want to wear old clothes and a full body vinyl or plastic apron. Did I mention how much oil these machines use? Never, never open the lid until the saw stops spinning! So once it stops spinning and you give it a couple of minutes to let all of the oil drip back down to the bottom (you do this as many times as you need

to slab all of your rock and this is what you end up with. After you

clean the oil off (kitty litter works great for this) and then you wash them thoroughly.

As you can see we still have some work to do to make these slabs of rock into something pretty and interesting to wear. I am going to continue with this next week at some point and show you what the next step is.

Can you see the possibilities?!

P.S No puppies yet. She looks like she is going to explode poor thing. Will update as we go.