Faceting Welo Opal George Ellis

Prepare Remove all pumice and sand. Use a motorized hand tool, an old lap, or a dental scaler. Remove obvious cracks on the edges and hand preform.

Design Opal’s RI is around 1.45 Pick your main angles so they are below critical angle of ~42 degrees

Dopping Opal, hydrophane or otherwise, hates heat. I use CA only for opal. The pores can absorb what you use, so wax might penetrate into the stone.

Cutting Start as you would with a normal stone, but use finer laps.

Cutting We are cutting with water, so the hydrophane effect starts to show.

Cutting Ouch! It cracked. Don’t panic as it can do that. Just lower the protrator and cut it out.

Pre-Polish 3K or higher. Clean the swarf very often. Clean off the swarf again. 3K will move facets very fast at the culet. Watch for this.

Polish I use a Greenway with NO additional polish. Oxide impregnated is your safest bet. You will scratch it. It will test your patience. You can win in the end. Low speed and a light touch.

Polish Watch for ‘tears’ on the previous tier. You may want to retouch the previous tier. Again, Low speed and a light touch.

Transfer CA to Gel CA has been the safest for me After it has set in 24 hours, using a paring knife to loosen the connection.

Transfer On a hard surface with a paper towel, rap off the dop with the back of the paring knife.

Finish Polish the table as the rest. Remove the stone from the dop in CLEAN acetone.

Finish Right out of the acetone. 2 hours later.

Mounting It worked for me 4 times already. Just work like you are putting lug nuts on eggshell. Move a little, go to the opposite post and move it a little. No hurry. The time you take is the less time you would repolishing, so patience.

Sigh It needs the table lowered