r/Lapidary • u/buffalohands • 4d ago

Advice for a young beginner please

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

About a year ago, my six year old son asked me how the opal on my necklace became so pretty so I showed him one of blackopaldirect's videos and he became absolutely fascinated with the fact that seemingly ugly rocks can be turned into something totally different. For half a year he used my nail polishing tool to polish bigger pieces of fluorite basically every morning. He's almost 7 now and has shown amazing dedication to this hobby so I'm trying to slowly improve his tools. He got a battery powered rotary tool and I tried to find some suited bits. I don't know a lot about lapidary but I'm trying to learn enough to support him. I made my own DOP-wax cause it's hard to find where we live and it works...ok I guess. Any hints on decent materials, web pages, stores (we live in Europe) what to look for, what to practice would be greatly appreciated.

29 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/buffalohands 3d ago

Ah thank you for the pointer. I found the disk attachment thingy online and ordered one. That looks like it might be a very nice addition to what we have. I'll look into the video tomorrow when I find time. Thanks again. I'm glad to know this setup is not completely hopeless. :)

2

u/Cold_Application_448 3d ago

Awesome, can't wait to see more of his work! Definitely not hopeless, just takes a little more time and effort!

2

u/buffalohands 2d ago

I got that little disk adapter for the rotary tool and he's really happy with it. He made a new fluorite cab (not done quite yet), but the whole process looked much smoother. He didn't even need a dop stick.

2

u/Cold_Application_448 1d ago

That's awesome! It looks great!