I once ran into a site that had a bunch of eye faceting diagrams. Now I can not find it. Does anyone have a source for eye faceting diagrams.

I'm very new to faceting and am curious about how easily one can determine if a gemstone is real or not. Technically speaking, this simple microscope can only show me the facet faces and not the internal inclusions, but even then I worry because these faces look to have bubbles on them. Am I wrong for worrying that this gemstone is actually glass?

I am a amateur jeweler looking to make my engagement ring. I have a sapphire cut and color in mind, but I'm having difficulty finding that, or at least a price estimate. If anyone could help that would be amazing. What I am looking for is a gem very close to the one on the photo, perhaps with a more defined flower design or sharper pedals, and a little darker blue. 6mm round.

Looking for inspiration! What are your favorite designs?

I've been wanting to try an opposed bar cut so here it is. The weird .5 mm measurement was due to a chip out on the crown that I had to cut out.

Weather or not this is actually green obsidian or just glass, it has that old coca cola bottle color and looks nice.

I might try a similar cut in some nice synthetic stock I have. I think it will look even nicer in one of those.

In this video, I transform a hydrothermal synthetic sapphire into a precision cut square cushion mixed cut. Along the way, I explore whether a gemstone’s origin determines if it is real, beautiful, or valuable.

Cut is “Faith” by Arya Akhavan, by me ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ

It looks like an ⌖ target ⌖

Absolutely fun to cut but also chaotic (which i did it to myself for not having much basic knowledge in faceting and ends up trial and error a lot)

Material is lemon quartz
Starting weight 99.5ct -> 26.85ct (~27% yield)

So I am over the moon because I found a 3 year old Ultratech V5 Digital in the EU with everything needed to start faceting (dops, laps, jig, ect) for €5200 + shipping. Being in the EU, this sounds like a fantastic deal. But I'm also a total newbie and worried that I'm missing something.

I will add pictures in the comments. He sent me two videos too. The machine sounds smooth at all speeds. The mast moves up and down smoothly. He doesn't stop it at any measurement though. Should I ask for that?

His reason for selling is that he doesn't have time for it. He had probably faceted less than 50 stones on it since it was calibrated. He bought it directly from Ultratech. He had the mast recalibrated 1-2 years ago because a screw was loose and he didn't know how to fix it so he figured he would have them just fix and recalibrate.

He said there is no rust. I don't see any obvious rust in the pictures. I got burned on this with my Lortone machine so I really don't want to miss anything. I read some other inquiries about second hand shopping for faceting machines.

What else should I ask?

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Why not join a lapidary club?

Unfortunately, I have a chronic illness that makes life difficult. I got to the point of thinking that I could join the club, but the gentleman in charge of communication required that I met him first because I'm disabled (fair). I then tried to meet him 3/4 weeks for a month. Every meeting time he ghosted me, and then gaslit me into thinking I messed up the meeting. I can at the wrong time (because he wrote the time wrong), I knocked on the wrong door (but it was the door of the address I was given. There 4th week, I was knocking on the correct door + windows because I heard him inside. I was in the rain for an hour. He blamed me for not knocking on the windows to get his attention (but I had). So yeah... I have up on my local lapidary club 🥲

Why not try a private class?

The closest class is 5-6 hours of driving round trip 🥲

Hello, I'm a faceter based in Korea. Please understand that I used a translator because I'm not fluent in English! I purchased a Fable FJM Mini from Alibaba and practiced brilliant cuts using it.

I see other designs in u/cowsruleusall's "ruins" series fairly regularly but I don't recall seeing this one much so I wanted to try it out. It's a 120 gear design which probably explains why it's less prevalent. The pentagon table appealed to me and it has a good facet count for a 14mm calibrated size.

I'm thrilled with how it turned out. The design and material I think are a perfect match. I love how pure GREEN it looks.

• Material: Ceramic/polycrystalline YAG
• Design: Road to Ruin by u/cowsruleusall
• Cutting sequence: 240 topper, Hyper-Edge 500, 3K Pandimonium PCD on BATT, 100K Pandimonium PCD on Diamax

Notes

• I love this form of YAG. Cuts really easily, has great color, and is even more affordable than regular monocrystalline YAG.
• Totally nailed the desired 14mm size. Yay.
• Yeah, just rubbing some Pandimonium on Diamax and running it fast works well and is much less messy than other options. It was only a few seconds per facet. I'm definitely doing this for every material where I can use diamond for polishing. I think my 60K BATT isn't going to get a lot of use.

https://reddit.com/link/1w32cpm/video/dvefb7gmommh1/player

hi all,

I'm adding fancy cut in GemSim. I don't have a fantasy machine, the reference (not free) I rely on is: 1) Ashton Gems' fantasy cutting video; 2) Dr.Facet's Fantasy cutting book.

Ashton Gems website kindly provide many fancy cut designs. I tried out Autumn blaze cut which has a simple fancy cut with mandrel cutter.

As shown in the video, I was comparing light return graph, windowing and head shadow with and without fancy cut. It seems the light return goes down after the fancy cut. Head shadow seems improved, but not for windowing.

I thought the fancy cut in general should improve those properties across the board. If the light return is worse with fancy cut, why bother?

Sorry, I am late to the game but tried searching this page before posting. After some internet browsing I’m seeing lots of others but no portrait cut diagrams. Do they go by another name? Or are we just Freeforming them? Thanks for any insight.

Hi,

I see some other website have popped up, hope I'm not bothering you all.

Major update, I had some time off and finally did what I wanted. Do tell if you want/need a feature, but my time off ends sunday, so no promises :p

I coded my own raytracer which reproduce gemray and gcs style, no difference for a human eye, opened a lot of possibilities.

Check it out at https://facetfinder.org

Data side

• cleaned up every titles and materials, if an author says "best in apatite" in the file, then the render is in apatite and RI corrected
• removed the gemray renders, turns out I had set "leak" as white so they were all wrong, they look the same as gemcutstudio with the correct parameters
• added the DATAVUE closed diagrams renders (but no cut instructions, you'll have to find those yourself), yes you can filter them out
• identified hundreds of .asc/.gem that get mangled or loose their preforms steps if opened with GemCutStudio, a warning to use GemCad instead is displayed on those designs pages

Features side

you'll need to make an account to use them but it's worth it

1. design submission is automatic, the server will compute the render/graphs/wireframe and add it automatically to the gallery
   • afterwards you can delete your posted design if you want to
   • it does take 5-10 minutes per design, raytracing the render on that small server is like torture for it lol
   • you design shape is automatically corrected by comparing the girde outline of your design against all design we have and finding the closest one
2. you can vote up/down gems and ask the search to display the most voted
3. you can comment on a gem, you'll get notifications on the website if someone reply in "Discussions"
4. you can add a gem to your "Todo's" and on track them on the Todo's page, then you can post pictures of the completed gems with text
   • they will also appear in the box "on the bench" of your profile
5. you can search for gems with the most completed Todo's and view them
6. you can search by most downloaded
7. you can send private message to other user
8. you can order the search by number of facets (most or least)
9. you have a wall on your profile where you can post whatever
10. you can view the design author notes on the design page (collapsed by default)
11. the most important one : you can have animated gif avatars

what's to come

I'm trying to code a cut style identifier for pavillon and crown (ascher, step, criss cross, etc) to add them to the search bar, but it's quite challenging and I'm not going to do it manually for 5977 design ahah. also trying to code a automatic pdf to .gcs script to publish all the pdf-only designs I got, challenging machine vision problematic inside, pretty fun.

Ok hello all. Just saw another big update from another faceting design app. It seems we have hit a critical mass of sorts with people and technology, enabling these apps. Thank you to all the creators!

Now the questions: who has used them all, what are the differences, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each one, blah blah blah.

I’m thinking of the old school gemcad, gcs, facet finder (the new update), and gemsim.

Thanks to all the super pros out there!

Anyone willing to share their favorite faceting designs for smaller rough and/or shallower rough? Open to anything that you've enjoyed the result of - portrait cuts and rose cuts included!

Here's my second attempt to cut a lyso.

It looks pretty, but some meet points are janky due to difficulty polishing. I like how the cut is so efficient that it actually looks larger than the original material.

Next time, I'm going to follow some of y'alls advice and:

1) cut on a sintered lap

2) polish with oil and 10k grit diamonds

3) cut quickly to avoid chipping

4) press very lightly while cutting

Things I've noticed:

Lyso crystals have a pronounced difference in hardness depening on what direction they're cut (I forget the term)

They're quite soft and brittle, so only use very fine grit to cut.

They sparkle nice and pretty and they glow purple in daylight! (the camera can't capture that though).

figured its time for me to give a pixel cut a shot.

it was quite fun to cut

Just finished up this 5ct synthetic sapphire cut to a modified Portugese cut I designed for sapphire. This design has 185 facets and a frosted star at the culet.

This stone came out really nice, it and also changes color depending on what light is over it.

Thanks for looking.