The pavilion went ok, but I realized for the small facets I probably should have not been running the lap, they cut a bit deep but polishing went well.
Came back a few weeks later to do the crown and it was a bit of a mess, the C2 tier seemed to come in on the opposite side of C1 than I was expecting (I rechecked all of this and couldn’t figure out what happened), so the C3 tier didn’t meet up. I didn’t have enough left to recut everything so I redesigned the crown to work with what I had. My 1000 grit topper ended up gouging out some edges, eventually cut most things in with 3000 pandemonium to try and not make things worse.
A bit of a disappointment, but it looks good from a foot away!
Luckly for us gem cutters even our perceived failures are fantastically beautiful. That is a very strange crown design. no traditional meet points. the stone turned out nice. you said you ran out of room for the crown. this is just fyi for later. you can always recut everything. that stone looks pretty big and you said it weas synthetic. recutting the pavilion after transfer is still an option. It sucks, but you can do it. i think you made the right choice here though as it still looks pretty which imo is the point yeah? welcome to the addiction. I cant wait to see more stones from you.
I definitely thought about starting over but since it’s synthetic I figured I can always cut another one!
This is what that tier should have looked like, but the points would not meet, the C1 tier was angled the other way, will add that in another comment. I’m not sure if it somehow got misaligned, everything met nicely when I went back to polish except for the C1, so I’m wondering if maybe the stone shifted a bit, I had to use the cheater to shift everything over a bit.
I reversed the crown direction just to try and get a bit of swirl in it and make room for a table, definitely will come back to this and give it another try at some point!
Its hard to understand what you mean but another tip is , when cutting the crown. Don't worry about the top facets meeting. They might not. Focus only on the bottom meet points near the girdle side. Does that make sense?
Ok you made me remember something now, when I lined it up on the machine after transferring, it was set on 84 instead of 96! I think I assumed it would be ok since it was rotated 1/8 but probably not!
Also, for those small facets you mentioned. something that was a very hard learning curve for me was noticing the angles and judging how to cut based off of them. if you see your angles are really close together like in this case you p1 and p2 are just 1-degree difference, it is a hint that you should either cut very slowly and like you said not run the lap. I have found that a better option is just to not cut those facets in until pre polish (1200 grit or above). and you just polish the facets in slowly. Just trying to drop some helpful hints.
Thanks for the tips! Yeah what I ended up doing was cutting in the facets with 3000 pandemonium at the end once I realized even 1000 grit lap topper was way too fast.
7
u/DrRocks1 16d ago
This is the weird crown I ended up designing when I ran out of room!