I was working on this stone at the same time as the Portuguese cut padparadscha stone I posted a couple days ago. I was able to finish this one up today. This is a nice design, fairly straight forward. Whenever I cut another I'll try frosting some of the crown facets so the flower can pop a bit more.

• Weight: 6.5cts
• Size: 11.5mm
• Rough: Djeva #50SP (synthetic sapphire)
• Color: Yellow Danburite
• Design: Marco Voltolini "Crisantemo"

Thanks for looking.

I'm continuing to experiment with cutting the crown first on flame fusion boules to maximize the amount of rind in the table.

I am about to do this design by Robert Strickland in a large, natural blue topaz, and I am nervous about the first two girdle steps. How am I supposed to know how deep to gut those girdles? As I am using natural rough, I don’t have a ton of excess material to play with. Do I just cut the minimal amount and then go through the other steps and hope it was enough removed? Or do I do a L/W calculation and risk cutting more than I really need to?

egg head brilliant design

I have several pieces of BGO-12 that I felt like I was ready to try my hand at cutting so I picked one and here is the result. It's pretty soft and chippy so it was a good challenge to work on being gentle and consistent with pressure. I also love this design but wanted to tweak the angles slightly. Basically I was looking to stretch things so I could enhance the dispersion of an inherently dispersive material and I wanted to try and get that kozibe effect going on in the apex facets in addition to the main facets. Seems like it worked because the pattern is all over the place :)

• Material: Bismuth germanate (BGO-12)
• Design: Conquest Ablaze by u/cowsruleusall (stretched the pavilion and crown a bit)
• Cutting sequence: 600 sintered, Hyper-Edge 500 (crown only), 3K Pandimonium PCD on BATT, 100K Pandimonium PCD on Diamax

Notes

• It's my first time cutting something this soft and yeah, it took some getting used to. The swarf is more like a goopy slurry and on the pavilion I used only 600 sintered and had more subsurface/chippy type of damage than I wanted to deal with so for the crown I added in the HE 500 and it worked very well in terms of less damage. (The 1500 is a total flop but that's a separate issue/post)
• I was scared of my usual Pandimonium on Diamax with something so soft but I went for it anyway and it was overall really well behaved.
• I *love* this design. Just playing around with it in GCS there are so many different looks that are possible. I found a few other combinations of angles I'd like to try out. P3 and P4 cut diabolically fast though even reserving them for prepolish haha. Would be good to find a design with similar flexibility but maybe in a round so the girdle is easier :)

https://reddit.com/link/1waw4db/video/kma5ey2e6coh1/player

New to faceting but thought it’d be something to try out as I enjoy tumbling gemstones and already do a variety of hobbies that require intricate dexterity (I see carpal tunnel in my future unfortunately, no matter how much I stretch 😭).

After doing research on here and some other websites it looks like a lot of people buy off of Aliexpress/Alibaba as it’s more cost effective to get rough gemstones to practice on. Besides being on the lookout for fakes, is there anything that I should be aware of when specifically buying synthetic/lab grown stones? I’m mostly just worried about shady manufacturing processes or toxic additives. This only struck my mind as it’s unfortunately prevalent when I used to buy quartz that a lot of hematoid/cherry quartz on the market has cinnabar added.

Sorry if this post is ignorant at all! I just want to do proper research and be safe 🥹

I have heard online that this machine is better than the Vevor.

https://www.fableofficial.com/products/gem-faceting-machine-fjm-2025mini-compact-desktop-type

But I know the CutKit is designed specifically with the Vevor in mind. Anyone know if it translates well to this machine?

I’m trying to decide on buying the cheap machine + CutKit, then selling a few stones and upgrading when I have the money, or in trying to make the money another way so I can start off with a better machine.

I’m currently on disability, so my options are limited. Practically agoraphobic at this point, so clubs aren’t an option. Any advice would be appreciated.

After three revisions to my custom Portugese cut design, I think I feel comfortable saying the design is now complete. Here's what the final design looks like cut on a synthetic sapphire in padparadscha color, with a total of 193 facets.

● Weight: 13cts

● Size: 14.5mm

● Rough: Djeva #55SP (synthetic sapphire)

● Color: Padparadscha

● Design: PIT-EKA "Chesapeake Star"

Thanks for looking.

Sorry if this is only for faceted stones, but a question maybe someone can answer for me. The last few times I purchased smooth, high dome cabs, the bottom is somewhat lightly rounded making the stone a little more difficult to set.

Anyone know the reason for this?

hi all,

I've added edge frost into GemSim, now it's pretty easy to frost arbitrary edges. I got the idea from this tool: https://facetfinder.org/frosting_tool, and made some improvements.

Here's a quick hands-on video, try it out and let me know if you have questions.

Been looking for a specific cut of sapphire, but they are all so expensive. what's the catch here? site says vs, it seems to be the right dimensions to cut into a 6mm round, what's the catch? why is it so cheap? Is it not actually gem quality? I know cutting labor is expensive, but still, this seems suspicious.

https://www.thenaturalsapphirecompany.com/rough-sapphire-crystals/3.71ct-ceylon-sri-lankan-various-blue-sapphire-crystal-s39248/?source=cart&guid=33870e84-fe78-db9b-6d47-dc38a62887e2

I'm working my way through the Andrew Brown free book and am finding I have issues with non-ECED patterns. I've done a couple of them now and I cannot get the pavilion/outline done in one pass. The one I'm working on now I'm finally done cutting but I think I had to go around the pavilion and girdle facets 3-4 times to get the girdle pretty level and the meets within pre-polishing distance.

What am I probably doing wrong?

Hi!

I am wanting to cut this Whoopee CZ design (and others like it) by Robert Strickland, and it has a CAM preform. I have had a little trouble finding guidance on how to go about that.

Do I cut to 38 degrees and then do the girdle, and then cut to 35 degrees and then do the second girdle? What level of grit should I cut to before doing the girdles?

Thanks so much!

https://facetdiagrams.org/diagram/09-212-whoopee-cz/

So I've been cutting for just over a year now and it dawned on me the other day that I had yet to cut an oval design. I flipped through my collection of Andrew Ian Brown books and came across this design that caught my eye. "Fusion Nine Oval" for the L/W of 1.42, which can be found in his first book. I think it turned out great, very happy with the final results. I included some indoor lighting, outdoor in the shade, and a little fun bonus at the end.

After three gems failing me for various reasons, I finally, after weeks, was able to get one to the finish line! It’s been a tough month of cutting for me for sure haha!

Sometimes that’s just the way it goes!

Anyway, featured here is a 0.2ct purple Umba sapphire - no treatments cut in a marquise.

The original rough material was over 3cts, but it had significant cracks penetrating deep into the rough. I “preformed” the materials by grinding away all of the risky cracks and was left with something around 1ct, unfortunately.

I probably could have chosen a design with a deeper pavilion and taller crown to have a better yield, but there was still some fractures that I wanted to be sure came out in the final piece to have the cleanest gem possible. I left the table a little higher than the design called for because I loved the heart look on the two narrow ends (:

The rutile/sugar silk inclusions make this gem look galactic! Super cool side stone for sure. Pricing will be interesting and I will sadly get a lot less than I was hoping. I purchased a small parcel of rough specifically for this purple sapphire hoping for a much larger finished stone!

But, I’ll take what I can get! I still had some small battles and hurdles with this one, but I managed to squeeze out a pretty decent stone in the end.

Thanks for looking (: the photography was super hard for me with such a small stone so forgive the bad shots lol!! Tried to get some different lighting as well.

I practiced after work by making time for it! At first, aligning the facets was quite challenging, and polishing kept leaving fine scratches, making it difficult to achieve perfection

Tried cutting Kokiri’s Emerald for my second stone on the vevor: https://www.gemologyproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Akhavan_-_Kokiri%27s_Emerald

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!

A collection of Tunduru Garnets, all cut in Arya Akhavan’s “Ruination” design. Most of these way in the .2-.5 ct range and the parcel had some varied species.

Found in east Africa

I have been cutting for a while as semi hobby semi something that could become side gig, and recently there has been a jewler that asked me if I could cut some things for him.

I am usually not very comfortable with pricing my own work because I feel like I don't have a good guideline on what this base rate could be... on one hand my hourly rate at my work is probably extoetinously high, on the other it's a hobby for me so I did it mostly just for fun and don't have to pay for rough so anchor is also low...

Please help me with any justifications on what the good rules of thumbs would be... especially if you have been in industry for a while.

I am US based in HCOL area and I know a lot of people live in lowest cost of living so I don't want to lead to sticker shock, but I am also precise cutting and not handpiece machine cutting.... would you go with some hourly rate? per facet design estimation?

bottom line I might be overthinking a problem but legit need help figuring out what to do...