First stone on the Rev XS!

Noel Rowe was one of the early builders of the Revision "H" faceting head, to which he added a digital stepper motor and controller. You can see it HERE.

Upon seeing the new "Revision XS" facter, he knew that the only way to get me out of the shop, making machines and BATT laps was to "Motivate" me..Which he did by sending me some very tempting rough to try. I was attracted by the beautiful teal/cyan color of a piece of fluorite. I had not cut it in twenty years, so it was with some stage fright I approached the challenge. Using a 1200 plated diamond lap as a "hogging" lap was novel, but the cutting and polishing was quite uneventful, except that I ran the BATT lap at 550 RPM. For a heavy-handed speed animal like me that was a first.

My timidity caused me to do two things: I made a thick girdle because of fluorite's cleavage, and I also cut it as I do topaz, by skewing the crystal slightly off-axis so that no cleavage plane coincided with anyfacet main. I cut it as a freeform because I wanted to maximize yeild. OK, I was greedy; I left a little veil in.

Noel had also included some spessartite garnet and some mint peridot that I am dying to try. I had always neglected spessartite because I felt it looked too much like citrine...but that shows that you have to actually SEE the rough before arriving at such prejudices..this stuff looks like fire.

The mint peridot is going to make an incredible stone, I think.

The 9 carat freeform barion fluorite under electronic flash.

and under tungsten lighting. The pictures do not do the cyan/teal color justice.

STOP THE PRESSES!

It was too cold to work in the garage today, so I cut the Spessartite! Give me hard stuff anytime! :-)
I used only two laps: A #600, then went directly to a BATT Redwing whose outer zone was charged with 4K, and polished on the inner zone with 60K diamond. 5.3X6.5 mm, 1.5 cts.

It's even colder in the garage. So what the heck, I cut the peridot.Only two laps used, again.

Noel's Rough Site is at:

RoughToCut