Faceting Another Massive Quartz Over 1000 Carats In A Square Cut!

Oh dear, what have I got myself into again? That's a big one. Hello everyone, I'm Matt. Welcome back to Matt's Corner of Gem Cutting. And I am doing another mega quartz. And why do I keep doing these massive quartz? Well, I had originally agreed to do five of them for Paul. I've done two for him so far. One I videoed. The other one I didn't video was a trillion cut. I skipped videoing that one. And then this is the third of the five. This one's going to be a square. A square with clipped corners. And I still have two more upcoming large, nice large pieces of quartz I have to do. One is going to become a pear. The other one's going to become a emerald or rectangular style cut. So even though this piece weighs more than the round one I cut by about 330 carats after doing the calculations from grams, I don't think it'll finish quite as large as that one for a couple reasons. One, the shape of the rough isn't quite as optimal for doing the square cut as it can be. And there's also a few big divots running into the stone that have to be cut out, which are going to cause it to lose a little extra size. Nice crystal clear piece. Shows a pretty nice cut. I'm excited to see it. Not excited to be cutting it. It already has a nice flat area here, which I will be dopping to. So what I'm going to do is slightly smooth it out a little bit more with this heavy grit and just get straight to dopping it. I use super glue to attach the dop to the stone. Wax or epoxy are more commonly used, but this is the way I like to do it. I find that glue is the easiest to dop with. The bond strength doesn't seem to be as strong as proper wax dopping, at least on tiny stones. So there may be a little trade-off there, but adding baking soda to the glue does strengthen it some and help it set quicker. Now, how does a normal size stone I cut compare to the size of this one? I think they're pretty close in size. Yeah, totally. All right, the glue is all set up. Just about ready to get going on this piece. I'm really pushing the limits of the stone size that I'm able to cut on this machine with these jumbo pieces. So like this, this barely fits. Of this stone size, I think I'm looking at close to 40-ish hours again for the cut and polish on this stone. You could say it's going to be a real grind, but at least I could do it a little more comfortably thanks to this FlexiSpot C7 ergonomic office chair. As someone who spends most of my time sitting in a chair, it is very important to me to have a chair that is comfortable and supportive in the areas that I need, and this chair does just that. My favorite feature of the C7 chair is the adaptive lumbar support. It conforms to the spine and literally moves with me to provide continuous support to my lower back. It can also be locked in place if desired. The mesh made of DuPont elastomer and velvet yarn provides strong support, has high elasticity, and is breathable. The nice large seat cushion has adjustable depth and can be tilted forward to support a forward leaning position. This helps reduce leg pressure and better promotes blood circulation during long hours of sitting. I personally do a lot of forward leaning while fastening gemstones. The 3D armrests adjust up and down, forward and back, left and right, allowing them to be tailored to find that perfect armrest position. The adjustable height headrest also tilts so that it can be adjusted just right for comfort while working. The backrest, locked at 93 degrees, provides a stable upright posture for working, but it can also recline back to a relaxed mode. The footrest tucks nicely under the chair, and the length can be adjusted when pulled out. You can use my exclusive code C730 to enjoy a $30 discount on the C7 chair. There is a 30-day return policy for a risk-free trial and 10-year warranty on parts. It is honestly a really nice chair for the price. Now back to the grinding wheel. To begin the fastening of this stone, I will use a new 60 grit diamond plated lap to roughen some of the facets until I've established a general girdle outline and center point. So, on the video of the round jumbo quartz over 1,000 carats, there are a lot of comments concerned about silicosis and me not wearing a mask. I am aware of silicosis. It is a lung disease that can develop from prolonged exposure to silica dust, usually at least several years of regular exposure. The silica dust causes permanent lung damage that is not curable. Silica is the second most common material in the earth's crust after oxygen, so there are a lot of rock types that contain it. It is in concrete, cinder blocks, and road materials. Exposure is more common in industrial type occupations that grind or break down these materials in some way. There are safety measures that help reduce exposure, and personal protective equipment like masks is actually the last measure of defense in the OSHA silica standard. If exposure can be kept under the regulation of 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air over an eight-hour shift, you are not required to wear a mask. The best way to regulate silica dust if you work around it is to use water to capture the dust. I use water with my fasting machine, which collects the dust and mostly goes down into the catch pan or drain bucket. Some water does splash out. When that water dries, the dust that was captured in it is left on the surface where the droplets landed. So I periodically spray down everything with water and clean away the dust left from the overspray. I also don't work with materials that contain silica very often. Most of the stones that I work with don't contain silica. I've only done three larger quartz pieces in the past year and probably less than 10 other regularly sized gemstones that contain silica. So between that and using adequate water, my exposure to possibly breathing in the dust is very limited, and I am not very likely to ever develop silicosis. I've moved on to using a 180 grit lap, which I use to cut in all of the pavilion facets, starting with forming a center point. A stone this size really wears out these topper laps fast. It took a couple new laps to get through the rough in at 60 grit. You might think that the laps wouldn't wear very much because the grid is made of diamond pieces, which is extremely hard, way harder than quartz. But diamonds are still very brittle. So bits of these diamond pieces will chip or break off over time as it comes in contact with the stone being faceted, eventually smoothing them out a lot, losing cutting power. When a lap starts cutting too slowly for my liking at its grit size, I'll switch it out for a new one. The new 180 grit lap that I started with was cutting more like a 600 grit lap from the get-go and was taking a very long time to cut in the facets. So I switched to a different 180 grit lap about halfway through, though they are supposed to be the same grit size. The second lap was obviously cutting much rougher than the first at a level that seemed more normal for 180 grit. After 180, I do move on to using a 600 grit lap. I often can start at this grit size on smaller stones. On this stone, it is just to remove the bigger scratches from the previous grit. As I move up grit sizes, the scratches get finer and finer. When I get through polish, the scratches will be so fine that you can't even see them with the naked eye. The next grit size that I use is 3000 grit. On really large stones, I typically run through at least four grits before getting to polishing. The 3000 grit is my last grit before polish or my pre-polished grit. You can start seeing into this stone a lot better at this grit size and the facets have a sort of dull polished look to them. The facets I've gone over make a nice contrast with the facets still at 600 grit. I'll be polishing all the facets on this stone, but on some designs, facets are purposefully left unpolished to achieve a certain visual effect. Facets left unpolished are called frosted facets. Putting frosted facets along the edge between two facets is also done sometimes, which creates some really cool looking contrast. I wash out my catch pan and wipe off my desk again before heading on to polish. I want things to be fairly clean for polishing, as any contaminants that get on the polish lap can cause unwanted scratching, which can be a real pain to work out. There is a good amount of quartz in a clay-like texture that collected in the bottom of my catch pan. I did save that in a container before washing the catch pan outside. I'm thinking that the quartz sludge may work in a glaze for pottery. I use cerium oxide to polish quartz. I like to make a slurry for polishing by lightly spraying the lap with water and rubbing some cerium oxide powder around on the lap to form the slurry. The polish is done at a lower speed and the lap is kept moist, just using the mist from a spray bottle. Too much water washes the slurry off. Still, the slurry containing the polished compound eventually gets pushed or washed off the lap and needs to be reapplied. I have to reapply the slurry quite often during the many hours it takes to polish this massive stone. The facets on this stone are fairly large, which takes a good amount of time to polish each one. With the depth to width of the stone, I was limited on what I could design to save the size of the stone while not adding facets that are too shallow, causing a windowing effect by allowing the light that enters the stone to escape. I want the stone to stay brilliant and even though there isn't a whole lot of facets for its size, the rendering of the cut looked like it would be really nice. Mmm, that's a nice polish. It is definitely worth the time it takes to get a fine polish like this. That is a really high surface luster and it looks really good. I use super glue to transfer the stone to a coned dop. I build up the glue a couple of times to increase the surface area of the bond so that there isn't so much tension right on the tip of the stone and the super glue can be dissolved easily later in acetone. The original dop isn't attached to a finished portion of the stone, so it can be safely removed by heating the dop to weaken the bond. I'm gonna go ahead and just put this mast extension on now. I've designed the crown with some pretty shallow facets, so I know that I'm gonna need this already. So I'm just gonna use this extension piece the whole time. I went ahead and got this extension piece after running into trouble maxing the height adjustment while cutting the jumbo round cords. I knew I would need it while faceting these other jumbo pieces. I run back through the same sequence of grits for the crown of the stone as I did for the pavilion, cutting in all the facets starting at the heavy grit and running back over each of them at every grit level. The only thing to note is that I leave the girdle a little larger to begin with as it will get smaller as I run through the grit sizes. I'll bring it in a little closer to where I want it with 180 grit and then finish sizing it at the 600 grit. So I am self-taught in faceting in that I haven't taken any courses or had anyone teach me faceting. I have only used free resources like any YouTube videos I could find on faceting along with articles or discussions on problems I ran into to guide my learning. I definitely have the knack for faceting and picked up on the skill relatively easy. It only took me a few months of practice to start getting really good at it. I have been faceting for over four years now but I am still learning ways to improve here and there. My videos are a way to share my faceting experience with you and give back as a resource to those learning faceting. The name of my channel, Matt's Corner of Gem Cutting, has double meaning in that I literally work out of a small corner of my living room and also it is my take on gem cutting or the way I do it. It is my corner of the gem cutting world. The faceting style that I use is meat point faceting. When using the meat point style, facets are added to a stone based on meat points formed by other facets usually starting at a center point or girdle outline that is first formed. Stones cut this way can be very precise and repeatable. I also like this style because my approach to gem cutting is as a form of art to bring out the beautiful potential of a stone. I am not as concerned about saving a little weight as optimizing the beauty that a stone can become. In nice stones, I still try to optimize a cut for a stone to save what size I can while maintaining a cut design that will still look great. Quartz is a very abundant material and isn't too difficult to come by in very large and clean pieces so I'm not concerned at all about the weight that was ground off. The pieces that I have been cutting for Paul have originated from here in the States from Arkansas. All right, here all the facets are cut and polished save one that being the table facet but look how great this is looking. This is why I facet and what makes the many hours of faceting this piece worth the time. Save the best for last. Well, it is probably the most important facet to have the best polish on and be scratch free as it is the facet utmost on the stone that you look through but it isn't my favorite facet to cut other than it means I am almost finished. As on this stone, the table is usually the largest facet making it the hardest to polish. Some of the inclusions reached a little further into the stone than they look to be when I judge the depth to cut the table to. Grinding until the last couple fractures were close to being removed put the table facet already at the intended meat point but to not have those inclusions right in the table I decided to cut the table a little past those meats to remove the inclusions. With the design I did on this stone, cutting the table a little past those meats still looks just fine. All right, I just got to dissolve off this glue and acetone but I got to go find a jar that the stone will actually fit in. This one, too big for that one. Let's see what I have. All right, I don't have any real good containers so I'm gonna use a bowl. No, but that's it for forever, at least overnight. Takes a little while to penetrate in there and get all that glue dissolved. I think it's gonna be a really, really nice stone. Wow, that is gorgeous. Now to check the finished weight. 233 grams. That comes out to 1165 carats. That makes it actually larger than the round one by only 5 carats making this one now the largest stone that I have faceted. I am pleasantly surprised by that because I didn't expect it to finish as heavy. It definitely already was the widest stone I have done being 68 millimeters wide. For size reference, a coin just seems too small. So how about comparing it to an old doorknob instead? It still has a bit of size on the doorknob. If I were to facet a gemstone doorknob, I think I would need to cut back a little on the size. The cut is very brilliant which still performs really well in low light and it also looks great outside. If you would, leave a comment saying which stone you like more between this one and the other jumbo round one or leave a comment about what you would like to see me facet or demonstrate related to faceting. While you're at it, smash that like button. Also, don't forget that you can use my code C730 for a $30 discount on the C7 ergonomic office chair. Thanks for your support watching my channel. I'll be back soon.