Lapidary 101 - How To Make A Cabochon

Hey everybody, it's Michael at Gotcha Rocks and today I'm going to show you how to cab a piece of lace agate. All right so the first step for cabbing out a stone is to actually put it on a dop stick which we already did in a previous video so I'll put a link I think it'll be up here for that video and I've done that already which are right here so that the dopping is just means that you put them on a stick or a dowel rod using wax. So this is one of the ones that I did previously and it turned out really nice so we're going to do another right here so a little bit rougher looking but trust me it'll look awesome. So today we're going to use the cab king and we're this is a six inch cab king and it has an automatic water feed from the bottom so if you haven't checked one of these out please do you can check them out at gotcharocks.com I do sell them, self-promotion. So we're going to start with an 80 grit wheel and we're going to work all the way through these six wheels all the way up to a 3,000 and hopefully when we're done we'll have a beautiful looking stone I'm pretty sure we will. So we have a cab king we're going to start it with 80 grit I have my water feed on right here which is just on this switch down here and here we go. So the first process is going to be going around this outside and I'll show you what we do after I do it. All right here we go Okay I have you come in here nice and tight you'll see that I put this like kind of like a 30 degree angle that goes all the way around here and so the way I like to do it is just do a first cut all the way around and I just keep cutting this one rim right here back and I'm trying to hit this center so I'm just slowly taking off piece by piece but I'm rolling it like so like this against the machine as opposed to starting out like this okay so I'm going to do a couple more cuts right around this outside edge and I think you'll see how this turns out where it actually starts to look like a cabochon. Okay all right let's take another look at it so here we are I did that first cut now I did another secondary cut and you'll see how I'm going closer to the center I'm just roll that so it kind of rolls over and you can see and I'm just going to continue to do that until it hits the center and I'm trying to leave about three millimeters right down here I like to have at least two so if you need to take a little more off that's fine I just don't like to take everything right down to that edge because then you'll lose the actual size of the stone it'll just make it smaller than what you're intending so I do this last little part all right so here we are I'm starting to smooth this out and we're getting pretty close to the center what I'm going to do at this point now that I have the general shape that I want I'm going to actually bring it in here and start going like this and that's going to round it okay so that's our next step here we go okay we're getting a little bit rounder I see a couple little inconsistencies here so I'm just going to work on them all right so as you can see this is starting to look a little more like a cabochon now one thing I want to point out is when I'm rolling this over the wheel I'm making sure that I go all the way over so the one thing that usually happens and this is what screws most people up is that they don't go all the way over the top and what they'll have is these like kind of deep grit like little pits and stuff like that right in here where it just won't polish up so you'll go through all your wheels you'll get right to the high polish and all of a sudden there's a big scratch in it so as long as you keep going across the top you shouldn't have that so I'm going to keep working on this I think I'm going to move to the 220 wheel now okay so I've worked on this a little bit and it's really starting to smooth out so that 220 will really kind of remove all these really heavy lines that were in it now the next one we're going to do is the 280 grit and this particular wheel these two were diamond wheels okay these two that I have right here these are diamond wheels this one is like a synthetic sapphire grit or something like that and this is actually on a wheel that has a little bit of cushion on it so when you push on it it gives a little bit and what's that what that'll do is really help us to round everything so if you're like cutting on these first two and you're like boy it just doesn't look right it looks like I'm kind of screwing things up I just encourage you not to go too far with it just get the general shape and then work on your 280 grit and that that should really smooth things out I think you'll be very surprised so that's what I'm going to work on right now okay so one little tip you want to move back and forth across your wheel so you don't wear it out I have a tendency to work in the center but you really want to move back and forth so you have kind of a consistent grit across here so look at that that's really smoothing everything out I always like to just do a little check here and just kind of eyeball it and make sure that nothing's really majorly off and this actually looks pretty good to me so our next wheel is going to be a 600 what's really great about the cab king is you don't have to change out wheel some of the other machines I've had you have to change out the wheel every time you want to switch a grip so this is great we're just going to move over to the next wheel always make sure you use lots of water don't ever run these wheels without water so notice that I'm working around the stone so I'm kind of like think about this as a clock so think of this as 12 o'clock and you're working all the way around back to 12 o'clock so 12 o'clock three o'clock six o'clock I'm just going to work all the way around and you're just drawing it once again back over the center like so until you get all the way back to 12 o'clock so here we go so okay it's starting to shine up a bit now one thing I like to do when I'm at the 600 is actually just run around this edge here we'll call it the girdle and just smooth this out so there aren't any little sharp edges from the original grinding on that 280 or on the the 80 grit so I'm just going to go like this there we go so I just smoothed it out a little bit and the reason I do it at the 600 is because if I did it at the 280 or the you know 220 or something like that I would remove too much material and I just want to remove it just so it's enough that it's it's smooth and it'll look good in the setting so I'm going to keep going with the 600 a little bit more just to make sure that I hit the center well enough and then we'll move over to the 1200. All right I just wanted to show you something so this is kind of what I was talking about if you don't roll over the stone enough and remove enough of the material if you look right in this area you'll notice that there's a few little pits like I can kind of feel them right there and some of this is just natural to the stone but this is kind of some of the blemishes that you might get if you didn't remove some of the grit so I just wanted to show you and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to jump back over to that 280 wheel and I'm going to see if I can cut this out and grind it down just a little bit more and then I'll jump back over to the 600 wheel and re kind of semi-polish it okay so that's the plan so I went ahead and jumped over to the 280 wheel and ground it down a little bit it does look like this is a natural in the stone so it's not a you know a problem that I had with the wheel or anything like that there are a couple little divots here in a different video I'm going to show you how to fill those in if these really bother you some natural stones are just going to have pits and if we tried to grind them out we could just grind the whole stone away and not have anything so sometimes this is kind of like balance between you know do I want to remove the pit and possibly ruin the stone or do I want to just kind of live with kind of the character of the stone and work around it so we're just going to keep going with this one because I think it's going to look awesome regardless so here we go we're going to move to the 1200 wheel now so I just want to point out when I'm doing this I'm applying a lot of pressure when I pull up like this but when I drop it back down I'm doing very light pressure so it kind of looks like I'm rolling back and forth like this but what I'm really doing is pulling up like this I'm just doing in a quick manner and letting this wheel take it back down so I just wanted to point that out you don't want to do this full blast you just want to kind of pull up that's your pressure and you're pulling down there you go oh there's some nice pinks popping out right here that I didn't see before so that's going to look really nice so this is what I was talking about you know you can grind away too much of the stone and you'd miss all this stuff here so we're going to keep going once again I'm rolling over the top look at that it's polishing up you can still see those little divots but I'm not too concerned about them so I'm going to work the top just a little bit more because that's usually where everybody misses and sometimes you can just kind of hold this especially at the 1200 it's not going to remove a lot of material and that'll just polish it up a little bit more so it'll just bring up the luster you want to make sure that you keep rotating the stone a little bit all right so that's looking pretty nice you can still see the naturals but that's all right okay so we're going to work through the 300 wheel you know one thing I think I'm going to do you know I was going to move to the 3000 wheel I'm going to run around this edge once again just like we did with the 600 just to give it a little shine okay here we are at the 3000 grit wheel and this is almost like a piece of paper if you were to feel it it's not taking my finger off yet so we're just going to do the same thing that we've been doing on these other wheels and this will bring up a really nice luster at this 3000 grit part you could almost stop there I would highly recommend doing a vinyl polish but just for this example we're going to stop here and go from there all right here we go there we are so you can put a vinyl polish on that this is our polishing pot pad and we're going to put cerium oxide on this and this pad actually attaches onto the side here so I'm going to show you how this all kind of breaks down that's what's really nice about this machine is that you don't have to do a lot switching out of things so so this is the polishing pad it's just kind of like a felt pad and then we have a cerium oxide which I will show you here I got this one from Rio Grande you can buy this in bulk on Amazon I'll see if I can find a link so here's how this works on the machine you just take this little water feed turn it up and then this little plate just pops right out okay and just set this back here or if you have a drawer probably better to put it in the drawer all right we're going to stop the wheel here and this has a little screw here it just screws in just make sure you don't force it now when you get these machines they have this wheel here and they have a plastic backing so they're a little bit wobbly but you can make it work they do have an aluminum one that you can upgrade to so be sure to you know ask me about that if you're ordering one we can get you one of those so what I do is I just kind of wet the wheel a little bit like this and put it on here you know one thing you could do I'm just going to back up a little bit since that's what we do here we're going to spray it like this and I'm just going to take a little cerium oxide believe it or not that's a lot of cerium oxide and we're going to just kind of mix it around like so okay we're looking for sort of a toothpaste consistency now we'll put it back on just makes it a little bit easier now when I first turn this on it's going to shoot this stuff all over the place so just make sure you're not in the way here we go same way for polishing we're going to pull up the wheel goes this way you kind of see it's a little bit wobbly you know and we want to keep this just a little bit wet not too not too crazy and I like to start a little bit in the center and then move out to about midway so this is what's going to happen you can kind of see it looks all kind of chalky you see how I'm doing nice long strokes with this during the polishing process you notice we used water with everything else with this we want to actually create a little bit of heat especially with jaspers and agates and that will bring up the shine I mean if I just kind of go like that and show you you can see it now it's getting a little bit of dry a little bit dry so I'm just going to put a little more water and I usually just put it right here in the center that smooths things out a little bit you can rock it back and forth it's not probably going to hurt anything you always want to keep the stone rotating just in case there's little crack or scratch or something like that you don't want it to pull the line all the way across your stone if you feel like this is grabbing it too much just move back into the center and it'll be fine so add a little more water you can rock it back and forth this way just make sure you hit everything definitely the top okay so let's wipe this off and look at that beautiful right so we'll clean this really well and if you have any those are the little spots right there that you know just naturals in the stone so they'll fill up with this cerium oxide but you can just scrub it with a toothbrush and they'll come right out so I see a couple little spots here I want to hit a little bit more okay I'm pretty happy with this all right so the next step will be actually pulling this off the dop stick so stay tuned for that video here's the final piece so I think it turned out great it's just absolutely beautiful I think and I might go back and polish a little bit more just on some of these edges once you clean it you'll really be able to see but for the most part I think this looks absolutely awesome I can't wait to put it in something so in another video I'll show you how to remove your stone from the dop stick which is a whole nother animal so if you haven't already please subscribe and leave me a like if you have any comments let me know what kind of stones are you cutting what kind of machines are you using what would you like to see me cut I've got some dinosaur bone on the table I've got some synthetic opal and things like that so I'm going to be doing a whole bunch of different types of jaspers and different types of stones so each one has its own little character so we just want to take care of that all right so I'll see you guys next time I hope you enjoyed it bye