How To Cut Incredible Gem Stones - Cutting A Lotus Flower Garnet Vlog - Nolan Sponsler

We're here with gem cutter Nolan Sponsler. Nolan, what are we working with today? Today I've got this Oomba light garnet. So this stone is from Oomba Valley, Tanzania. What's unique about it is that it's color changing, so depending on what light frequency you have it under, it'll appear more pink or red. So under lighting like my lamps or my faceting machine, it'll appear more red and then you take it outside into normal daylight and it'll appear more pink. I'm going to be doing my lotus cut. This lotus cut will have concave cuts along the girdle as well as a v-groove cut inside of the concave cut. So it'll have a 60 degree v-cut in the girdle with a mandrel cut which will give it the appearance of this lotus flower petal pattern along the outer edge of the stone. And we're going to end up making a ring with this as well. So I get people saying all the time that it's a cool stone but how are you supposed to set it with that shape? I'll show you. So I put a layer of wax on the dop first. While the dop's hot and the wax is hot, I press that dop flat on this target dop which then flattens the wax on the dop and it leaves a layer of wax in between the dop and your stone so that when you go to transfer the stone you heat the dop and it just falls right off because the wax melts. So you don't even have to worry about heating the stone up. So now that I got the dop wax flattened out, I then use Loctite 404, apply some glue, setting the accelerator so that it hardens the glue. That's that. So here we have the stone roughed in. Nolan, what does that mean when it's roughed? Roughed in, I'm just using a rough grit lap to just rough in the shape. I'm not polishing it or anything. I'm just keeping the size I need. So change the lap from 250 topper to a 1200 crystallite centered lap. This lap is one of my favorites. This is right before I go to the prepolish. It helps me get all my facets really sharp and level and crisp. Because it's a hard steel, thick steel, centered lap, it leaves a really flat facet. Right now I'm free rotating the stone. I also have the mass locked in place so it's getting it perfectly even. Changing the lap to a 3000 grit lap to prepolish. It seems to be a good grit to go to the next polishing stage. I'm also using a bat lap which is in my opinion the best prepolishing polish there is. A 10 ounce I made by Gearless. Super nice.