One of the jewelers sent us the ring, pictured below, which had a faceted glass bead mounted in the ring. Their customer wanted the glass bead replaced with one just like it, but made of Quartz.
Below you will see how I copied the facet pattern and faceted it from a piece of rough Quartz.
This is the ring which the jeweler sent to me.
You can see that there is a colorless faceted sphere made from glass.
The jeweler's customer wanted this shape to be duplicated in natural Quartz.
When I make the new one, I can make it more perfectly faceted than the glass sample so that it will look even nicer than their original piece.
Here you can see their glass sphere which I have removed from the ring.
I measure the sample to make sure that the piece of rough Quartz is large enough to make the piece at the correct size.
Here you can see that I have started shaping the preform to the correct size.
You can now see that I have preformed the Quartz to the correct size.
You can now see that I have the preform mounted on my faceting machine and have made it the correct size.
you can also see the first facets that I have placed on the stone.
I have added a few more facets here.
One of my first steps in this project was to measure all of the angles and indexes of the stone I am duplicating.
Once those are recorded, I can place all of the same facets onto the new stone so that the new stone will be exactly the same as the sample stone.
The first facet that I polish is the one on the very bottom of the stone.
I have polished all of the facets on one side of the sphere.
The first side of the sphere is now finished.
You can see that I have turned the stone over by re-gluing it on the dop stick and re-mounting it in my faceting machine.
I am now placing the same facets onto the other side of the sphere.
I continue adding rows of facets.
The facets of the sphere are now complete and the next step will be to finish polishing the sphere.
Here you can see the lap that I use to polish Quartz.
I have now finished polishing all of the facets except for the one on the very top.
You can now see the new Quartz faceted sphere (on the right) next to the glass sample on the left.
You can see how the one that I cut is more perfect and symmetrical in shape than their glass sample was.
Here you can see where I have drilled a hole part way into the faceted sphere. It needs this hole so that they can glue it onto the peg in the ring where the glass one had been.
→ Take me back to examples of Custom Faceting Gemstones from Rough . . .
Denton Anderson,
Gemologist & Gem Cutter
click photo for Video
Graduate Gemologist, GIA, GG
Over 20 years of experience.
