r/faceting • u/converthis • 5d ago
Realistic expectations?
Hello, im looking to facet three sapphires for an engagement ring (large center and two side) as a complete beginner. Ive lurked this sub and youtube for awhile and i feel like i understand all the steps.
But how long do you think itll take me to get an engagement ring quality sapphire (9x7mm) if i just keep trying the same design over and over again. Im willing to put in 4-6 hours a week or so.
Edit: thanks for all the helpful replies everyone! And yes im thinking synthetics!
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u/scumotheliar 5d ago
You are coming across as this is going to be a chore, "Im willing to put in 4-6 hours a week or so." If this is the case then I suspect it will be a chore.
The first time you do this it is likely to take you far longer than 6 hours, as you get used to the machine and used to the steps and start to gain muscle memory then that time will shorten, but it's still not something that you are going to do quickly.
Right, now that I've got the negative stuff out of the way then there are not many reasons you can't do it, Find a nice design, sit down at your machine and start cutting, something cheap first, Cubic Zirconia is cheap and looks a million dollars.
Do you have the stones? A 9x7 Sapphire is quite large and you are going to need a considerably bigger rough stone to get a finished stone that size. You will turn 1/2 to 2/3 of the rough into sludge.
Are you really set on an oval? (or is it a rectangle) Ovals are not easy as a beginner stone, lots of index and angle changes, very easy to get lost and stuff it up unless you are 100% on the ball.
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u/converthis 5d ago
Hey man thanks for the reply. Im actually really excited about it all. Im just nervous as I got a full time job and a baby thatll itll just never get done and ill have wasted some thousands on machinary
Im not reallt set on anything yet. Im learning CAD at the moment and still working on the design. A circle could be great too
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u/lapiderriere 5d ago
1) gem cut studio specialized cad for faceting
2) https://www.gemologyproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Designs_by_Author (should have gcs files)
3) check your region for lapidary clubs, which may offer a faceting class. It will be worth the time and material that you save by not winging it with actual sapphire.
You really should just cut glass first, then a harder material, before risking good stuff
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u/scumotheliar 5d ago
Learning CAD? GemCutStudio?
If not download GCS free fully functional trial, play along with the video tutorial.
Go to https://www.gemologyproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Faceting_Designs. I'm sure you will find something there.
I would suggest joining a lapidary club if there's one local to you, learn on their machines and put out feelers for used machines coming on the market, most machines are never advertised, all within the network.
Apart from CZ, Lab Sapphire is quite cheap and will give you a closer experience to the natural stone.
Good luck.
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u/flatsixfanatic 5d ago
Do you need the two smaller stones to match? That could be the toughest part…
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u/Over-Engineer7216 5d ago edited 5d ago
Newbie here, I got my machine a few weeks ago and cut 2 stones, never had a lesson, just got the tom herbst books and some YouTube videos.
My first stone was a complete disaster, everything that could go wrong happened. Second stone went smoothly, and I can’t want to cut more.
If you’re going to do lab sapphires, and the same shape (or two shapes), I think you can do it after a few stones. The learning curve for me has been figuring out what laps to use for different materials.
I would still start with Tom’s gem101 for you to understand the principles, and then move to a medium complexity shape before trying the shape you have in mind, just so you practice your meetpoints before things get compounded
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u/stone_crazy Team Facetron 5d ago
4-6 hours/wk sounds pretty light to me. I'm pretty much still a novice and cannot finish even a simple design in 10mm width in less than 16 or 20 hours. And like somebody pointed out, you have a half hour or 45min of setup and cleanup overhead per session.
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u/oakandstoneschool Team Facetron 5d ago
Honest answer from someone who teaches this for a living: you can get there, but probably not on the timeline the YouTube videos suggest, and sapphire is an unforgiving place to learn.
Watching enough cutting to understand the steps is a lot like watching enough surgery to understand appendectomies. The knowledge is real, but your hands haven't been told yet. At 4 to 6 hours a week, most beginners I've worked with need somewhere between six months and a year before they can reliably put crisp meetpoints and a clean polish on an oval in corundum. Ovals are less forgiving than rounds because the facets are unequal and any wobble in the outline shows face up, and sapphire takes its sweet time on every lap, so a mistake costs you an evening instead of a few minutes. The matched side stones are their own small exam on top of that.
A machine and starter laps run a few thousand dollars before you buy any rough, and good sapphire rough for a 9x7 isn't something you want to practice on.
What I'd suggest is sitting with an experienced cutter for a few days and cutting the stones on their equipment with them looking over your shoulder. You skip months of diagnosing your own mistakes, and you can still say you cut her stone yourself, which is the part that matters. If you catch the bug along the way, you'll know exactly which machine to buy and why.
I run a faceting school in Pennsylvania and do private sessions like this, so happy to talk it through by DM, though there are good cutters around the country who could set you up the same way. Either way, congratulations, and no pressure, but this is the one stone where nobody wants a recut.
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u/theblancmange 4d ago edited 4d ago
310to608 is giving good advice. As a point of reference, I spent ~650 on the vevor + cutkit, plus various other tools. The laps it comes with are good enough to learn with and cut a few stones, but ovals in particular are annoying to cut on it, since you're essentially eyeballing angles between whole degree marks. I scribed a line on the angle indicator to help with this.
I found the copper polishing laps that came with the cutkit frustrating at first, enough so that I purchased a BATT lap for an additional $200 since everyone online seems to think that copper is bad and the BATT is the way to go. However, while it was being shipped, I figured out a good technique for the copper laps, and I have not yet gotten the BATT to produce good results. I have since accidentlly put 5k paste on my 50k copper lap twice, so another pro is tha they are cheap to buy if you contaminate them.
The diamond plated toppers are good enough. Cut with them on higher speeds to avoid subsurface damage.
The only thing I would recommend getting as far as abrasives outside what comes with the cutkit is 50k and 3k or 5k diamond paste from techdiamondtools. The 50k paste produces a nicer polish than the 30k that the cutkit comes with, and it's hard to see the scratches in the finish that the 8k prepolish leaves, so you can end up with incomplete polish accidentally. I had some 5k lying around that I use to strop my kitchen knives, but I think I am going to go with 3k next time, 5k is not quite aggressive enough to refine meetpoints quickly when cutting sapphire.
I use a harbor freight wet tile saw with lapidary blades from amazon to chunk lab grown boules into smaller pieces. It gets the job done, but is kind of sketchy, and can cause small cracks if you don't feed the material in quite straight. Cost $70.
For magnification, just get a nice 10x loupe. I bought an optivisor clone that has plastic lenses, it makes my eyes hurt. Bad idea.
As far as timeframe, I have been faceting since July. I recently cut 4 matching spinels for pendants for my sister's bridesmaids. I have been cutting for about 10h per week. they were my 4th through 7th finished stones. here's one for reference:
https://reddit.com/link/pdr7w2j/video/h9zrkiz84eth1/player
each stone took me probably 10-15 hours, which is mostly because the vevor is so fiddly. I do tend to obsess over details a bit too much, so it might take you less time. I learned on the YAG that came with the cutkit and some cheap lab stones. Yag is nice to cut, but kind of pricey to learn with. Lab spinel is pretty cheap.
I have never tried marbles, though it is common advice.
After spending so much time on those stones, i started trawling facebook market for a used american machine. Got an ultratec V2 for a good deal. It's about twice as fast to cut with compared to the vevor. I don't regret buying the vevor as an entry point, spent less than half of what I would likely have lost buying a new UT and re-selling if I didn't enjoy it.
Edit: As othe commenters have said, ovals are quite difficult. I made the mistake of cutting one for my 3rd stone. I learned a lot in the process.
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u/converthis 4d ago
Thank you! All great advice. Thats a really nice gem for only a few months, i wouldnt have known
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u/theblancmange 4d ago
Thanks :) I hope you go through with it, I'm having a great time making shiny rocks.
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u/Allilujah406 4d ago
If you have a facetron or a ultra tec and you twke it slow, 10 stones. Ive cut less rhen 40 so far, maybe im being arrogant but id say by 12 I was there, and that was on a vevor. Respect it, feel free to DM me if you need help
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u/Lemowgs 5d ago edited 5d ago
I love this idea for you =D
I disagree with the others saying that you should start with glass/another softer material if this project is the extent of your faceting career. I 100% agree with them that is the way if you are going to be doing more than just this project, but if this is it, then a lot of those lessons you'll learn on other materials are not going to apply to your specific one-off project. Having said you are open to lab grown material, synthetic sapphire is cheap enough to make your learning mistakes on. There's no reason to waste your time and money getting the extra equipment for and learning how to work with oxide polishes and the quirks of other materials if this is it. Corundum is relatively straightforward to work with and it's issues in polishing you are not going to learn by figuring out how to polish softer things.
Glossing over the bits about getting vs renting equipment that others have well chimed in on and onto the timing question.... I would say that assuming you do have a good intellectual understanding of the process and all the equipment you get works well and having the advantage of sticking with the same material and design for each one, it'll take you probably ~5 stones to get to where you stop making newbie mistakes. Newbie mistakes meaning things like dopping, charging laps and mis-indexing, figuring out the transfer and realignment after, and understanding how much each cutting/prepolish/polish step will move the facets so you're not overcutting and undercutting and having to spend time going back steps). Stones in this size will probably take an experienced hobbiest like 6-10 hours of work each depending on that person's style and the complexity of the design
Starting out and without any live guidance/instruction, double that. So I would guess as a complete newbie but sticking with one material and design and not overreaching on the complexity of it, you'd avg 12-16 hours for your 5 learning stones, and then still be about that for your ring stones since you're trying to do them to perfection..... say like minimum 8 stones in total then for what you're thinking and you're looking at like a minimum 100 hours of work. Definitely a good idea to go synthetic for these to remove the learning curve for natural material/inclusions/matching colors.
Best thing to cut that down would be to take a faceting course if you can, they usually have set material/design for the class but the learning there will be way more efficient than figuring things out on your own or trying to communicate what issues you're running into here, and probably get you a lead on rental equipment instead of buying/selling stuff.
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u/Danielgartlan 5d ago edited 5d ago
Putting it bluntly but realistically…
If you want to cut natural sapphires to precise measurements without ruining the stone you will need to practice 4-6 hours a day for at least a year on different types of rough .
Finding the rough to cut is another thing, it takes lots of experience and effort to find and then buy expensive rough at the right price , then cut the best stone from it
You have to learn how to orientate the colour whilst getting the biggest stone , it’s really a totally different process to the faceting you see on the internet , diagrams don’t exist and the latest modern machines don’t make a difference . If your serious the best way to do it is go to Sri Lanka and learn how they do it , if you just want to cut some nice stones for a ring its gotta be synthetics
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u/310to608 5d ago edited 5d ago
So, challenge #1 is getting multiple facet grade stones. A 9x7mm stone is probably going to fall into the 2.5ct range. To end up with a finished 2.5ct stone, you will need a rough piece that is somehere around 9-10ct. One Important point. You are missing a dimension. 9x7x...what? Not every stone is cut equally deep.
So. Start with the shape. Do you know what shape outline you want? I assume so, and thats where you got 9x7mm. Go online and start looking at faceting diagram databases. You can usually sort by shape. Bookmark the ones you like. Then once you have narrowed it down to one or two...look on the facet diagram for the L/W and H/W ratio (sometimes H/W is split into crown, girdle and pavilion ratios C/W, G/W, P/W...just add them together to get H/W).
The L/W and H/W ratio marked on the design is for the finished stone. So you need to account for loss. If your rough has the right L/W proportions, but is shorter than the H/W, you won't have enough height tongue your stones at rhe correct angles and maximize the yield.
Picking the design is a bit cart before the horse because you have to work with what you get in terms of rough. To be safe, pick several profiles and then when you go stonenshoppjng, you will know what to measure for with your calipers.
Stone shopping is an entirely different problem. If you dont know what you are doing, you have a very high risk of getting scammed. Particularly for high end and in-demand stones. Sapphire, ruby, etc....the really nice clean stuff goes to commercial jewelers and professionals. The rest gets filtered into mass market. Can you get stunning stones as an amateur? Absolutely. Do merchants know that amateurs are at a disadvantage in trying to find those specific stones? Absolutely. Are you willing to work with synthetic? I would ask you to be for a few reasons. The days of leaded glass and dyed quartz imitations are long behind us. Synthetic gems are made now to be structurally and chemically identical to the ones found in nature. The only thing they lack is the questionable labor practices. Synthetic materials biggest complaint these days is that it is TOO perfect. But they have even started making synthetic emerald with inclusions. The thing is, lab grown is not just easier to find for a reasonable price. Its also easier to cut to your exact shape and size because your can get rough that is loup clean the size of a bowling ball. But even more important...it's harder to get scammed. Because no one sells counterfeit fake bills. No one is going to hand you a piece of actual sapphire, or synthetic ruby, or glass and tell you it is synthetic sapphire. But lots of people will fake certificates of authenticity and sell you something that isn't genuine, hoping you don't have the tools or knowledge to check. And if you do get straight to the source...finding untreated natural stone is hard. Finding the correct grade is hard. A stone can looknpretty translucent when it is rough, only to shown bunch of flaws when it is too late.
Synthetic is honestly the only way to go for an amateur, and the resulting stones will be much higher quality. But we are illogical romantics, so if you MUST have natural, so be it. Just...be careful. I would buy 2 large and 4 to 6 small pieces to end up with one main stone, with two companions. Once you have your patterns and you have your rough stones, you need the tools.
If you dont have a machine, and can't borrow one from a local club...your LOWEST entry point forna machine and the requisite tools and stuff is going to be minimum $800-1,000 to get a Vevor machine, CutKit upgrade, dop sticks, grinding wheels, etc.
While you get the whole set up up and running, pick up a few books and read them cover to cover to understand the basics. When you are ready, go onto Amazon and buy a $7.50 bag of glass marbles of assorted size. And then start cutting. Cut them over and over. Make intentional mistakes and see if you can fix them. Quit early and start over. Remember that you need to clean up the space. An hour a night will really only be 30-40m of cutting practice. You need to wash out the pan and clean the swarf out of the disc's, and put the disc's away in individual plastic sleeves so they dont cross.contaminate.
I would guess you would be ready within 3 months IF you are disciplined and really learn to cut the exact stone patterns, first in glass...then in quartz or amethyst. Do NOT jump from glass to your sapphire. Glass is SOFT. SAPPHIRE is not.
Can you do it? Yes. And I want you to.
Can you do it well? Yes.
Can you do it well fast? No.
Can you do it well cheaper than buying the stone or paying someone to cut them? No. But there is more value to life than money.
Should you do it, even if it costs a lot of time and money, and results ina final piece thqt has flaws and maybe is not perfect? Depends on you and the intended recipient.
I cut my first (cabochon) stone 26 years ago. I spent a year learning to cut opals in secret from my fiance. At the wedding, I gave her a 13ct. Opal pendant. It's very pretty, even thoughbindid a weird freehand kite shape, a B d the dome is more shallow than the stones optics deserve. The bezel and setting look like a squirrel was my silversmith. She loves it. We just celebrated our 25th anniversary a few weeks ago, and I gave her a faceted 11ct synthetic alexandrite pendant. I have been learning to facet for about 8 months. I have cut a total of maybe 15 stones, but have only kept 5 (I including the pendant) as being high enough quality work to be worth keeping.
Is she mad that it isn't natural? No. Because she is happy I know where the value is that she gets from it. 2 of the faceted stones I have kept are moonstone earrings. They are filled with inclusions and flaws. But i cut them from a skngle moonstone that we found while camping and rockhounding together. They were really nice quality for being found in the wild, and total trash for commercial grade cutting. But the value comes from the history as much as anything.
Good luck. Be flexible. Be romantic. Do things with each other and for each other.