Faceting a Space Ship

One of our more active club members, Bruce, has recently gotten involved in gemstone faceting. You can often find him at the shop sitting in front of one of the faceting machines sliding his stone over the grinding plate and fashioning some of his arcane projects.



Bruce likes to do unusual designs for his stones instead of the same old thing. His current project when I was at the shop was taking clear pieces of quartz and shaping and polishing them into large faceted gemstones in the shape of space ships.


A closeup of one of his stones half way done shows some of the facet faces on the stone already polished and reflective while some of the other facet faces are still milky looking from lack of polish.





An end on view shows the likeness of the spaceship more clearly.

The San Diego County Council Tailgate - Hand Faceting Machine

While walking the aisles at the tailgate, my eye was quickly caught by a small machine on a table (click on photo for larger view). It was Bob Johnson's table, but a nice young lady was manning it and allowed me to take pictures of their hand faceting machine. I never knew such a thing existed! She was in the middle of cutting a stone, which she said was coming out well.

The small hand machine sits on the table with the stone at an angle against a polishing plate. Various polishing compounds can be added to various plates depending on what stage the stone is at. The machine has dials to set angles. The user sets the angle, chooses the plate and the drags and swirls the stone around the plate manually.

What struck me was that this machine would probably be quite a bit less in cost than your standard electric powered faceting machine. I was told this particular machine in the picture was purchased used for very little money. Since the tailgate show did not have electrical hookups to plug in a regular faceting machine, they were playing around with this little hand machine instead.

Looking on the internet, I do see there is a similar device available for $400 here, but I bet one of these could be found used for a lot less!