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 - Amethyst Flowers

Inside one nice covered outdoor booth were many especially beautiful specimen types of stones but one type in particular caught my eye here. They were called 'amethyst flowers' and were large, about one foot or more in diameter, sprays of amethyst. Almost no bits of host rock were evident. It was all quartz. Some of the specimens had a bowl shaped pattern with steep sides, almost like the bottom of a bucket.

The one in the second photo was (if I remember correctly) over a foot across and was priced at $200.00 which I thought was very reasonable. Apparently, the amethyst flowers are found in layers of basalt and the flowers must be carefully taken out and then the basalt and matrix must be carefully removed from the flower using hand tools. Sounds very tedious!

The flowers appeared delicate but seemed surprisingly sturdy when handled. The proprieter of the booth looked only slightly nervous (and I don't blame him!) after telling me it would be OK for me to move the flowers around to gain better photos.

He was very nice to me and mentioned that he also did watch repair, and custom stonework for watch bands. I don't know of anyone else in the San Diego that does that. As a courtesy, I will include here a photo of his card and contact information for anyone who might be interested.

Austrian Finds HUGE Buried Treaure

What do you do if you are digging in your garden and instead of worms, you end up finding a big cache of buried gold, silver, and gemstone jewelry? Apparently, if you are one Austrian man, you throw the stuff into an old box, stick it in your basement, and forget about it for 4 years! Then I guess finally you see a bit of sparkle through the sluffing dirt and at long last you decide to show the stuff to the authorities who tell you the items are probably 650 years old and worth quite a bit of money!

But even after all that, the man was apparently not overly excited about the whole thing! Supposedly, there are about 200 items in the stash, but very few photos have been published. Hopefully, more will be coming soon. The items are indeed interesting looking and not of the style currently popular.

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!