Congratulations on your purchase that will be exciting! I have not sold any of the boulder opal, most of it is still uncut. I'm looking into some options for a better setup, since the one I used for these video's is a bit time consuming.

And if you already have Nova wheels on a cabbing machine that's another way to go. But if you tried to polish material like that with a any kind of a bit you're going to undercut like crazy. Lay any .25 in D cylinder point against a flat surface there's about a 1/16 in touch point. Another thing that I do that works well is I buy sets of cheap plated faceting laps like 400 800 1200 3,000 and then use an abrasive cut off saw or even like Weiss metal shears and I cut my own files out. you know grind the back edge away from the front edge make sure there's no little burrs sticking off of it and then hand file it. Because you can do fast sweeping motions with it and get perfectly contoured flowing surfaces without undercutting. Then finish pre-polishing and polishing with those little Nova mini laps.

Thanks- I think this one would have still looked nice being flattened out, will keep it in mind for the future!

I consider myself to have gotten very lucky with how this one turned out- was no indication this was going to be free of the matrix like it was!

It's such a lovely material and seeing something like this come to life from what looked fairly mundane to start with is really fun!

Or a triangle and an oval two stone art deco pendant

Yeah I'd wondered about doing a slice and trying for two but i was worried with how the backing would hold up. Maybe something like this will happen once I take a more in-depth look at the piece, its concave nature may be hiding too much as of now.

No insta/twitter as of yet but I'll likely look into setting those up in the future- will update this post when I do!

One thing I'm not certain I mentioned in the video was the paint on the arbor itself- mine (80's 70's?) still has shiny paint however it peeled off with just compressed air - just thought I'd make mention of that. Exciting that you've also got one of these beauties!

It's my pleasure it is going to be exciting to get the results from the challenge even if it may be some time until parts 4/5 are released!

@@coldopal5942 Take your time, it'll be nice to see the final result of each of these parcels!

Hey “Cold Opal” - Thanks for the excellent description and insights on video 1 of 5. Did I miss how you actually paid for these two parcels?

@@jimconnor6476 I'm going to be covering the costs and expenses etc in parts 4 and 5- I thought It'd be best to do the discussion once the opal is cut and sold.

Thanks! For the drips I used an old juice bottle (48-64 oz size) made a hole in the bottom of it and then screwed in some loc-line with a tapered end. The loc-line kit I got also had a valve to control the flow rate, I think it was like $13 so its a decent budget solution.

Thank you for your answer, that’s a creative way (the bottle one). What country are you from?

@@coldopal5942 That's so cool! I might try it as well

I watched a video where the cutter was describing his set up and he said he was using an intravenous drip tube that only cost a few dollars

Yeah I'm going to go over the costs and sale prices etc when this is all cut and done- since if I put "well these cost $400 or w/e" does that really tell us anything since the value is subjective uncut. Sold opal is the only thing that will give us a frame of reference. Really not trying to clickbait anyone by any means!