Our Beginners’ Guide is intended to as a tool for people who join our Guild and are new to faceting. It represents our approach to helping people get started with faceting. We highly recommend you attend our workshops where you will be paired with an instructor who will help you navigate through the five gem designs presented in this guide. We believe that by completing these five gem cuts, a new faceter will possess a solid foundation in the art of faceting.
NMFG beginner diagrams
We have selected a series of designs with increasing complexity to build your skills. You can cut any of these multiple times to practice. All of these designs should result in stunning stones. While they all target quartz with an RI of 1.54, several can be cut across a range of refractive indices.
General Guidelines
Keep your working area clean and wipe the stone and machine down with a clean, moist paper towel and thoroughly wash your hands when moving to the next finer grit size. It takes just one diamond particle to cause scratches at the next grit size. This becomes even more important during pre-polish and polish steps.
Start with a stone in the range of 10mm to allow for recuts and to easier see what you are doing. Smaller stones may cut a bit faster, but it is more difficult to see the progression and an overcut facet may just remove all of your material. Much larger stones will result in long times to pre-form as well as polish.
Depending on your stone and design, you will progress with laps in the order of 260-600-1200 grit, typically using diamond plated full or topper laps, followed by a resin pre-polish of 3000 grit and a final polish using cerium oxide. Each successive step removes the prior step’s scratches and sub-surface damage. If you use material other than quartz, a different sequence and polish may be used. Your instructor will walk you through the faceting process.
At any time, ensure you do not cut into the direction of the lap. If there is a sharp spot on your stone, a coarse diamond particle, or just a moment of inattention, and you are past the line where your lap pushes into your stone, your stone may wedge into the lap, which in the best case causes a bent dop stick, but often also gouging of the lap. It can also misalign your mast, or in the worst cases cause a bent quill or mast of your machine.
To assess alignment of you facets during pre-polish and polish, as well as table steps, use a sharpy to paint the facet and with a light swipe see if any fine adjustments are needed.
After you have completed the pavilion, your instructor will show you how to transfer the stone to let you repeat the faceting process for the crown. Typically, it will take one workshop session for the pavilion and another for the crown.
Beginner Designs
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- Novice 13, round
- Perkins SRB (standard round brilliant)
- Squilliant (square)
- Trilliant C
- Emerald cut with 1.5 length to width ratio
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