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First attempt at cutting a picture into a faceted stone - Bob Keller's "Bola Spider" in colourless quartz.
I actually made a couple of errors here but the end result still looks effective. The entire pavilion is cut well below the critical angle for quartz. Only the pavilion facets that make up the spider are polished, all others are left frosted to maximise contrast. The deliberate fisheye causes the light to pass straight through the spider without reflecting back, creating a dark silhouette that stands out against the frosted facets. If the stone is sitting on a black background, it creates a solid, matt-black image.
You can see the tip of one of the back legs is fatter than the others. That was the first part of the image that was cut, as I brought the stone down toward the spinning lap I thought "maybe I shouldn't do it this way". And I shouldn't have because it overcut a bit. For the rest of the leg facets I just wiped the stone back and forward across a stationary lap. Also, the leg ends extend under the crown facets where they don't in the original design. It isn't very clear from the instructions just how wide you are supposed to make the crown step facets, I thought I had made them narrow enough but I had not.
Anyway, it's something a bit different - something Peter Parker might give to Mary Jane
I actually made a couple of errors here but the end result still looks effective. The entire pavilion is cut well below the critical angle for quartz. Only the pavilion facets that make up the spider are polished, all others are left frosted to maximise contrast. The deliberate fisheye causes the light to pass straight through the spider without reflecting back, creating a dark silhouette that stands out against the frosted facets. If the stone is sitting on a black background, it creates a solid, matt-black image.
You can see the tip of one of the back legs is fatter than the others. That was the first part of the image that was cut, as I brought the stone down toward the spinning lap I thought "maybe I shouldn't do it this way". And I shouldn't have because it overcut a bit. For the rest of the leg facets I just wiped the stone back and forward across a stationary lap. Also, the leg ends extend under the crown facets where they don't in the original design. It isn't very clear from the instructions just how wide you are supposed to make the crown step facets, I thought I had made them narrow enough but I had not.
Anyway, it's something a bit different - something Peter Parker might give to Mary Jane