One of the main questions we get through our site is “I am having trouble polishing my sapphires, what am I doing wrong?"

Fortunately or unfortunately if you ask 6 cutters how they cut and polish their sapphires you will get 6 different methods.

However talking to most of the cutters I know, one system seems to crop up more than most.

1. Cold dopping of stone (Tite-on etc) reason being that our stones have very hard planes and if using wax the heat build up causes problems - like shifting.
2. Cut sapphire with medium 600 grit
3. Pre polish with 1500/1800 grit (some cutters claim better results using copper laps for this stage)
4. Polish with either 50,000 or 100,000 - I personally use aluminium laps or bearing metal laps.

 

Heavily scored (100 grit sandpaper) and by far the best, and agreed by all the cutters - polish mix is diamond dust with a little machine oil, stir into an almost dry paste and apply sparingly. Too much or too wet doesn’t work.

As I said there are many different theories on how to polish sapphires, but this is the one that works for us at the moment.
I hope this helps anyone out there with problems, let me know how you go.

Cutters Desk Archive Articles...

After the floods we had in Central Queensland the gemfields were left waterlogged; with mine shafts collapsed and the tunnels caved in. Jackhammers and ladders along with buckets, picks and mining equipment was lost under meters of sapphire bearing dirt. Some sapphire mines were closed down indefinitely and others cleaned out their mine and started again.

Our mine was luckier than some, the area that was producing sapphire in the past collapsed and the large processing machinery was ready to fall off a newly made cliff.
With the help of neighbours we managed to move the machinery to a new area and have started digging in a hole that we were exploring last year. The floor is only 8 foot down but large boulders have trapped the sapphire and we are on a ‘run’ again, finding good sized sapphires, some blue with light cross tables and some nice greens and parti sapphire.

There aren’t as many tourists arriving on the gemfields this year, all the locals enjoy the peak season of winter and the new faces that come to town. The townships of Sapphire and Rubyvale are still great places to come and find your own sapphire; fossiking is always a terrific way to spend the holidays with the family, camping out or staying in the cabins or caravan parks. Some good pieces of sapphire have already been found by tourists this year.
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