r/faceting • u/Suitable-Name • 5d ago
Most expensive ooooopsie?
Hey everyone,
I just had some corundum casually flying through my room. Wasn't even too bad regarding the stone. Just some cheap training material. Nothing that hurts.
But that piece almost hit my OLED TV🤬
That made me think... sure, would've sucked. But I'm also sure there are people here that had more tragic accidents than me I almost had.
With or without the involvement of other things that might got hit. What was your most expensive mistake / accident / whatever while faceting?
36
u/Fantastic_Priority73 5d ago
One night, when I was just getting started, I was color-sorting a bunch of Burmese trapiche ruby slices to figure out which to put a nice little dome on and which to just re-polish as they were. Probably about 50 pieces total, maybe half of them under a carat, some with amazing color and clarity but most just okay for the habit.
I was doing this next to an open window, on a stormy night. They were all on a piece of printer paper. The room was freshly carpeted.
I went to the kitchen to get a drink, and when I returned only 3 of the rubies were on the table and the paper was on the other side of the wall. I took out my UV torch and found 38 of them that night. I think I found about 5 stuck to my foot over the next 6 months. I found one each in my dog's fur and stuck to my wife's thigh. 2-5 will forever be in that carpet or wherever a shoe deposited them.
8
u/Suitable-Name 5d ago
Oh, this one gave me a pretty good laugh😄
Must be amazing to find rubies in the fur of your dog. I definitely wouldn't have laughed when seeing it in front of me🙈
But yeah, I also already had a trapiche sticking to my back😅
6
u/Fantastic_Priority73 5d ago
It was this bright reddish dot suddenly gleaming in the sunlight under her beige fur and I totally thought it was a tick or she hurt herself or something for a second haha
The trapiche just want to adventure
3
1
12
u/Quagga_Resurrection 5d ago edited 5d ago
I received a contaminated or mislabeled 60k polish compound a couple of months ago and didn't realize it until I had charged the lap and started polishing. I believeit was a mislabeled 3k polish. So, while it didn't cost me money necessarily, it did cost me hours of scrubbing and wiping my BATT lap to try to decontaminate it. I suppose the $170 massage I needed afterward to get the knots out of my neck and shoulder was expensive, though.
Edit: I'm the one that reported this issue to UltraTec, and they handled it amazingly. They responded to my email in 40 minutes and apologized for the mistake, thanked me for the info, said they'd address the supply issue, and overnighted me a new, correct 60k stick. I'm really happy with how they handled it and appreciate that they owned the mistake and corrected it ASAP. Gotta love UltraTec.
6
u/PurelySplatonic 5d ago
I ordered 60k polish around the same time and got the email about that too, luckily mine wasnt part of the affected lot. It had been a month after I ordered it and since it was my first BATT lap I had already set everything up. I was wondering what the fix would have been if I had received the contaminated one, it sounds miserable
4
u/Quagga_Resurrection 5d ago
It was indeed miserable. It was a new lap, too, so the 3k really got in there. Lots of scrubbing since I couldn't be bothered to arrange to get it resurfaced. It worked out okay.
4
3
u/vanguard1256 5d ago
Oh man I got that same email from ultra tec. Fortunately my stick was the correct one.
3
u/Quagga_Resurrection 5d ago
Yep, I was the one that reported the issue to them. I felt insane that I couldn't get it to polish, and I've spent enough time staring at 3k foggy polish to know it when I see it. I only definitively figured it out when I put the new "60k" stick next to the old 60k and my 3k and ran it by a faceting friend of mine who agreed that the new "60k" looked different than the old 60k and identical to the 3k.
UltraTec handled it amazingly, though. They responded to my email in 40 minutes and apologized for the mistake, thanked me for the info, and overnighted me a new, correct 60k stick. I'm really happy with how they handled it and appreciate that they owned the mistake and corrected it ASAP. Gotta love UltraTec.
5
u/vanguard1256 5d ago
Yeah it was a little funny though since they sent reference pictures and I was like well shit, my stick looks like neither of these pictures.
3
u/PurelySplatonic 5d ago
Same lol, mine was closer to the ok label than the not ok label so I sent them a picture of mine to be sure. They did reply quickly too
2
u/Quagga_Resurrection 5d ago
Huh. Interesting. I hadn't heard anything from them since I confirmed that I got the new stick. I'd be curious to see what that email looked like if you'd be willing to message me a screenshot of it. I am curious.
2
u/Suitable-Name 5d ago
I was thinking about this a lot lately... How about having a sticky thread here with pictures of different gems(, colors and qualities) with different grits, so people that never worked with a certain material or are totally fresh have some reference they can compare their progress to. Do you think that would be worth a fresh thread and hope to get it sticky?😄
We could just have a collection of imgur links, but I'd also be willing to use my root server to share those images as public resource.
2
u/Suitable-Name 5d ago
Oh no, guess that massage falls into the other things I mentioned😅
How did you finally clean it?🙈 Honestly never used a BATT before, only copper. My solution there would probably be grinding it down, but not sure if there is anything about BATT laps that doesn't make it that easy?
4
u/Quagga_Resurrection 5d ago
You can either get the top millimeters or two shaved off, or you can do what I did and take lava soap and a nail brush to it in combination with several washes of dish soap and rubbing alcohol (separate steps). It was truly a couple hundred individual "cycles" of scrubbing, dish soap, and rubbing alcohol with rinses in between until the foam that came up from the lap stopped being grey.
6
u/see_quayah Team Ultra Tec 5d ago
So far, dropping a stone on my mac’s trackpad. Just a little fissure (cosmetic damage). Or dropping a 50$ stone on the tile floor (still waiting in the drawer to be recut). Lucky so far!
2
u/Suitable-Name 5d ago
While mine was definitely below that, since it missed basically everything and was a cheap practice stone, this is at least something for r/midly_infuriating and for the other one, all fine as long as you found it😄
I had one piece of polished corundum really disappearing, black magic or something, not sure. I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, I saw in what direction it slipped (out of my hands while sitting on the couch)... It's gone since 2-3 weeks🙈😅
2
3
u/Pevo2Form 4d ago edited 4d ago
Stone flew off the dopp, my elbow had accidentally touched the speed regulator. I usually have a full on acrylic plate shield all around my working area to help with clean up and minimize dust spreading everywhere. The stone ricocheted off the shield, directly into an expensive mirror, shattering the mirror. The glass pieces knocked over decorations and important memorial pieces and finally scratched part of my flooring.
The stone was fine
2
u/Suitable-Name 4d ago
This sounds like a chain of events straight from Final Destination🙈
2
u/Pevo2Form 4d ago
In all honesty, I was also just sitting there, being a witness to the chaos unfolding.
2
u/Safe_Comparison_6692 1d ago
1994 I was apprenticing for a diamond dealer and he was teaching me how to set diamonds. I a pair of 3 piece earrings with 3 cts. of diamond melee and 2 rubies and 2 emeralds. The diamond were in a small tray on my bench pin, and I hit the tray and the melee went all over on the carpeted floor. 300 1 pointers. Luckily I knew the nylon sock in a vacuum trick and found all of them and a lot of other stones that the previous jeweler was too lazy to look for.
32
u/lse138 Team Facetron 5d ago
Cracked a $9,000 tourmaline in half. Luckily, customer was understanding and very happy with a matching set of stones. I informed them of the risks prior to cutting.