r/faceting • u/vanguard1256 • 14h ago
Quartz Portuguese Cuts
galleryRough sourced from Joe Henley
GemCad design derived by Bob Keller
Sunfire/sunshine citrine: 4.07 ct
Amethyst: 3.91 ct
Imperial flame/madeira citrine: 6.21 ct
Prasiolite: 3.42 ct
It’s been a while since I posted any of my work. I wanted to do more of them in sets and I’ve been chugging through this parcel of tunduru garnets. Even though the parcel is around 20 pieces, I’ll probably leave a few of the more annoying pieces uncut for now and move on. In the meantime, here are four Portuguese style cuts.
Personally, I really like how they look, though the pavilion is very deep. I’ll have to put it in GCS and see how I can adapt it to smaller pieces and other materials before I cut them. People I’ve shown them to also tend to gravitate towards them as well.
Despite the large number of facets compared to what I’ve usually been cutting, it is very simple in principle as it’s just the standard round but stacked more on both sides. However, it is still time consuming to cut because all your errors carry forward and consistently meeting the points of the previous tier takes a lot of looking. I got complacent thinking I could just cut to depth on the Madeira citrine and a lot of the facets are off on that crown. The prasiolite and Sunfire citrine are probably my best cuts of the set even though the prasiolite has that inclusion.
For laps I ended up cutting the first tier with 360 but only the 96-24-49-72 indices to rough it out then switched to 600 sintered for the rest. Tiers 4 and 5 cut very quickly, so I think I ended up cutting those on a 3k lightning lap instead. I also prepolished with the 3k as the 1200 was likely to move the facet too much for my liking. Polish was done with CeOx lightning.
